Time to meet your malevolent maker

I called shenanigans on the existence of God at the tender age of ten. Even before I knew pie was more than something you threw in 20s slapstick comedies it never made sense to me for an omnipotent being to be benevolent, given that we have such terrible things in this world as Justin Bieber, truly an apocalyptic horseman of our time. He also never returned my prayers, but I’m sure he was too busy setting bushes on fire like some geriatric yob.

The fallacy in the previous argument is rather obvious but at the same time often overlooked because of what our idea of God generally is: some jolly old guy with a huge white beard who keeps a caring, watchful eye over us – except when he’s playing the odd round of golf with Satan to keep on good terms with him so that he can take all the annoying do-gooders that would otherwise go to Heaven.

No. If God exists he is a jerk. Once you take a minute to think about it, it explains everything so beautifully it brings a tear to my eye. Earthquakes, tsunamis and volcano eruptions happen because He just likes seeing the different ways he can ruin your day, like a child pulling the wings and legs off a fly. Of course, on occasion good things do happen, like winning the lottery or getting an excellent in your latest lab cycle, but they’re only to build you up so you can be knocked back down again. It’s a lot funnier to see Fernando Torres break his ankle than Stephen Hawking.

I’m sure many of us would do the same; history is fraught with examples of dictators and Nazi doctors who probably weren’t evil to begin with but inevitably did some really bad things simply because they could and were divorced from the morality of their actions for whatever reason.

God’s ultimate dick move, however, was when he made the laws of nature. In creating the second law of thermodynamics he’s essentially flipped the bird at us all by saying everything is just going to get worse as time goes by. That loaf of bread going from brown to blue? Entropy is increasing. Getting lung cancer and dying? Yep, you guessed it. Shit getting worse is just the natural order of things, and we as human beings we have a tendency to resist this because we don’t like bad things happening to ourselves (exceptions include Catholics and sado-masochists).

In summary: if you want to get back at God for all the ridiculous lecture timetables, flat beer and cystic fibrosis he throws at us because he’s an incredible dick, go do something amazing, like curing cancer.