by Howard Ayno
Anyway, Hell is old-fashioned. Nobody believes in Hell these days—
GOD: Do you expect your house to burn down?
ME: My house? Of course not! I hope not! Why—
GOD: Then you have spent thousands of dollars insuring against something you hope and expect will never happen!
ME: Fire insurance? Well of course I do. Every homeowner does. Your point?
GOD: Only that you invest a great deal of money to insure yourself against something that you think will never happen. You hope and think that Hell will never happen. Why aren’t you even more willing to invest far more in case Hell happens to be true and you end up in unbearable agony for all eternity—Forever!
ME: Do you claim to be good? Kind? The acme of everything nice?
GOD: I am perfect goodness.
ME: Then why do you chuck half the world into Hell? Fire and brimstone and wailing and gnashing of teeth? I wouldn’t call that nice—
GOD: I don’t throw anyone into Hell. You choose it for yourself. You go to where you belong—
ME: Oh come now, NO one chooses being cooked alive in an everlasting fire—
GOD: Oh yes you do. You just don’t know you do. Anyone living a life of Satan’s values shares Satan’s destiny. Everyone who loves obeying me, lives forever with me.
ME: I thought we were saved by faith?
GOD: An initial act of faith leading to a lifetime of obedience—
ME: There is always a catch!
GOD: There is no catch. It’s plain and obvious. You end up where you belong.
ME: If you’re good you go up and if you’re bad you join your mates down below—
GOD: You never see them. The loneliest ever place is Hell. Solitary screaming. And goodness isn’t good enough. Heaven is my home. If you don’t know me personally, you can’t come.
ME: I can feel viewers turning off in droves!
00.21.31
ME: You are watching “In Town Tonight” and my guest is God. Tell me, why did you choose this station, this programme, this interviewer, this insignificant country to be interviewed in? Wouldn’t Almighty God be expected to—?
GOD: I chose this and you for the same reason I chose unimportant Bethlehem and funny-speaking Galilee. It is far less costly in human lives and my agony. It also places eternal treasure in an earthen vessel, a basic principle of ours which requires a Matthew revelation from the Father to each Peter, so that even a Lot recognises a heavenly angel when unenlightened men see only a man, and an Abraham sees me.
ME: Well thank you for that. I’m so glad I asked you that question though I’m not sure you haven’t just grievously insulted me—
GOD: Then don’t let me leave you guessing. I chose you because you are so average at your job, so mediocre, and your station and nation likewise. But don’t frown, from this day on only those counted greatest on Earth will queue up to be interviewed by you. Believe me, even a donkey can be made famous if beckoned by God.
ME: You seem an average enough guy to me: Don’t you feel embarrassed posing as God? Don’t you feel in mortal danger of God’s eternal wrath in that Hell-fire you speak of?
GOD: I feel in danger only of being grossly misunderstood by those who love me, which is the reason I am in this studio this day, being subjected to such inanities—
ME: Yes, why ARE you here? What purpose—?
GOD: My people are blaspheming me relentlessly. Pious blasphemy, unintended, but wicked insults none-the-less. I am not sovereign in anything like the sense many think I am. This world is nothing like what I want the world to be. Concerning Revival, they are waiting for ME to act sovereignly while I am waiting for THEM to act sovereignly. I placed man in charge of my world and this present mess is what he has made of it. Yet he insists on blaming me for what his own actions have produced. I can stand that blasphemy in my enemies but not from those who love me. It seems that you unthinking humans have yet to realise that Almighty God has the least free-will of all living beings—
ME: Now THAT really IS blasphemy!
GOD: That is truth. Down through the ages we have marvelled that none of your great thinkers, your clever men, have yet put themselves where God is and looked at all things from my point of view. Had you done so, you would have long ago realised I am a hand-head-and-foot fettered prisoner in the most solitary of confinements, and that I have been from the beginning and will be so world without end—
ME: You heap blasphemy on blasphemy—
GOD: You, the human race, have never worked out that I am forever on the horns of an insoluble dilemma, one which has already cost me my life and fatally injured the Godhead were it possible for God to die and remain dead—
ME: A paradox of blasphemies—
GOD: And the heartbreaking thing is that belief in this contrary blasphemy is paraded as an evidence of a strong godly faith, that good Christians can believe that God can be infinitely cruel and infinitely good at the same time—such unthinking faith is no faith at all—
ME: What are you on about?
