God’s Sense of Humor
Sometimes I think that whatever God is He or She is really a rather bratty teenager. A cruel one at that. If you believe the creation story you would have to wonder about a deity who would create this supposed perfect garden and yet put that stupid tree in there anyway. Why even bother with that? Sounds like one of those science experiments scientists do with rats. You know, you have one lever that shocks and one that administers a food pellet. You start to see how many times it takes for the rat to get shocked before it realizes it needs to push the other lever.
See, I began to wonder about this yesterday when I developed a pimple on the end of my nose. I know, considering the myriad of other health problems I probably have and that the world probably has, this seems like a little thing. Given the state of the world it seems very minor. Still, when you wake up and see something red right at the corner of your eye and then spend part of the morning looking cross-eyed at the end of your nose you can’t help but think of anything else. You know how those pimples are. They hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.
I thought, why would we be made in such a way that our bodies would allow pimples on the ends of our noses? Or worse, INSIDE our noses? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have our bodies built in such a way that it was impossible for pimples to form in such inconvenient places? Shouldn’t there be some part of the health class in school where the teacher points to the nose and says, “Thankfully the pores on the inside and outside of the nose generate an enzyme that destroys dirt and any excess oil that may build up. This prevents you from forming any painful blemishes.”
But no. Instead you get huge red pimples on the end of your nose. Worse, you sometimes get them on the inside of your nose. Aren’t they the worst? Feeling that pain inside your nose and then having to blow your nose or getting an itch on your nose and then you rub it and it just hurts like hell. What possible reason would there be for us to have that? Some sort of way to keep us humble? As if walking down the street and stumbling to the point of falling on your face over nothing isn’t enough to keep anyone humble. As if the very act of eliminating waste weren’t already enough of a humbling experience. As if getting a treatment for just about anything by most doctors isn’t enough to keep us humble.
Of course there has been the questions for millennia as to why bad things happen to good people. There has never been an explanation for that. Simply saying that God Works in Mysterious Ways hardly covers it. Basically when someone says that they are shrugging and saying, “I’ll be damned if I know.” I would rather someone just say that than try to offer some kind of supernatural, mystical explanation.
Why make man the way he has been made? Was it all just an accident? I have a hard time believing it was all an accident. Scientists think that evolutionarily speaking the chances of us developing the way we have were so infinitesimally small that it is unlikely to have happened again anywhere else in the universe. If our planet titled a few degrees more one way or another it would not have happened. If things had not gone exactly right temperature-wise on this planet, we would not have happened. If the dinosaurs had not died out then mammals would not have happened the way they did. So, it seems to me that people who believe in God would love to find life on other planets. Since it is such a remote chance that it even happened here, finding life somewhere else would seem to indicate a definite intelligence at work. Yet most Christians choose to believe that there is only us. As someone once said, that seems like an awful waste of space.
It seems to me that if God is really controlling our every move then he has a very sick sense of humor. Kind of like holding a magnifying glass over and ant, really. He likes to kick down the ant hills too. He likes to pour water over them and watch the ants scurry around and then try to rebuild so he can kick it down again. I don’t understand a deity that would want to do all of that.
So, did God help create us and then send us on our way? I don’t know. As I stated, I am still not here to say I know exactly what God is or how to describe Him, Her or It. I am just saying there are some pretty strange things going on around this planet that no one really has any explanation for. I guess that’s why people have to believe in a God or god in the first place. Our natural tendency is to try and work out patterns in chaos. This is why people see faces in toast, I believe.
In the meantime, I have this nasty red thing on the end of my nose. It hurts like hell, plus it’s right on the end of my damn nose. I feel like I have a stop sign attached to the end of my face.
If there is a God and I am ever allowed to speak to Him or Her or It, I will have a lot of questions to ask him. What’s the deal with zits on the end of my nose? I will ask.
Hey, He might say, I did help you invent moisturizers and skin cleansers.
