Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, and welcome to re:Christian, a critical and satirical reconsideration of Christianity, the Bible, and God. This is episode 9: “I Get an Email from God.”
Well, I’m grateful for a few things about the email I received yesterday from God. First of course is just the fact of it. I don’t agree with everything he says (he talks as if he knows everything) but I’m a person who is always open to communication. It’s a more positive reaction to criticism than silence or passive-aggressiveness, or just plain old aggression. I also appreciate that he didn’t resort to the antiquated methods of the Old Testament. If he’d chosen the burning bush as his means of contact, and I was obligated to both walk out to said burning bush and then actually talk to it—well, the condo board likely wouldn’t have been happy at the destruction of part of the grounds, and neighbours who saw me talking to it would likely trepidatiously stare fixedly at the floor of the elevator from then on if I were in there with them. I can just hear it now. He’s nuts, you know. I heard from Sally on the third floor that he was talking to the shrubbery. In his pajamas. (For the record, it was sweat pants and a T-shirt. The truth gets distorted just within a day, which is part of my point about the inaccuracy of the Bible over the course of a few thousand years.)
Anyway. The email. Here it is:
Listen, fuckhead, I’ve been listening to the podcast and I’m surprised you’re so stupid to be talking about a vengeful God at the same time as you are mocking him.
Okay, just let me step out of the email for a minute and address a few points in this first sentence of an email that is as idiotic as the book he (let’s call it) “wrote.” The creator of the universe, the omnipotent, the omniscient one, the guy who made humankind and then perversely had his own son killed to save that same humankind from itself—that God starts his first communication with me by calling me a fuckhead. Nice. Classy. The dumb bastard is not even au courant with email protocol—fucking email, which the three generations older than me (X, Millennial, and Z) consider old tech—a protocol that would allow him not even to mention my name or to slur me at all, but to get right to the point about listening to the podcast.
Note also that he’s “surprised.” Hmmm. That seems like an emotion that’s contradictory to the all-knowingness that his book is going on about all the time. Shouldn’t he already know how stupid I am, so to speak? How can you be surprised when you know everything?
And, finally, I mean, really? This is how you’re going to be? Pissed off that one person in the just over 8 billion on the earth right now has a podcast with a modest following? For fuck sake, man, those Old Testament stories are starting to make a lot of sense now.
Back to the email:
I have given you and all humans so much. I have given the planet more than you even know and you stupid fucks are treating it like a toilet.
Sorry, I have to step out and comment again, but the old guy has a point here. If we allow that he created the universe (which he didn’t), then we humans have not taken care of it very well. Which is an understatement. We’ve trashed the joint. And built enough weapons to kill all 8 billion of us and in the process likely do even more damage to the planet, to home.
But I digress. He goes on:
Yes, I am vengeful, and, yes, in the OT I do kill a lot of people. And I am insecure, but I attribute a lot of that to how my parents raised me. Or didn’t: there was a lot of inattention and malicious neglect.
Well, hold on, said Wayne, stepping in again when as stupid as he reputedly is, he knows a scoop when he sees one. God’s parents? What the fuck? However, I do admit to be kind of impressed by his openness here. His giving himself up to vulnerability, and especially to someone who makes fun of him.
Okay, here’s the rest without interruption:
The blatherings of the televangelists and born-agains and Bible-thumpers notwithstanding, I do not intervene. They call it a miraculous cure, I call it a coincidence. They call it the power of prayer, and I would note that prayer is unnecessary in the first place because I can read your thoughts, you know. The one principle I have maintained for the last six thousand years is that I have never stepped in even once to rescue a situation from disaster. I’ve allowed thousands of children to die with their Christian parents on their knees on the bedside at the hospital. I’ve allowed babies to accidentally slip from a mother’s hands and for their little heads, still soft at the top, to thud onto a hard and unforgiving floor. I’ve let Russians kill Ukrainians and vice versa. I’ve let an intractable problem between Israel and the Palestinians become—do you have the word dystractable in English yet, or is that one yet to come?
So, as bad as I might be, or as bad as you make me out to me, I do stand on at least one principle. I don’t interfere. And you can keep on with your little podcast. I don’t care. It hurts, sure, and it makes me angry enough to send a herd of endangered snow leopards off the brink of some small but killing cliffside, but you carry on, Mr. Jones.
And that’s how it ends. The email, I mean, not the world, though who knows? His writing is better here than in the Bible. I kind of like the beginning and end, where there is rhetorical symmetry in addressing me, but lexical asymmetry in meaning: I progress from fuckhead to Mr. Jones, with a dash of sarcasm though.
Of course, since there’s no God, I wonder where this email came from? And from whom? The address is God@whocreatedthefuckinguniverse.heaven, which has a domain name that is in fact available, but a domain name extension that’s not yet available. That seems appropriate somehow. I may try to ferret it out some time, track down the sender, but today I have a haircut in about three hours and then have to continue my search for a go-to café in this new city I’ve been living in for only just over three months now. God can wait.
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. Check the show notes for a full transcript and for how to contact me. And please join me again on Monday.