by Steve Toltz
Voice:
You often say, I didn’t ask to be born. Have you considered the possibility that the Lord has irrefutable evidence—a recording of the whole conversation?
Me:
Gary, that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.
Voice:
This isn’t Gary. Look. He’s sleeping.
Me:
Oh. Oh!
Voice:
Yeah. So sit up and look smart. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and feeling sorry for yourself about feeling sorry for yourself.
Me:
What does that even mean?
Voice:
Isn’t it true that the more self-pity you feel, the more regular pity you feel for others?
Me:
I guess.
Voice:
No, you don’t guess. I’m telling you something. Self-pity gets no respect around here, let alone pity, but when you think back to your whole life, can’t you credit self-pity for opening your heart out to the world? Didn’t self-pity propel you to pity others, and then to feeling that pity? Where else were you going to get empathy from—Leila?
Me:
I suppose you’re right.
Voice:
But what’s the point of being empathetic if you don’t get in the mix?
Me:
So you’re saying, the empathy I have felt in my life for the sufferers in my immediate surrounds—
Voice:
Counts for nothing. Actually, less than nothing. Less than a self-absorbed solipsist. Less than a sadist. When one understands. Convulsions of empathy are actually immoral if you won’t get your hands dirty.
Me:
Is that why I’ve suffered so much?
Voice:
No.
Me:
Just as I thought. Meaningless.
Voice:
You’re so wrong. Suffering has meaning, just not for the sufferer.
Me:
Oh.
Voice:
Suffering’s all about other people. What others do about your suffering defines their ethical stand in life and what you do about their suffering defines yours.
Me:
I guess I can buy that. So because I’ve done exactly nothing to ease anyone’s suffering, that’s why God’s fucking with me?
Voice:
No. Listen. The creation of the universe was a motiveless crime—though not a victimless one, obviously.
Me:
Obviously.
Voice:
But would you not agree that a god who cannot turn his omniscience off—nor shorten eternity—is limited?
Me:
I would.
Voice:
You sure you haven’t made a mistake assigning agency to God?
Me:
Have I?
Voice:
You’re awfully critical. Let me let you in on something. God loves a heckler but loathes backseat creationists.
Me:
I just have this fear that one day God will forget to back up and lose everything.
Voice:
You have an unusually high number of fears.
Me:
Is fear dangerous?
Voice:
People with castration anxiety do lose their testicles, but so do people without it.
Me:
Is bad luck self-harm by another name?
Voice:
What do you think?
Me:
I think an entire planetary suicide would be worth it just for the look on God’s face.
(the voice laughs)
Me:
I got dicks flying at me from all angles! This shit’s funny to you?
Voice:
My turn to ask a question. What do you actually know about the ineffable?
Me:
Only this: if you had a peek at its profile you would not hook up with your own soul on match.com.
Voice:
Let me ask you, why is an agnostic praying? Why now? You’re like those people whose relationships with God begin and end on airplanes during severe turbulence. This is a divine booty call, isn’t it?
Me:
Yeah, all right. I’ll cop to that. I’m not actually a believer.
Voice:
The thing is, I don’t blame you. Why should you be? Imagine, if you will, a person with no nerves at all—he cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or feel—now who wants to meet the Holy Spirit?
Me:
No one.
Voice:
Right. What do we know about the risen Jesus other than his head shot? Isn’t the resurrection just three days he never got back? And I never understood why people are expected to cry for Christ’s suffering in particular when one hundred others were crucified the exact same day, a thousand the same week. His suffering was pretty standard fare for that time and place.
Me:
Or how we are expected to believe in God at all when there’s so much evil in the world.
Voice:
Haven’t you ever heard of the bystander phenomenon?
Me:
You mean, during the atrocities God’s up there, expecting some other deity to intervene?
Voice:
Maybe.
Me:
I know history is littered with stories of people pissing on corpses. I’ve always found it curious that nobody ever shits on a corpse, not even in wartime, not even in Auschwitz.
Voice:
That’s true. But what’s your point?
Me:
I don’t know. I’m just trying to find a way to say: Where the fuck has God been all this time?
