Some people shop for gods, most others have gods thrust upon them from birth, gods to whom they feel obliged to remain loyal, mainly and sadly due to peer pressure.
But whenever one is reflecting on whether the god one currently worships is the best, the most beneficial, the most deserving of worship – or when considering whether there are, in fact, better alternatives, one can use a kind of check list for surveying the qualities of the god one is currently saddled with – or the god one is considering adopting (..can one adopt a parent figure?)
One suggested check list is humbly supplied below, but it would perhaps be better for each of us to make our own list – or at least come up with supplements or substitutions. (Moses' laws were chiseled in stone – but that was back when stone was cheaper than papyrus.)
1. Ask yourself “Is your current god similar in disposition to someone you know? A rich or powerful uncle or grandfather who is usually generous, humorous, but can turn spiteful or vindictive when he doesn’t get his way? Your own father – or the father you wished you had?”
Logically if you can’t admire your god, who can you admire?
Your god ought to be the most patient, kind and generous imaginable – and not just an affable alpha-male who turns nasty when his children continue to misbehave. Drowning the world for its sins is an act of pique, to say the least! The Bible is full of stories of when God became angry. But how can you get mad unless you are unpleasantly surprised? A perfect all-knowing god surprised and enraged? A logical impossibility. The Bible’s god is Donald Trump, cool and all-knowing, always striving to appear in control, but all too often forced to peevishly punish the disappointing when their shortcomings suddenly appear!
2. Do you require your god to have a face? A nose? A mouth? Two eyes? Would three eyes eliminate a god from consideration? Tentacles instead of arms? Egyptians once happily worshipped ram-headed and crocodile-headed gods. Why can’t we in the West today? Hindus continue to love Ganeesh, not despite, but perhaps because of his trunk! If God can create a creature as strange-looking as an octopus – think of it! Eight arms! Suction cups! Squirts ink! Changes colors! Can slip through a bottle neck! Poisonous! If God can create something so bizarre and alien to us, what shape and appearance would God choose for himself? Surely a w.a.s.p.-like Charleton Heston-type would be dull, insufficient and highly unlikely???
3. Must your god have a gender? Is a beard really necessary? Must your god resemble a patriarchal male in order to hold your respect – or a wise earth mother? What about Elvis sideburns? (When you picture Jesus do you imagine him as far more physically attractive and far less sarcastic and ironic than the average Jewish male?) Does your god just happen to have your skin color?
4. During the English War of the Roses (1455-1487), which side was God on? Which side would you have been rooting for? Does it matter? Is it enough to suppose that God is always on the side of the underdog or at least the side that didn’t start it? Do you require your god to take sides in all wars – or remain neutral? (If God chooses to take an interest in some wars but not others, is it a sign of attention deficit?) Can you live with the notion that there may be a creator who doesn’t care a whit who amongst his creations lives or dies, or how they live or die, and has no interest in punishing or rewarding behavior? A god that is impartial and indifferent, regarding us as no more special or necessary than cockroaches? Can we confused humans in fact be more interested in morality than God is?
5. Do you require your god to have motives and plans that we can not only glimpse and understand, but approve of? For example, would you love and respect a god who created the earth and mankind – and has been patiently waiting for us to reach 20 billion – so that He can then feed us like tasty tidbits to His true favorites on the planet Belso? What if we've been created only to contribute global warming - so that later on His real "in his image" preferences, the lizard people, can evolve and thrive?
6. Do you require your god to perform magic tricks occasionally? Walk on water? Turn water to wine? Raise white tigers and train them to jump through fiery hoops in Las Vegas? Must your god be flamboyant? Ballsy? Donald Rumsfeld or Alan Alda? Martha Stewart or Madonna? The sweetness of Teller combined with the sadism of Penn?
7. Do you want or need a god simply because you can’t wrap your mind around the possibility that the universe is the result of something and not someone? That there has never been a conscious plan for you or for anyone or anything else? Do you require a Man With a Plan?
8. Do you find it impossible to believe that human beings are capable of behaving kindly and decently in a universe without a conscious god who punishes and rewards? He knows when you’ve been sleeping – he knows when you’re awake. Would you really behave much worse than you already do if you began to believe there are no cosmic eyes watching you? Do you really want a god like Judge Judy?
9. Do you require a god to take credit for the good stuff - and a devil to take the blame for the bad? If God created Satan, surely God can uncreate or change his nature? Unless of course God needs a fall guy to take the blame. An enforcer? If you’ve been bad, God “renders” you to hell just as Rumsfeld boxes and ships off the despised to Syria and Bulgaria for waterboarding?
10. If you are a woman, is your perfect god a nearly - but not completely sexless male figure, a Richard Chamberlain? A male figure who never thinks of sex but just wants to cuddle? For 2,000 years millions of frustrated Catholic women have lusted after the parish priest simply because they wish to believe he is incapable of lusting back or any other heinous form of male deceit. Is your god the one-of-a-kind male – the pure and shining ideal - the only man that can be trusted?
11. Do you absolutely require life after death? Heaven or Hell? Disneyland or Auschwitz? Do you imagine that Heaven is some kind of gated community – and do you secretly fear that God may be letting in riff-raff - that He hasn’t had the sense to set up some kind of platinum card system to keep the good-but poor and boring people from trying to mingle with - or stalk the better, richer more interesting, more important residents? And if you do require eternal life, what do you hope to do with your time – when you are unable to find anything interesting to do now on a rainy Sunday afternoon? Aren’t you already sick of repeating your jokes and stories? How much will you be repeating during the next trillion trillion trillion millennium? Especially when there are no more fresh and juicy murders or sins to gossip about?
12. Admittedly we are often told by clergy that the pleasures of Heaven will be different than earthly pleasures, pure pleasures, superior pleasures. But if you have been purified to such a degree that you no longer long for - nor appreciate sex, chili dogs, heavy metal music, muscle cars, Terminator movies – or any other cheap but delicious pleasures – just who is being admitted to Heaven? Certainly not you, as you are the sum of your pleasures. The new purified you will be as different to the present you as a total stranger would be. God may as well as make a robot copy of you without a personality and usher the –yes, soulless – copy through the Pearly gates in your place. If Heaven is to be without familiar pleasures, familiar faces or a familiar feeling of time, then it will be an alien place indeed, built perhaps only for Newtons and Einsteins who could possibly thrive on pure thought – though I imagine that even Einstein appreciated a beer or a good steak once in a while. If God is a foe of earthly pleasures He had better have some mighty interesting substitutes waiting for us. But I suspect that the equivalent of one endless eternal mental orgasm might begin to seem trivial and tiresome after just a few millennia.
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