[LNHY/ACRA] The Daily Super Short-Short Story #51 [long]

[Martin Phipps]

saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au (Saxon Brenton) wrote in message news:<15f3bff1.0410311521.62e70fa at posting.google.com>...

>      As you recall from the first arc set in the Garden of Party Time, 
> in Looniverse Y God the Obnoxious Father - the God of Abraham of the 
> Hebrews, Christian and Muslims - is an overbearing pain-in-the-arse. This 
> has certain inevitable effects on the nature of the faiths that worship 
> him. Now, it's nevertheless True that Jesus the, Like, Totally Mellow Son, 
> and various angels, archangels and saint have tried to ameliorate this 
> but that simply means there's a slightly schizophrenic dichotomy between 
> those people who believe that they're obliged to be good and help make 
> the world a better place, and those who consider their faith as a tool 
> for consolidating their own authority. After all, there is a *reason* 
> why, in Looniverse Y, Lucifer succumbed to pride and rebelled; and that 
> reason is the Hermetic principle As above, so Below'.

You know, something occurred to me as I re-read this paragraph just
now: how is the God of Abraham NOT a pain-in-the-arse, as described in
the old testament?  I mean, for starters, he puts a tree in the Garden
of Eden, calls it the "Tree of Knowledge" and puts these apples on the
tree which Adam and Eve are told NOT to touch and then banishes them
from the Garden for eating a single apple, this being after Satan in
the guise of a snake had presumably told her it was okay.  Why put the
tree there in the first place?  How different is that from Arthur's
version with the Vending Machine of No Free Lunches?  Then we have the
Great Flood which not only killed 99.9% of humanity and animal life
but creates a great burden on Noah, who he presumably likes, who then
has to build a massive boat, gather up all the animals he can find and
then go without food for a while until the waters receded (or did Noah
get hungry and eat one of the dinosaurs and that's how they went
extinct?)  Then there's the matter of Sodom and Gamorra being
destroyed, of idol worshipers being killed simply for worshiping
idols, of human sacrafices, of people getting stoned to death for
adultery or for entering a temple without permission, of wars, of
plagues, etc., etc., etc., not to mention the suffering that his
chosen people had to endure way back when they were slaves in Egypt. 
Granted, He comes off a lot better in the New Testament because Jesus
said that stoning people to death was wrong but this is after all
those years during which people believed that they had been doing
God's work and then suddenly "Um, sorry, but you have to be without
sin to cast stones.  Okay, who wants to go first?  Hmm?  Thought so." 
What's with that?  And if you're a Moslem it gets even worse because
presumably God went back to saying killing was okay if the people
being killed were non-believers.  So much for the Golden Rule, huh?

Of course, I suppose I am the sort of person George (no W) Bush would
have denied American citizenship.  (Oh, I am _so_ disappointed that I
wouldn't get to become an American.  Boo hoo hoo.)  Thing is, an
atheist, by definition, is someone who says God doesn't exist and I
haven't actually said that.  There are plenty of people who want us to
believe that the Bible is 100% correct and not open to interpretation.
 If you believe in the God of Abraham and believe that the Old
Testament is an accurate description of the way He thought and behaved
then wouldn't you have to conclude that He was, as you say, "an
overbearing pain-in-the-arse"?

Oh, and by the way, I think Pontius Pilate got off pretty easily too
in the New Testament.  It's almost as if the Romans in writing (or at
least editing) the New Testament after the fact wanted to make it
clear that the Romans hadn't been responsible for Jesus'
cruxification: it was those Jews who demanded it!  Again, if you take
the Biblical account seriously then, yes, Pontius Pilate seemed to
have some grim fore-knowledge when he washed his hands in the matter
and hoped that he wouldn't be held responsible, almost a kind of
fourth wall breaking in itself!  Or did he wash his hands every time
he sent a prisoner off to be cruxified (which would have taken away
all the meaning of doing so after a while)?

Anyway, sorry about the rant.  I hope nobody out there wants to kill
me now.  Ha ha.  I wish I were kidding. :(

Martin