Voice:
Perhaps the sad answer for God’s absence from human affairs is that he’s been denied visitation rights.
Me:
What are you saying? That God lost us in a custody battle with the devil?
Voice:
Aldo, for those who love God, that love is enough.
Me:
Yet any god who commands love doesn’t understand the first thing about love.
Voice:
Touché.
Me:
In any case, love for God is just Stockholm syndrome.
Voice:
God’s silence is an injured silence.
Me:
Injured by what?
Voice:
Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia are God’s ways of acting out against mankind tripling the median mortality age and so rudely delaying their reunion with him. He’s starting to think you’re avoiding him!
Me:
Look at Gary sleeping there. Why is it that whenever God or his angels talk to someone they are incapable of being overheard by a third party or corroborating ear-witness?
Voice:
Is that really what you want to know? What else?
Me:
Off the top of my head? Does God allow mass murder because it’s like carpooling to heaven? In the afterlife do eunuchs get their balls back? Why didn’t he send down a daughter? Or twins? Admittedly the creation of the universe was terrific, but why no encore? Is God’s mobile ringtone the braying of an ass? And if he felt it necessary to point out right there in Leviticus You shall not place a stumbling block before the blind, what kind of cunts were running around Jerusalem back then? Are souls like fingerprints to identify the dead for processing? When it comes time for the dead to rise from their graves after Armageddon, what happens to all the cremated ash? Will it wriggle in jars and stir in flower beds and fish stomachs? It’s understandable that those Axial Age miracles drained him of power, but that was over two thousand years ago; how long does it take the Lord to charge back up? If His son does come back, is He just going to raise the dead like last time? Does God so fundamentally misperceive human desire that he won’t turn back the clock instead? Doesn’t He know that’s the miracle we’ve all been waiting for? To make Lazarus young again? And why the fuck didn’t He simply make the inflictor of pain the equal recipient of its sensati
on? It’s such an obvious idea, I’m almost embarrassed for having to suggest it!
Voice:
You still want to talk about an absent father. A deadbeat dad.
Me:
Yeah! Aren’t we just seven billion children in a single-parent household? He’s left Mother Earth holding the bag.
Voice:
Let me ask you another question.
Me:
Shoot.
Voice:
What if I was to tell you that upon death God lets you ride him bareback, judges you Best in Show, waits on you hand and foot as reparation for the scandal of consciousness; He swaddles you in his endless beard, pulls out the complete set of recordings of all your interior monologues, that you have to listen to, but if you’ve given a lot to charity, He’ll make you a compilation.
Me:
I’d say that sounds awesome. Is that true?
Voice:
The question is not, Is that true, Aldo. Nor, Do you believe it to be true, but Can you believe it to be true?
Me:
Gobbledegook. What can I concretely tell the people of earth?
Voice:
Children, if an angel wants to take you under his wing, run to the nearest adult.
Me:
What else?
Voice:
I’ll give you a clue.
Me:
To what?
Voice:
To the answers you are truly seeking. Tell me, what is consciousness for?
Me:
To become aware.
Voice:
Of what?
Me:
I don’t know.
Voice:
This is the human condition in one knock-knock joke: Knock knock, it’s me, Death. Who’s there?
Me:
I get it.
Voice:
So consciousness gives us awareness of what?
Me:
That we are mortal.
Voice:
Which leads us to?
Me:
Seek.
Voice:
Seek what?
Me:
Meaning. God.
Voice:
You’re always asking, Where is He? Where is He? Why aren’t you asking, When is He?
Me:
When is he in Time?
Voice:
Which is relative. Which is circular. Which loops. Am I right?
Me:
You don’t half-ask hard questions.
Voice:
I’m not asking questions. I’m giving answers.
Me:
That I don’t understand.
Voice:
You want an easier clue?
Me:
Please.
Voice:
Christian mystics report seeing Jesus, Muslims see Mohammed, Buddhists see the Buddha. What does this tell you?
Me:
That we have the power to cast our own mystic visions.
Voice:
Precisely. And?
Me:
We’re getting sick of waiting.
