We're urged to dream big, and I always follow instructions. The other night I dreamt that I was God. I'm neither religious nor megalomaniacal, as far as I know - at least, no doctor ever hinted at it. Overweight, yes; megalomaniacal, no. But there I was, reaching for the top.
It was a bit weird, even for a dream. I sat in a celestial electronic office, going through my mail.
My mail was piles and piles of prayers whirling around inside a transparent cylinder, like numbers in a lottery machine. They were written in tongues of every kind, addressed variously to Jahveh, God, Allah, Zeus and Zoroaster. It seemed all very ecumenical.
I was disappointed, though. Frankly, the prayers were embarrassing. Most supplicants seemed like a royal pain in the keester.
Things look different from the other side, I suppose, but viewed from God's vantage point, human beings aren't very attractive. It's not for God to complain about Adam and Rib, having created them, but really, what a shoddy design.
I'm not talking about supplicants praying for long life, health, money, whatever. If people haven't got something they need and don't know how to get it, they've no choice but to pray for it. Mendicants may not be majestic, but they're human.
It isn't mendicants who embarrass me as God; it's people who pray for faith. Specifically, those who demand to see my ID, so to speak. These good folk want to believe, but would feel silly if they believed in a God who didn't exist -why, Christopher Hitchens might mock them -so they ask for a sign.
It isn't much, they say. A sign should be a breeze for a deity. No need to lay out anything new and expensive. Any old trick will do. Just part the Red Sea again, God, and whoosh! We'll be happy.
There they were in my dream, the aspiring faithful, demanding documentation. Their fervent prayers for a sign were scrawled on postcards, stitched into animal skins, carved on stone tablets, written on napkins, or left in the crevices of the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem. Hey, God, we want to believe. Let's see your birth certificate!
Oh, ye of little everything. You want to see my ID? How about the universe?
A sign, you say? Will a galaxy do? How about gamma rays, the structure of the eye, E=MC 2 , a black hole, a pollinating insect, a homing pigeon or a Bach fugue? How about the Milky Way or the Taj Mahal? How about conscience? Consciousness? How about feeling the need to believe?
A "sign" of God's existence is existence itself. If the macrocosm of galactic systems and the microcosm of amino acids fail to convince a skeptic, what would? A tweet from God? "Hi, my name is God; have you had breakfast this morning?"
People who wait for a sign usually mean a "miracle" -in other words, a suspension of a law of nature. Why would a suspended law confirm the existence of God better than an operating law? Search me.
In matters of commerce, it is cheques honoured, not cheques bounced, that indicate a sufficiency of funds. Waiting for a miracle from which to extrapolate God's existence is like waiting for a dishonoured cheque from which to extrapolate the existence of a bank account on which cheques are being drawn and cashed every day.
Bizarre -but skeptics aren't the worst offenders. Other faith-seekers impress me even less. They're the imperfect moralists who would believe in me if only I stopped them from doing evil things.
"Where were you in Hiroshima, God?"
"I wasn't in Hiroshima. I was in Heaven. You were in Hiroshima."
"Aren't you supposed to be omnipresent? I never saw you in Auschwitz, the gulag, Dresden or Katyn Forest ."
" You never looked for me. You were busy doing evil things."
"Why did you let me?" "Has it occurred to you that you might have acted without my permission?"
But, no, that never occurs to the wannabe faithful. If human beings do something they don't like in retrospect, it's because either (1) I don't exist, or (2) I'm not All-Powerful or (3) I'm not All-Good.
Men doing fiendish things used to prove the existence of evil. Now it casts doubt on the existence of God. Once I punished men for being bad; now men punish me for it. "If we're bad, God, you don't exist." Talk about gall.
Yet prayers keep coming. They pop up as computer printouts, text messages, data links. They come as three dots for S in Morse, three dashes for O and three dots for S again. Save Our Souls. People sending it usually mean Save Our Bodies -but you can't very well send SOB to God.
"Requests, all of them," I say to my co-pilot, before waking up. "What happened to thanksgiving?"
My celestial office has become a glass cockpit, very state-of-the art, hurtling through the sky. A young Middle Eastern looking man is sitting in the starboard seat.
"Believe it or not, Eli," he says, "being God used to be a dream job."
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