Tag Archives: prophecy

What I wouldn’t do

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What would you do if you were a God? That’s a challenging question. An easier question is what wouldn’t you do?

Here is what I wouldn’t do:

  • I wouldn’t wait thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to present myself to my ‘subjects’. (Or I would wait longer so that my message could spread more easily, and in high definition.)
  • I wouldn’t root my religion in superstitions about the natural world.
  • I wouldn’t write my holy book with references to social norms and practices that will date themselves and become embarrassingly outdated.
  • I wouldn’t introduce my religion to only one geographical location and leave many others clueless to my existence. (If I did pick just one geographical location, I’d choose one where my subjects were the most literate and able to share my words more consistently and precisely.)
  • I wouldn’t punish my subjects for being unbelievers, I would let their good or bad actions be the measure of their right to eternal life after death.
  • I wouldn’t expect obedience, I could have created slaves rather than self-conscious beings if obedience was really important to me.
  • I wouldn’t want anyone to fight expansionist wars in my name. Why pit my subjects against each other? This seems a bit egotistical for a god!

I’m not wise enough to list all the things I would do, without contradicting myself or being in some way myopic, selfish, or egotistical… that said, I could probably get together with a team of thoughtful people and improve on any and all holy texts. It would take equal or less effort compared to the apologists who defend and justify the contradictions in these texts, rather than admitting that a wise and benevolent God would never had allowed such poorly written scriptures to be written either by Him or in His name.

I have not yet seen a scripture or text written to this day that I believe a benevolent and loving God would have written. But there are many holy texts that such a kind and worthy-of-worship God would never have written.

Not in our lifetime

We have an inherent bias that we believe things will happen in our lifetime, and conspiracy theorists are far more biased in this area than others. The next big event will bring the end of the world as we know it.

From the Bay of Pigs all the way to the Reagan era, World War III was inevitable. Y2K was going to send us back to the Middle Ages. Meteors, super volcanos, earthquakes, super floods, and yes, viruses, are all threats to humanity that will be the end of civilization as we know it…. apocalyptic threats to the human race that will happen any day now.

But the weird part is that somehow these are inevitable to happen in ‘our’ lifetime. We will bare witness. We will be the last generation to know what normal was.

Normal.

What is that? Normal as in a life of traveling by horse and buggy? Normal as in women can’t vote? Normal as in smoking in restaurants? Normal as in life before indoor plumbing, or before social media?

Our world advances in extremely fast and innovative ways, but somehow the human race will find its demise in our lifetime… or so conspiracy theorists believe. People will prepare for the end days, but they won’t live in the now.

“If I hold up this sign that says, ‘The world will end tomorrow’ long enough, one day I will be right.”

…that’s assuming the end will happen in your lifetime… but it probably won’t. We will see so many changes in our lifetime, but so will our grandkids… and maybe they will see the end times, but the simple reality is that it’s unlikely to happen in ours.

Humans, the earth, or the universe probably need a few more generations to really screw things up for us, for our planet, and odds are that this will happen after everyone living today is long dead. The end might be near, but it’s farther away than our short lives.