Voice:
Waiting? Who are you waiting for? Who are you waiting for? Jesus?
Me:
What’s so funny?
Voice:
Imagine on the first day of the Second Coming the priceless look on His face re: biodiversity! Imagine Him saying “Do unto others as you wish to be done unto you” to the subs in the S & M crowd! Imagine your crestfallen Lord rejected for His body mass index not being like it is in the paintings! Imagine a billion people tweeting their ultimatum: “An eye for an eye OR turn the other cheek. You can’t have it both ways!”
Me:
I’ve always felt we learn more about the cosmos from Buddha’s death by poisoned mushrooms than from Christ’s ostentatious showboating on the cross. Although nobody ever talks about the fact that because the Buddha abandoned his family, his greatest unsung legacy is actually the use of the philosophy of detachment to avoid child-support payments.
Voice:
Let’s face it, Aldo—as soon as the meek discover they are to inherit the earth they turn nasty. Happens every time.
Me:
When you’re right, you’re right.
Voice:
Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism are patently insufficient tools for answering twenty-first-century ethical questions, like: Is sexual intercourse with one’s own clone masturbation or incest?
Me:
Ooh. I know this one. Is it incest?
Voice:
Your sclerotic churches, synagogues, and mosques have no idea, that’s for damn sure.
Me:
This is the pilgrim’s frustrating lack of progress.
Voice:
You look at your own life, Aldo, at your suffering, and what really pisses you off is there’s no one you can drag to The Hague for this ultraspecific crime against humanity.
Me:
You want to hear the truth? If there is a God, I’m just so sick to my stomach sick of Him. Who even wants a deity who’ll crash a plane for a juicy haul of souls?
Voice:
Is that what He’s doing?
Me:
And frankly, someone whose face you can’t look into might as well be faceless.
Voice:
Maybe He is. And maybe He’s sensitive about it.
Me:
And who even wants to be in a relationship with someone who freaks out when you say His name?
Voice:
I can see how that might be a dealbreaker.
Me:
And all this here, all my failures, my pain, my loss. Now it’s also personal.
Voice:
How so?
Me:
Smite me once, shame on You. Smite me twice, shame on me.
Voice:
So what do you intend to—
Me:
Smite me a third time, and I will fucking replace You.
Voice:
There you go.
Me:
What?
Voice:
You’re almost there.
Me:
What are you saying?
Voice:
What are you saying? You’re so close!
Me:
To what?
Voice:
Think.
(long silence)
Me:
The secret shortcut to God is to make him yourself.
Voice:
How many of the born-again are in breach?
Me:
I don’t know those statistics.
Voice:
The Calvinists say, let God in! What do you say?
Me:
Let God out?
Voice:
Precisely! What you want in place of universal justice is the Messianic experience without—
Me:
The mess?
Voice:
You weren’t praying, Aldo. You were making someone to pray to.
Me:
I was?
Voice:
Did you know that over thirty-five percent of all religious people are “displeased” or “extremely displeased” with their deity?
Me:
Is that right?
Voice:
And thirty percent of those with no religious affiliation whatsoever are tired of atheism and ready to switch brands but feel there is no viable alternative.
Me:
So there’s a market.
Voice:
Hell, yes.
Me:
Is there a hell?
Voice:
Forget that medieval crap. Don’t get bogged down in inherited concepts. You need to be creative. What does your old teacher Morrell write?
Me:
Morrell? You know Morrell?
Voice:
Imaginations require limits just as creativity requires boredom.
Me:
He also said that you achieve your goal only when you f
orget that you can’t.
Voice:
No one thought an alien god would take off. Nobody thought a known con man like Joseph Smith could sell Mormonism. They drummed up some bullshit cosmology. They faked some visitation from God. They offered suckers water glimpses of salvation for monthly credit card payments. You, on the other hand, have the real thing.
Me:
You really think this is viable?
Voice:
God still has star power. Let me ask you, who is always crapping on about creating a better world and leaving a better planet for their children?
Me:
Uh, every adult on earth.
Voice:
Right. That’s your fucking market. Don’t you think they should want to leave a better God too?