Sent: 8th April 2005 • To: The Lord God Almighty • Subject: A Quick Word

Dear Father Who Art in Heaven,

Apologies for writing this letter to you on the day of the Pope's funeral, but as you're omnipotent I thought you could probably still manage to show him around and read this at the same time. Regardless, I'll try to keep this brief as I know you're very busy being utterly indifferent to the suffering of mankind:

What the fuck are you playing at?

Okay, perhaps that's a little too brief. If you'll avoid turning me into a pillar of salt or having a plague of locusts descend on my house for the next five minutes I'll explain my concerns in a little more detail. You may want to have a seat before continuing, assuming for one second that someone who is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time is capable of sitting down.

That's a point - if you made man in your own image how come I'm not an unfeasibly large invisible giant too? Actually there are one or two questions I have regarding your existence and the contents of the Bible which I'll throw into this letter, and which I hope you can answer should you take the time to reply. That's not my main reason for writing, however. Oh my goodness no.

I'll admit I haven't been a regular church goer. In fact since leaving primary school I've only ever set foot inside a church to shoot wedding videos, and even this was solely motivated by profit. On the other hand, however, I don't think I've lived my life in sin, or at least in no more sin than the vast majority of your flock, and in less than the majority of the Catholic church.

In fact, to illustrate how scarcely I sin (other than low key, everyday sins, obviously, because let's face it, if I was to avoid all sin I'd have to somehow force myself to slip into a coma), let's take a look at the Ten Commandments:

I. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
I don't. I'm strictly 100% atheist and worship no gods of any description whatsoever. I've dabbled in Buddhism, but then Buddhism is not centred round the concept of there being one true god, so I don't think it counts.

In fact when you think of it, this commandment is pretty stupid. What other gods are there these days? I don't really expect there's a large following for Thor the God of Thunder any more, at least not outside of Marvel Comics. If you ever get round to having the Bible updated (and if you do I'm more than willing to help with the rewrite) I think you can safely drop this commandment.

Have I broken this commandment?: No.

II. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
I don't even know what this means, so I don't reckon I've done it. Was this the thing about all the folk at the bottom of the mountain having made a cow out of gold and started worshipping it while Moses was up getting these commandments carved in stone? How bored do you have to be to decide to build a cow out of solid gold??

In fact if it only took you a week to create the Earth and everything in it how come it took you like a month to write the ten commandments? If it was writer's block I can relate to that. Or did you come up with loads of other commandments that had to be whittled down to the final ten? "Though shalt not throw toads at a wall" and the like?

Whatever, how pissed off were you when Moses smashed them to smithereens when he got to the bottom of the mountain? Way to go with the temper losing Moses. Man I bet he was sheepish when he came back up to ask for another copy.

Have I broken this commandment?: No.

III. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain.
Okay, I've done this, but Christ, who hasn't? I'll give you this one though, since I've actually been pulled up for saying "for God's sake" by an old woman in the past, so there must be people out there who strictly adhere to it.

Have I broken this commandment?: Yes.

IV. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
I'm unsure on this one. I like to think I've kept the sabbath day holy in a relaxed, informal sense. A sitting about watching telly in my pants kind of sense. Do I go to church every Sunday? No, I don't, I'll give you that, but then in order to keep the sabbath day holy in the way intended in the Bible no-one should be going to the shops or drinking alcohol or driving cars or anything, and I don't believe there's more than a handful of people in the world who can say that.

Except maybe the Amish.

And no, I'm aware it doesn't mention anything about driving cars in the Bible, but it does say you're supposed to walk everywhere on the sabbath, so the driving cars bit is definitely inferred.

So on balance then I reckon I've kept the sabbath just about as holy as everyone else has, so assuming you're not going to have everyone but the Amish cast into the fiery pits of Hell for breaking this one, I'm going to assume it remains relatively unbroken by me.

Have I broken this commandment?: No (ish).

V. Honour thy father and thy mother.
Oh, I do. They may get on my nerves from time to time, but everyone gets on my nerves from time to time, so it's no reflection on them. I'll admit I'm struggling to recall specific incidents of me honouring them, but there's a vague kind of generic honouring going on most of the time.

Have I broken this commandment?: No.

VI. Thou shalt not kill.
I'm definitely in the clear on this one! Even the police said that guy was just a tragic accident and that I'd tried my best to grab him before he stepped in front of that train.

Have I broken this commandment?: No, and I dare any fucker to say different.

VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Hmm. Again this is a tricky one. Depends how you class adultery. If it has to involve relations of a physical nature, then no, I haven't. If it also includes spending time with another woman on the sly while in a relationship with someone else, then yes, I have.

I'll put me down as a "don't know".

Have I broken this commandment?: Maybe.

VIII. Thou shalt not steal.
Once when I was about seven I absent-mindedly walked out of a shop without paying for the newspapers I had been sent to buy for my parents (see how I honour them?), but I realised about half way home and went back in to pay for them. Does that count? If so I reckon you're being a little bit harsh.

