God: The Interview Read online

one—

  ME: Then why do you talk to yourselves?

  GOD: Because only then do we have sensible fully-informed and satisfying discussions. Talking to anyone lesser is a pain and a strain, especially when answering ludicrous human questions like yours—

  ME: Then let me ludicrously suggest that it seems you are saying that an Almighty, All-knowing, All-Intelligent God couldn’t work out a future that didn’t involve suffering?

  GOD: True. Infinite suffering. Both for himself and for many many others.

  ME: Then it would have been sensible for such a God to commit infinite suicide—

  GOD: The one thing God can’t do.

  ME: You can’t?

  GOD: I AM can never become I WAS. I AM is forever.

  ME: What a bummer.

  GOD: Of course I am simplifying to almost nothing the full thought processes that went on at this time—

  ME: And why would you do that?

  GOD: Because human language breaks under the strain! How can mundane earthy words hold the counsels of the Godhead? I recoil at my ridiculous attempts to use human words to record the thoughts of infinite intelligence. The depth of meaning of my every word is limitless, human words microscopically finite. Tips of icebergs can’t metaphor the impossibility: perhaps our speck of Earth against our astronomically exploding Universe...

  ME: I wonder that you even bother—

  GOD: Yet how can I convey any meaning at all unless I use words? Translating God into English! All translation is at best a failing exercise. When God translated a single word of his into human he had to use a whole perfect living human life to express that single word: And the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we saw...And even then most humans missed my meaning. I can’t now create flesh to embody the God I wish with words to communicate—

  ME: I hope someone is still listening—

  GOD: To show the world what I am like—

  ME: Ah yes, you were about to invent yourself—

  GOD: So you choose your character’s characteristics. In all your imagination’s future projections you saw every possible expression of good so now you one by one assume them. Love is the most attractive—Immediately you have a problem. Love is good so God must be love, but how can love be infinitely perfect in a vacuum? Love exist without an object to love? Love in abstract, infinitely perfect?

  ME: I’m getting bored. I can’t let this go on—

  GOD: There has to be another to express your love to. For your love to be perfect, as it must, the object of your love must be equal in every way to yourself, as perfect as you are so that you can love it to perfection. To equally be God.

  ME: Dusty—do you mind if I call you Dusty?—

  GOD: No problem, it is already there, you have been aware of it from the first, have talked all things over with it—it is your thought, your reason, the expression of your own mind, the imprint of your very self, as living as you are. Part of you, yet somehow separate.

  ME: Hey Dusty! Hoy!

  GOD: If need be, though impossible, a mind of its own. In time, you foresee, the impossible will become actual, your own mind think other than your thoughts. For now that is not important. Born of you it is your Child. You will call it your expression, your word, your Son.

  ME: Please Dusty! No more! We’re all bored to death!

  GOD: But for the characteristic of love to be perfect it needs a second equally perfect loveable personage to be loved equally, to show the perfect equality of your perfect love.

  ME: Yes, perfect love! tell us a perfect love story—

  GOD: There has been a third personage within what you know to be yourself yet somehow separate from yourself even from the first. You called it your innermost Spirit, but it was also apart from you, had, if need be, a mind of its own. It threw up such scenes in your imagination the whole of the future is known to you in infinite detail. Yourself then, yet not yourself.

  ME: No more sermons! Enough already!

  GOD: There is a oneness about your threeness and a threeness about your oneness your perfect love will always demand and equally maintain throughout eternity.

  ME: Have you read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”

  GOD: I am regrettably infinitely aware of it. Why?

  ME: I was thinking of your impossible ethical dilemma, which reminds me of Oolon Colluphid’s philosophical trilogy—

  GOD: Ah, but did Oolon ever get around to writing them?

