Jesus came down on earth the mystery of the Cross

Kneeling Man: Oi, God! You there?

God: Yes, Neel.

KM:  Jesus came down on earth the mystery of the Cross? “Jesus came down on earth”, what’s that supposed to mean?  Doesn’t the Vatican have any competent translators? Did you see the Pope’s latest tweet?

God: I’m omniscient, Neel, I see everything.

KM: Of course you do. What do you think about the way that he states something is very simple and straight forward, as if it’s an obvious fact, and then calls it a mystery?

God: He may be reminding his congregation that I work in mysterious ways.

KM: You know what I think’s mysterious about you?

God: What’s that, Neel?

KM: Churches are called God’s house, right?

God: Yes…

KM: And they’ve sometimes been touted as sanctuaries where good people can hide out against evil doers?

God: Uh huh…

KM: Well how come you’ve allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be raped by your own employees in your own house?

God: It’s one of the consequences of free will, Neel.

KM: Being omniscient and omnipotent means that you watched every single one of those children being raped and deliberately decided to do nothing about it. And you also watched as your church protected and enabled the rapists by moving them to new places to rape again. Either you aided and abetted the carnage, or the whole omniscient and omnipotent schtick is bullshit. Which is it?

God: Mysterious ways, Neel. Isn’t that what you wanted to talk about?

KM: Another mystery is why you allow so many rapists and pedophiles to become priests in the first place.

God: There’s a bit of a shortage of normal men, by which I mean men with a healthy sexual appetite for adult women, who buy into the whole vow of celibacy thing. Doesn’t make sense to most.

KM: Was that the point of the celibacy rule? To encourage those with abnormal desires?

God: I didn’t invent the rule.

KM: It’s your church. Aren’t you omniscient and omnipotent?

God: I thought you wanted to talk about the Pope’s tweet about the mystery of the Cross?

KM: Nice deflection, big boy. And by nice I mean, childish, simplistic and obvious. Never mind. I knew you’d have no answers for the tricky questions. So, back to the Pope. He says A causes B, therefore mystery. What the absolute fuck? Once again the pontiff tweets some inane bullshit and within hours, tens of thousands of people are liking and retweeting it.

God: Good to be Pope.

KM: Why did Jesus have to “come down on earth” as a baby? If he’d arrived as a 30 year old preacher he could have got on with doing his stuff straight away. As it is, the story has a decades long hole in the middle of it where absolutely nothing happens. You sent your “son” down to do something “important”, but not so urgent that it couldn’t wait for a few decades while the Jesus half-human-thing muddled along through a mostly unremarkable infancy, childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Act One, a few days, a birth. Act Two, literally decades of literally nothing. Act Three, a brief flurry of activity, culminating in violence and gore. Good finale, but a terrible story structure. Also wouldn’t it have been more impressive and easier for people to believe his story if he’d descended on a light beam? Or a rocket-powered unicorn?

God: You can bag the story as much as you like, Neel, but it works. Billions of people love Jesus.

KM: Even though he doesn’t exist?

God: Not important. People love Harry Potter and James Bond.

KM: Wouldn’t the world be a better place if you hadn’t made such a large proportion of people so fucking gullible?

God: If I made everybody really smart, who’d go to church?

KM: At last, a plausible answer. Night, God.

God: Night, Neel.