I'm going to assume because I didn't actually steal anything for more than a few minutes that I'm in the clear.

Have I broken this commandment?: No.

IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
I once told a story about a neighbour who is a pub singer falling off his stool while performing but "magically" continuing to sing uninterrupted due to him having been miming his way through his entire repertoire, but to the best of my knowledge that's true, so it doesn't count as false witness.

Have I broken this commandment?: No.

X. Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbour's.
When I was a student the guy in the flat above had an eighteen year old daughter who would come to visit who I found very attractive. I wouldn't say I "coveted" her as such, more just quite liked the idea of seeing her naked. Never did though. Shame.

Have I broken this commandment?: No.

So there you have it. Of the ten commandments I've broken one, been a bit iffy on two and adhered to the rest. I haven't been a bad person all things considered.

So what's with the grudge you appear to have against me? Why have you singled me out for special treatment? Don't try to deny it, the facts speak for themselves. I'm not going to go into great detail on all the things you've inflicted upon me over the years because you know them all too well. In fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if you have a spreadsheet of them printed out and pinned to your office wall, just below an A3 sized artist's impression of my crying face.

It may strike you as odd that I, a self-confessed atheist, am writing to you to question your motives, but the answer is very simple. Either I accept that you do exist and that for reasons unknown you fucking hate me, or I assume all blame for everything that has gone wrong in my life and actively do something to improve the situation. Though it has taken a radical shift in my thinking, I've decided to go for the former, simply because I don't fancy facing up to the crushing realisation that I am the captain of my own destiny and that the majority of my woes have been caused solely by my own actions.

Take, for example, the old penis in the zip incident back when I was sixteen. You remember that one, don't you God? Granted it was me and not you who caught the old chap in the fly of my Levis, but I'm not the first to do it and I'm reasonably confident I won't be the last.

How many others, however, awoke next morning to find themselves literally pissing blood all over their sheets? How many others had to face the indignation of walking through a crowded doctor's surgery with a plastic bag apparently designed for just such a purpose held firmly over their genitals? Very few, I'll bet. My I bet Noah laughed at that one when you told him about it in the bar that evening.

Oh, and as an aside, Noah lived to be how old? Nine hundred and fifty it says in the Bible, but that's got to be some kind of misprint, right? I mean I thought people were living longer these days, but I don't think anyone is even close to getting a second telegram from the Queen, let alone their ninth! No wonder his beard was so huge. Man I bet he bored the arse off everyone for the last few hundred years banging on about that boat he built. "Yeah, yeah, Noah, big flood, animals went in two by two, we've all heard it". Does he still talk about it now?

In fact, now I think about it, can you explain this:

Genesis 8:20 Then Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

Am I right in thinking that after saving all the animals and birds from the great flood Noah then killed and burnt one of each of them?? How does that work? Didn't that defeat the entire point? I also couldn't let the next bit pass without comment:

8:21 And the LORD smelled the soothing aroma; and the LORD said to Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done.

Yeah, you can't beat that smell of burning giraffe, can you? What's with the talking to yourself, though? More importantly, how did whoever wrote this know you were talking to yourself? And the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth? Fuck that's bleak. What's the point in even trying if we're all inherently evil anyway?

Seems to me though that you're regretting the whole flood business. Does that mean you made a mistake? I thought you were infallible? Isn't that the whole basis for religion, that your word is beyond question?

I really hope you can answer some of these and help clear up the confusion, because I'll be honest, I'm starting to lose that little nugget of belief again, and I don't want to accept any responsibility for my own life if at all possible.

Reading back over it, I'm struggling to find the purpose of this letter, but I think it basically boils down to "stop picking on me". In fact, how about you stop picking on everyone? Enough with the Tsunamis and the earthquakes and the famine and the wars in your name. Cut that shit out. And don't give me none of that "free will" nonsense. What, it's man's free will to be sitting on the toilet when a fifty foot tidal wave smashes his house to rubble? On one level yes, I suppose it is, but on so many other levels it's just plain nastiness on your part.

Man can only have free will if all the information is presented to him, so perhaps if the Archangel Gabriel had gone door to door saying "by the way a fuck off great wave is going to kill you next week if you stay here" then I'd have accepted the free will argument, but to the best of my knowledge no such house call was conducted.

When I was about six a Salvation Army person came to the school and said something which stuck with me forever: "Every time we see a rainbow it reminds us of God's love".

I took this to mean that you, the aforementioned God, were making the rainbows appear as a little reminder of how much you love us. Tell you what though, keep the rainbows, and stop randomly killing hundreds of thousands of people on a whim. Sound fair? Perhaps if you stop heaping the tragedy onto people they won't need your multi-coloured distractions and can instead happily get on with their lives in peace? Just a thought.

Anyway, sorry I didn't quite pull off the brevity thing, but then being God you probably received this letter before I was even born or something, so chances are it hasn't interrupted your working day too much.

I look forward to your reply, or that of the thousands of zealots who shall now likely attempt to kill me in your name. Get them told to ease off with the fatwahs too.

Amen,

Baz@rr