GOD: It reduces me to the level of a Reverend Jim Jones, of a man claiming to be God yet by his actions denying everything God must and should be—
ME: Oh it does that all right! It does indeed—
GOD: Yet all you unthinking humans have to do is a scientific thought experiment such as Einstein performed to produce his Special Relativity—
ME: You’re an Einsteinian, a worshipper of Einstein—
GOD: So why don’t you thought-experiment? You shouldn’t need any special revelation such as I am giving you tonight. Why don’t you postulate that the God of the Bible is true and real and the world is as it is today and see if you can make sense of that contradiction—
ME: And you can, I suppose—?
GOD: I live it. That is my biography. Why has no Christian thinker seriously attempted to reason their way through my Biblical biography?
ME: Perhaps because they wouldn’t dare. Perhaps because they have too much respect for an Almighty God—
GOD: That is a respect I don’t need. I don’t wish to be lumped in with Father Divine and Jim Jones, an object of gullibility—
ME: Yet you sit before me in your dusty toga, being exactly what you appear to be: a rather ludicrous object of idiotic gullibility—
GOD: You will change your opinion. And soon. What do you think people first thought of Jesus, a horny-handed carpenter from nowhere? What good thing ever came out of Galilee?
ME: You don’t convince me, and you never will. Give us your biography then. Where were you born and when? Who was your Mum and Dad? your Grandma and Grandpa?
GOD: You make the same mistake as Professor Stephen Hawking on page 166 in his “Brief History of Time”, where this reputedly greatest mind since Einstein asks in impeccable Dalek, Who made God? Yet a mere 8 pages earlier he calls this very question a fallacy, quoting Augustine, that it is wrong to imagine God being subject to time as time is a only an aspect of the universe God created.
ME: You’re saying the great professor got it wrong—
GOD: He saw the point intellectually but failed to apply it practically—a failing of most of you humans—
ME: He doesn’t believe you exist.
GOD: Very obviously I do. Why is there something rather than nothing?
ME: So you are giving me a picture of God lounging around on the clouds of Heaven reading books on Science?
GOD: I can’t turn off my omniscience, often as I want to. We automatically know all your productions, but Science is our favourite reading! There is nothing we in Heaven like better than a good laugh.
ME: Maybe you don’t realise how ludicrous you sound! And you haven’t answered any of my questions—
GOD: Yes I have. God could not have a beginning because beginnings are time things not found in eternity where God lives. I eternally am. God lives outside of time. However, as the question is so universal yet the answer so obvious, let’s answer it: Who made God? Answer: I made myself: “I AM WHAT I AM AND I WILL BE WH
AT I WILL BE.” That is what I said to Moses and that is what I eternally shall say.
ME: How could you make yourself when you already were? as you already had to be in order to decide what you would become—?
GOD: If you were a being of infinite intelligence I could tell you in detail and you would fully understand. But as you are a human and thus of limited intellectual capacity, and as your human languages can barely begin to contain infinite meaning I will equally dumb down for you as you would for a child of two. And even then you will never understand—
ME: Try me.
GOD: One day I will. For now, I ask you to accept Einstein’s dictum that imagination is superior to knowledge, therefore emulate Tolstoy and imagine there is nothing and nobody in the universe except yourself, for that is the position I found myself in at the beginning—
ME: The beginning you just said you never had—
GOD: I am humanising for the sake of communication—
ME: Ah yes, that’s so good of you—
GOD: Imagine waking tomorrow morning without a body—
ME: —without—?
GOD: You feel incredibly light. Floating. You stretch out your arm and touch—nothing. Your hand, it seems, travels a million