Talk of the devil, or more specifically of his cyberspace rival, the bearded ballgown wearer who practices the Godding lark but no-one knows his name, and of whom of late I’ve made a few observations about on this blog.
One thing I’ve frequently remarked about is given his all-powerful capabilities, why does he punish his creations, namely us poor buggers, with so many bad things; typhoons, sinking ships, Trump, coronavirus and so on. It really is a pretty bad record of either job failure or sheer bloody malice.
As I’ve argued, the logical explanation for this constant lashing out has to be God being utterly fed up as the recipient of this relentless praying, of billions of buggers endlessly seeking his intervention for their advantage.
We saw this illustrated three days ago with about 20 skybayers killed in Bangladesh while praying to him, doubtless asking for stuff. Organising that would be a mere flick of the finger for God, who for all we know was having breakfast or lining up a putt in a heavenly golf-course when interrupted by this sky-baying racket. So bang, as said, a flick of the divine finger and collapse of the mosque.
Anyway, the other day it occurred to me I hadn’t read a Kingsley Amis for a while, so I scanned my library and pulled out “One Fat Englishman.” I saw in the frontispiece I bought it in 1966, three years after it was published and I certainly haven’t re-read it in at least the last quarter century.
Well, lo and behold there’s a marvellous and typically Amis piece in it dealing with precisely my skybaying point.
Set in America, the plot involves a fat English publisher anti-hero, Roger Micheldene, the guest of a gracious American colleague who puts on a dinner party for him. Other guests include a novelist, an academic, another publisher and their wives.
In the course of the evening Roger goes out of his way to be incredibly rude to everyone and forcefully attempts to have it off with two of the wives when catching them alone.
He’s a Catholic and later that night kneels beside his bed to pray. He opens formally with, “In nomine Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti” then launches into God brilliantly with, “Now, look here, this isn’t good enough. You know what I’m like and yet you keep on at me. All those people you know I can’t stand. Why do you keep sending along bastards like Atkins and Macher and bloody fools like that Parteger creature (these were the guests he’d insulted) if you don’t want me to be angry? When a chap starts talking the sort of pretentious cock that horrid little…” and so on in this vein his evening prayer continued, finishing with an appeal to God to help him succeed in ravishing his host’s beautiful wife. “You must know how much I want it for Christ’s sake”.
Well, doubtless finding this blunt approach refreshing from the standard unctuous praying style, God does intervene and Roger eventually succeeds with the beautiful wife.
So there’s a lesson there for skybayers, namely cut out the praise when you’re making your praying appeals and get stuck into God. Understandably he’d find it refreshing and jump into line and deliver the goods.
8 Comments
classic,,,,,,
And Amen
I’ve read the New Testament. It seemed to have three main messages, as follows:
1. Forgiveness is divine (heavenly).
2. We are redeemed by love.
3. We shouldn’t judge others (lest we be judged).
These don’t seem like absurd propositions to this heathen, although of course the human condition means that we will fail to live up to these ideals (we are all sinners).
The rest is simply a straw man?
A suggestion, particularly prompted by your accurate observation that god does
seem to have it in for his created creatures : C.G.Jung’s ” Answer to Job”.
With all the suffering in the world, where is God? Why are we destined to be challenged at all?
“And even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening—everything dangerous (and, therefore, everything challenging and interesting), that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness. How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger? How dull and contemptible would we become if there was no longer reason to pay attention? Maybe God thought His new creation would be able to handle the serpent, and considered its presence the lesser of two evils.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
I was surprised to read your posts as I recall many years ago you had a similar viewpoint on cell phones including banning the use of these affronts to humankind from your offices, or allowing your staff to use them, besides denigrating any foolhardy users. I simply assumed you must be either Amish or Exclusive Brethren. I am greatly relieved to see you are not one. However i see you may instead be a hoarder, if you insist on keeping a item you don’t use for 54 years.
Let’s hear it for Professor Einstein:
“Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional “opium of the people”—cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
Church goers tend to be contrite hypocrites. Proud hypocrites dwell on the outside.