In the questionnaires in weekend papers, they often ask, ‘do you believe in an afterlife?’ or something similar. And nearly all of the interviewees say yes, and the ones that don’t, often give an answer which countenances there being, ‘something or other out there’.
I don’t get it. The notion of heaven was obviously a marketing idea from some controlling, despotic, hard-line, right-winger who hailed from a time when almost everyone, particularly him, was ignorant. Can’t they see that? All he did was to extend the basic idea of dreaming, where you meet deceased relatives and pets as if they’re still alive, into a sort of permanent, final-sleep dream – the projected conditions of which gave him leverage over his subjects. It’s so easy to see through, that I can’t understand how anyone else, can’t.
Or perhaps I can. Take Suella Braverman as an example – it’s easy to become a darling of the far right – ask anyone who’s been brainwashed by a bully. You just say, and go, a bit further than they dare to. And they love you for it, especially at the beginning, when their desire for new evangelists coincides with your need to grow your reputation for enthusiastic, unempathetic, enforcement of their oppressive, freshly-hewn, rules.
Speaking of which, lets now move on to Moses, using, to aid our analysis, the ancient geographical* tool, the Venn Diagram. In one bubble we’ll put all the people in his community that could read; and in the other, those who were capable, not to say allowed, to climb up Mount Sinai. See that little dot in the intersection? That’s the man who said that God sent him a text one day when he was up there alone. Yeah, me too. I know that Moses, like Holden Caufield before him, can divide opinion but I’m going to stick my neck out and call him a bit of a bully. You know, Moses supposes that to have a better think about what God said, you’d better make everyone come and live in the desert with you for forty years. He came out of that period of reflection (not that it happened or anything) knowing that God was omnipotent and omniscient. It took him forty years to decide that the best way to answer awkward questions about God was to be able to say, ‘God- oh yeah, She’s great, She can do anything.’

Which brings me to the age-old conundrum of: could God make a bowl of porridge that is too large for Her to eat? For which the traditional answer has always been that it’s a logical fallacy, created only to undermine the notion that God (or anyone) could ever be omnipotent (She either could not do something beyond Her competence (eat it), and hence is not omnipotent; or she could not do it (make the porridge) in the first place, and hence cannot be omnipotent on those grounds either). That traditional answer asserts that to propose such a fallacy amounts to no more than saying, is God capable of doing something that isn’t possible in the first place? – like making a circle out of a square. Well you could if you made it out of string actually, anyway, regardless of that, I disagree with the priniciple, and here’s why …
Putting aside for the moment that God was some horrible person’s fabrication in the first place, and can be whatever the currently presiding hegemony deigns Her to be, the answer should be this: God IS capable of being greater than the sum of Her parts, because She put on the earth many compliant half-wits like Suella Braverman who, in their desire to impress those above them, push the accepted orthodoxy beyond its limits, double-down on errors to present them as a virtues, and are prepared to break the system to have their way. Then, one day, their mentor dies and they, the idiot, takes over. At which point, they become the new superior – an intellectually higher-grade version of the proselytes that now bow down to them. Eventually, a ruling class of the educationally subnormal presides, with no idea about what it was they originally stood for; only that they must keep pushing. But, as you continue to double-down on nothing you soon find yourself in a position where you have to turn a nothing into a something, and ultimately, given that dark matter outweighs visible matter by 6:1, by these actions, turn God’s great design inside out.

Ah, you say, She created both matter, and anti-matter, it is all Hers. But no, you’d be wrong, she cannot say on the one hand, that She made the Heavens and the earth and on the other, the exact opposite of all that. The anti-matter came as a consequence of Her creation, not part of it. Ask anyone at Cern, they’ll tell you.
{I know that She didn’t actually ‘claim’ this as such – I refer you to my point above as to the author of God’s edicts – but if they say She exists, I say She went along with it}.
It is, therefore, quite within the bounds of reason to imagine that God may make a bowl of not-porridge several times beyond Her ability to consume it. Much like I did today, but that was mainly because I put too much liquid in it, then had to bulk it out, first with a banana, then other non-porridge items.
And thus, I prove that, unlikely as a God might be in the first place, if there is one, She is not much cop. Yes, a great, black, silent, endless, nothingness, awaits you on death, which will a) be nice, because you’ll get some peace from all the fucking earache we all constantly have to endure; and b) won’t matter, because you’re dead; and c) won’t anti-matter, because …. oh no, hang on a minute.
*geography (Prince of the Humanities) not mathematics, which always tries to take credit for things only after they have been proven to work. Geographers like the Venn brothers, were always prepared to put their reputations on the line.
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