God’s Judgement Day

God’s Christian soldiers love banging on about Judgement Day. The day we die. The day God will judge us. The judgement we are supposed to fear so much that we willingly give money to charlatans who claim to be God’s representatives.

It seems a little one-sided. Perhaps we should consider judging God. There’s no point in waiting until God’s Judgement Day, because then we’ll be dead. So we’d better get on with it.

Like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, God’s Judgement Day is ambiguous. It can mean the day that God does the judging, or the day that God is judged. Using the second meaning for God’s Judgement Day, how should we judge God? What would be suitable criteria for God’s Judgement Day? Well, he would presumably judge us according to his rules as written in his big black book, so let’s start there.

The most important of God’s rules must surely be his Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are not only what God considers to be the most important rules for humans to live by, they’re also a definitive statement of God’s most fervent desires for himself.

When judged according to his own Ten Commandments, the God of the Bible is an abject failure.

Here’s why.

God’s first commandment, his number one desire, was for him to be the one god, the only god. That hasn’t happened. In addition to the millions of people who don’t worship any god, there are many millions more who have worshipped thousands of different gods over the last few centuries. Gods come and go like fashion trends. Gods are not even uncommon, let alone unique. So that’s a fail.

The second commandment was that no images were to be created. The worship of godly symbols or likenesses was forbidden. That also hasn’t happened. Millions of people who pray to God flout that rule every day by worshipping painted and sculpted images of Jesus in his death throes. Very tasteful. Another fail.

His third wish was to enforce blasphemy laws that would punish those who took his name in vain. Hashtag OMG. Hashtag JFC. So once again, it hasn’t happened. Expletives utilising heavenly creatures are as common as those involving body parts and bodily functions. Blasphemy rules are sometimes enforced in those barbaric places where women are also stoned to death in the name of “honour” and for other imagined sins. But judging the morality and ethics of God’s rules is not primarily what this piece is about. Moving on. Fail.

God’s fourth most important desire was for everybody to keep one day aside purely for worshipping him. Unsurprisingly, that hasn’t happened either. Even in devout Christian communities the worship generally lasts for an hour or perhaps two, then they get on with sport, shopping, gardening and odd jobs. That is if they themselves don’t have to go to work in a mall, sports bar or garden supplies outlet. God’s desired day of rest and praise is mostly ignored.

His fifth demand was for people to honour their parents. The only places where that one gets enforced are the same places where people get stoned to death. Reasonable people don’t need this rule at all. Good parents are not merely honoured by their children, they’re loved. This rule would only need to be enforced when children had been maltreated or abused in some way. Sold as sex slaves perhaps. Hell of a rule. Yet another fail.

On the second stone tablet, God commanded humans not to kill, steal, commit adultery, bear false witness or covet other people’s stuff. Definitely an ethical improvement over tablet one, but given the subject matter and accuracy of most news stories and the prevalence of gossip, the last five commandments are also widely and routinely ignored.

Any child who’s suffered the indignity of having other children ignore the rules of a game they’re trying to create would understand God’s frustration and rage, and an extinction event would be a characteristic response.

Once upon a time God supposedly drowned every human on the planet, except for Noah and family, because they weren’t behaving in a way that pleased him. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive consensus on the dates of events in the Old Testament but it was perhaps a thousand years or so after the great drowning that God gave the tablets to Moses. That was possibly one or two thousand years before the nailing of the Jesus.

To recap, the deliberately vague chronological storyline is that God created man, dabbled with his experiment for one or two thousand years, got snarky, drowned everybody, dabbled some more for another thousand or so years, produced his ten commandments, and has, ever since, watched over a planet where his wishes are pissed all over every single day. And he hasn’t done a damn thing about it for at least three and a half thousand years. Unless you count the alleged stunt in which he pretended that Jesus died, but only the blindly faithful could rate that as a success, given that the point of the trick was to save the world.

In fact, in the time since the big man failed in his final, lame attempt to rid the world of sin through his only begotten, death-defying, miracle baby, the omnipotence has been impotent, the omniscience has been indistinguishable from blindness, and the omnipresent one has failed to appear in the background of any selfies. Or anywhere else.

So there it is. God’s Judgement Day.

Overall impression? When judged with respect to his own Ten Commandments, God is an impotent loser.

Out of ten? Zero.

An absolute failure.

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