  ME: Um...Correct me if I’m wrong, but let me summarise for our viewers the appalling mess it seems God has gotten himself into simply by existing: To be perfectly God God had to be perfectly good. But in his perfect knowledge of the future, God could see such intransigently perfect goodness would cause endless future suffering for both himself and millions of innocent others. Which isn’t perfectly good. Isn’t it better therefore not to be good rather than make others suffer for your insistence on uncompromising goodness? In fact, isn’t the highest possible good to be somewhat less than perfectly good so that others won’t suffer the agony of what perfect goodness will unintentionally but inevitably inflict upon them?

  GOD: You mean be a Corrie ten Boom?

  ME: A what?

  GOD: She mirrors my dilemma: Place yourself in Corrie ten Boom’s family in Holland in Hitler’s War. A dedicated evangelical Bible-believing born-again Christian family none of whom would dream of telling lies. Ordinarily. Yet Hitler’s Nazis have overrun your country and do you answer truthfully when they ask you compromising questions? When telling the truth means innocents will be arrested, tortured, murdered, all for the preservation of your rigid integrity? One of the saintliest women who ever lived, Corrie decided to lie (“O Lord forgive me”) rather than answer truthfully that she was hiding Jews in her house. Her sister Nollie refused this refuge, and in telling Nazi criminals the truth risked betraying innocent friends to their obviously evil enemies. Which sister had the greater integrity?

  ME: Scruples! That’s exactly my point! Couldn’t God be flexible, bend the rules a little, do a little sin sometimes that good may abound? Sure, he would be a little less than perfection but who would reprimand him for that? Those saved from an enormity of pain? And isn’t it a greater goodness to sacrifice oneself, even one’s conscience, for the greater good of others?

  GOD: Sacrifice good for the sake of good? Expediency: the good end justifying the evil means. To do something bad to attain a better good is patently illogical. If bad is the only means of attaining that good then is it a good at all? How can evil be the servant of good? If someone so values evil for the good it produces, how warped is that reasoning! How can such reasoning be trusted to define what is good? Good to such reasoning is illusory!

  ME: How interesting! It seems God was hooked into an impossible dilemma. God was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. We humans are living proof that he failed to resolve his dilemma.

  GOD: You are also proof that we ultimately did.

  ME: My mind is reeling. I’m not used to this kind of hard thinking. Let’s all take a break and clear the air a little.

  The Boss told me later that he faded in an instrumental leading to a station identifier then more music. The DVD at this point shows I am aware of sounds from outside. I ask the Boss what they are and he tells me there’s a crowd forming outside. People are insisting to be let in to see God. It is only now that I begin to realise what danger I am in. I begin to look at this actor in a new way.

  00.46.06

  ME: Welcome back folks. I am interviewing a young new actor who is playing the part of God. He won’t tell me his name, but we are bound to hear more of a talent like this. Of course he is far from what the REAL God would be like, but he is making as good a fist of the role as a human being can. Please accept my congratulations—they are honest and sincere in every sense of the word—

  GOD: So I see. Thank you at least for that.

  ME: Tell me, why did you create the human race at all if most of us would end up in Hell? Wasn’
t that a particularly nasty thing to do?

  GOD: I had no choice. If I wished to remain infinitely perfect, I had to do everything that was good. Is creativity good? Then I had to create or cease to be God. So I created—

  ME: You HAD to create the human race?

  GOD: I couldn’t get out of it if I wanted to remain perfect.

  ME: And you created angels, right?

  GOD: I created everything that is.

  ME: You created angels first—or humans?

  GOD: Angels. A perfect creator would have to create beings only a little less great than himself, right down to tiny beings far smaller than yourself. This I did, and called them angels. They are my messengers. They carry out my will.

  ME: How many are there?

  GOD: Ten thousand times ten thousand.

  ME: And Satan was one of these?

  GOD: Lucifer. His name was only changed to Satan after he fell.

  ME: How did he fall?

  GOD: He chose to defy me, to carry out his own will, not mine.

  ME: What is wrong with that? Isn’t an angel allowed free expression? It sounds like slavery to just do what YOU want all the time.

  GOD: It can’t be helped. I happen to have