Without evidence of benefit, an intervention should not be presumed to be beneficial or safe.

- Rogue Medic

Happy Play God Day

 
January 9th is Play God Day.

OK. I’ll play. What could possibly go wrong.

I will start before The Beginning. I am everything and I am perfect.

Do I ruin that by creating something other than me? Am I lonely, bored, needy, neurotic, . . . ? What fallibility would inspire me to create creatures to slaughter? According to my biography, this is where I start to screw things up, but it could have been earlier.
 

play-god-day-1
 
Do I ruin perfection by creating something imperfect? Apparently. According to my biography, I do not accept that my far-from-perfect actions are demonstrations of my lack of perfection, but I make the rules, so I will torture you forever for pointing out my failures. It seems fair to me.

Remember that my name is Jealous and It isn’t bad when I do it. I said so. And it seems that I have to say so, because I can’t write. Why can’t I write? Why am I the worst communicator of all time? Remember, I will torture you forever for pointing out my failures.

Why would I choose to create evil and abolish my perfection? I didn’t create evil. Evil created itself and I use the existence of evil so that I can claim that I am better than something else. Don’t expect me to be reasonable. Remember, I will torture you forever for pointing out my failures. If I can create myself out of nothing, why can’t evil? And if I am not as good as I claim to be, maybe evil is not as bad as I claim that it is.

Was I ever perfect, if I can create evil, or let evil be created, or let evil create itself? So what if I get cranky and drown everyone on the planet, except for eight supposedly good people, who weren’t as good as I thought? Was everyone else really evil? What about their innocent fetuses? If I really wanted to get rid of all of the bad people, maybe I should have chosen passengers a little better. Maybe I could have just dealt with them individually. Look at me being surprised by something I didn’t anticipate, again.

Why did I use such an inaccurate weapon? Why not use a laser? That would impress people. A technology that the creators of the Gods did not know about! That would have been much more impressive than a bigger than usual flood. Maybe I should have created better writers.

Why would I want to be such an abysmal failure as the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God? Maybe I just don’t think for myself. Maybe I was just created by people who were not aware of their prejudices and logical fallacies. Richard Feynman has comment on the reports of flying saucers, which I like to modify to apply just as accurately to the Gods.
 

It is not unscientific to make a guess, although many people who are not in science think it is. Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers God — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers God! I said “I don’t think there are flying saucers Gods”. So my antagonist said, “Is it impossible that there are flying saucers Gods? Can you prove that it’s impossible?” “No”, I said, “I can’t prove it’s impossible. It’s just very unlikely”. At that he said, “You are very unscientific. If you can’t prove it impossible then how can you say that it’s unlikely?” But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, “Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers God are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial supernatural intelligence.” It is just more likely. That is all.

 
The Character of Physical Law (1965)
chapter 7, “Seeking New Laws,” p. 165-166: video

 

I could have arranged for good people to be rewarded and bad people to fail. I used to have you believing that I did that and you humans abused people who were different, because that was a sign from me that those people are evil. Many of you haven’t stopped. I love irrational people. Billions of irrational people can’t be wrong, so keep killing each other over the right interpretation of my biography.

If I were going to be a God for a day, I might increase the ability of people to understand. A God capable of communicating in a way that people could agree on would suggest that the God is not made by people, but the only thing that Christians seem to agree on is that they like Jesus. A real God could have communicated a real message, but what should we expect from the guy who wrecked the Tower of Babel, which we have long since surpassed. Ooops.

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Comments

  1. But you are not God, so shut the fuck up already. Stick to pre-hospital medicine.