For God has a plan that plagues our feeble prospects and from which we never find relief. The comedian George Carlin fires the first shot in a good spot of God hunting: ‘If we could just find out who’s in charge, we could kill him.’
So we meet the victims of a fascist intergalactic empire-builder not by jackally jeers and hiding, but by jest, empathy and solidarity. At a long stretch, we may all be victims of parental abandonment.
‘Maybe at the very bottom of it ... I really don't like God.’ Steven Weinberg
‘He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.’ George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Shake free your spiritual shackles, shed your fear, stiffen the sinews of your backbone — and when in the dock on Judgment Day, cry solidarity with your condemned sisters and brothers.
‘If it were to be true, one would be living under a permanent surveillance, a round-the-clock celestial dictatorship that watched you while you slept; and could convict you of thought crime, could indict you for things you thought in the privacy of your own skull, and sentence you to quite a long stretch, namely an eternity of punishment for that. Or dangle not to me very attractive reward of life of eternal praise and grovelling and sprawling and singing the praises of someone who you are ordered to love; someone whom you must both love and fear ... Compulsory love — how fascinating.’ Christopher Hitchens, interview Divine Impulses
For the ages, Christopher Hitchens coldly lays out the horror of a real-life fascist intergalactic empire-builder God: ‘It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable unchallengeable tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep. Who can subject you — who must indeed subject you — to a total surveillance ... A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? ... At least you can fucking die and leave North Korea.’
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