Why are we Here? An Angel Speaks.

I found this on Angel Footsie’s computer. It’s good. Humans ought to know this stuff. I bet he’ll be really pleased when he finds I’ve posted it on ABC.

Q: Is there a God?

A: Of course there is! Big ones don’t just bang themselves, you know. It took God several trillion years of careful calculation and testing to be sure he had everything right before he banged the first one. It created quite a good universe with some interesting ice robots in it, but God wasn’t satisfied and started work on an even bigger one. “The god who did all this in six days must have been on crystal meth,” he used to grumble. “Oh for some Harry Potter magic and a universe that works out all the details for itself.”

The newspapers accused God of playing human. Only humans meddle in things they don’t understand, they complained. God was rather flattered by the attention and said he understood it all perfectly well, thank you very much, and offered to show them the calculations. The journalists declined, saying that science was God’s business and scaremongering was theirs, and they’d rather stick to what they knew.

God told them it would probably work out okay but there was a slim chance they would all be turned into cheese mites. He winked at them as he said it. They rushed off to write how irresponsible God was, and how he had an eye tic just like a Bond villain, which proved he was up to no good. Their case was supported by a ‘leading deity’ who had bought his godhood on the celestialnet for a mess of pottage, and who nobody but the journalists had ever heard of.

The fifth bang created your universe. God is currently preparing the sixth, which should be ready any millennium now. Everyone is very excited about it.

Q: Does God answer my prayers?

A: Don’t be silly. Having gone to all the trouble of designing a fine and delicate watch mechanism that has kept perfect time for billions of years, do you really think he's going to stick in a pawky finger and push the hands around himself? Next question, please.

Q: Is there an afterlife?

A: Yes, you ungrateful bastards, but don’t think you deserve it. It came as something as a surprise to God that, in iteration five of his universe, the inhabitants didn’t think the gift of life was enough. “This is all very well,” they grumbled, “but it could be a lot better. I bet God’s making us go through this misery to see if we deserve a gold-star life somewhere else. This is obviously a tourist class world and I’m worthy of at least business class.”

We held a brief debate, with one side maintaining that, in providing humans with a life and somewhere to live it, we had amply discharged our duties to them. Besides, if they didn’t get an afterlife they’d never know about it, and if they did get one they’d probably complain about it. Easier all round just to ignore them.

The other side maintained that humans hadn’t asked for life, it was just thrust upon them, so we had no right to give them something they didn’t like. Somebody quoted from the Sentient Beings Act, which everyone else had forgotten about trillions of years ago. In the end it was decided that, although their legal counsel was a know-it-all, the humans probably had a good case.

So, by a narrow margin, you lot got your afterlife.

Q: Is there a hell?

A: Yes and no. If you mean: does God torture people, or encourage others to torture them, then no. You’re thinking of Americans. God will not set fire to people who haven’t performed the correct rituals or believed in your favourite collection of fairy stories, much to the disappointment of humans throughout history who had been looking forward to seeing the infidels burn. God is an adult in ways you infants can barely comprehend.

Your petty squabbles are your own business and you should sort them out yourselves while you’re still on Earth. If somebody’s actions offend you then put them in prison, waterboard them, inject them with lethal chemicals, do whatever you feel you must. God won’t settle scores for you.

If, on the other hand, you mean: do some people have a rotten time in the afterlife, then yes. As Sartre so wisely observed, hell is other people. Give each person their own private heaven and they complain that they’re lonely. Put them together and they fight. People have an infinite capacity for making themselves and each other miserable. Why should it be any different in the afterlife?

Q: Is the afterlife any better than this one?

A: Yes, for most people. A lot of the technology of Iteration 6 has been applied to the afterlife, so most of the annoyances of your Earthly life have been eliminated. Your hair doesn’t fall out, your teeth don’t rot and you aren’t plagued by flies in the summer. Supermarket pizza tastes as vile to the fat as it does to the thin, so obesity is rare. If a good infrastructure could guarantee a good life, you’d all be in heaven.

Humans are separated into numerous groups, each with its own afterplanet. Now you aren’t obliged to watch Alan Carr on TV unless you're on an Epsilon planet. Lawyers can live together and compliment each other on their fine legal minds without any embarrassing contact with truly fine minds. There are sink afterplanets for people nobody else wants to live with – traffic wardens, estate agents, tax inspectors, Michael Portillo.

The religious are a perennial problem. Oddly enough it’s not the popes and cardinals, the ulamas and sheikhs, the rabbis, supreme earth mothers and grand elves, who cause all the problems. Faced with reality they generally shrug their shoulders and say, “I always thought it was a bit far-fetched anyway. So what now?” Some of them continue to practice religious rituals for a while, often they’ve been doing them for so long they can no longer distinguish between things that serve a purpose and those that don’t. But they’re generally pragmatic and accepting about the true nature of God.

Unfortunately there are those who have spent their lives bleating about the blood of the lamb and using religion as a means of spiritual one-upmanship. There are those who have dreamed of non-believers, like that bastard Alf who mocks them at work, getting their come-uppance when God punishes them. They are the ones that cause the problems. When they don’t get the god they want, the god they demand, they accuse God of being the work of the devil. They demand to see the real god, who they’ll know by the brightness of his light, the loudness of his voice, and his smiting of the unrighteous, specially Alf from accounts. The real god will immediately give them a season ticket for a front row seat at the Praisings in recognition of their exemplary lives on Earth, or so they think. Nobody can talk them out of it.

Oh, he doesn’t seem to have finished it. Maybe I shouldn’t have posted it after all? Never mind.