Bizarre Fables About Stupid Choices Read online

CHAPTER TWO

  AN ORPHAN'S EFFORT TO PROVE

  THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST

  There once was an orphan raised in a church school which taught him that God never smiled and that he liked to punish little boys who didn’t do what they were told. The boy often lay in bed at night, wondering what had happened to God’s smile muscles, and imagining God sitting on a golden throne thinking up cruel and horrible punishments to use on people. He would then fall asleep and dream about smiley faces rushing around with sticks of dynamite and steaming plates of broccoli that they would hand to bad people.

  When the boy grew up, he was surprised to see that there seemed to be lots of people doing bad things all over the place. They would lie, cheat, steal, be promiscuous, and then sit around and brag about it all. Strangely enough, God didn’t seem to punish them for some reason. In fact, some of them seemed to profit quite a bit by it, and to have more luxurious and comfortable lives because of their bad behavior. After a time of observing this odd phenomenon, the man finally concluded that what he had been taught in school was false, and that there must be no God.

  However, when he shared his new belief with others, he found that many disagreed with him. “Prove it!” the God-believers would say with a sneer. Then they would warn that he was going to hell if he continued to disbelieve in God, and that he would be punished forever in the burning fires down there that never stopped.

  This just made the man mad. So, he decided one day that his mission in life would be to prove that God does not exist.

  The first thing he did was to take out a full page ad in the newspaper that said simply, “God does not exist because he has never been seen.” The day the ad came out, the man’s phone started to ring off the hook. Many callers swore at him, while others threatened to come beat him up, and a few said they felt sorry for him because he was going to hell.

  Then he started to get hate mail. There was the usual death threats and condolences that he was going to hell, and one from a minister that said he was damned and would burn through all eternity. But there was one letter that actually made the man worried. It read as follows:

  I’m just a simple garbage collector, so I don’t know much. But I read in my Bible that Adam and Isaiah and Stephen all saw God, and a whole bunch of people saw God’s son Jesus Christ when he lived on the earth.

  The man hadn’t known this and was very disturbed. Naturally he believed that Adam, Isaiah and Stephen were all deranged liars, but how could he prove it? Upon careful reflection he decided he would have to modify his claim to say that no one had seen God today, and past ages didn’t count since you couldn’t question the people who claim to have seen him then, to see if they were lying. He decided to visit the garbage collector who had sent the letter to tell him this.

  But his meeting did not go quite as planned. Of course the man started off by saying to the garbage collector, “No one has seen him today, have they? You can’t believe what you can’t see!”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said the garbage collector, scratching his scraggly beard. “I believe in the wind, and I haven’t seen it.”

  “But you can see the wind moving in the trees!” the man replied.

  “I can see the trees moving, but not the wind that’s moving them,” said the garbage collector.

  “Well, we’re not talking about the wind,” said the man in frustration. “We’re talking about God. Have you seen him?”

  “Sort of,” replied the garbage collector. “When I pray, I picture God in my mind, smiling at me.”

  The man was taken aback at this, since he had thought that God never smiled. But he didn’t let this stop him. “That’s not seeing him,” countered the man. “That’s just your imagination.”

  “I suppose,” agreed the garbage collector. “But I feel him when I pray, just like I can feel the wind. I feel peace and happiness that I know is coming from somewhere outside me.”

  “Hogwash!” cried the man, who then left in a huff, slamming the door behind him (even though it was the front door of the garbage collector’s house, which he had no right to slam).

  The man was confident he had disproved the garbage collector. However, he was still disturbed at the claim that God’s presence could be felt during prayer. Then he struck on a brilliant idea. Why not pray to God and ask him to reveal himself? Naturally God wouldn’t do it, and that would prove he didn’t exist!

  As soon as he got home the man offered a simple prayer: “God, you’ve got until tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. to prove to me that you exist.” Then he ordered pizza and sat down to watch the news.

  The man was pleased (and not at all surprised) that there was no immediate answer to his prayer. There was no burning bush, voice from on high, or anything.

  Because his pizza was salty, the man decided to go to the shop for some soda. On his way to his car he noticed there was an amazing sunset. It was one of those sunsets where the clouds are all orange and pink and fuzzy—the kind that takes your breath away.

  While driving to the shop, a crazy driver swerved in front of the man, and by amazing good luck, the man somehow avoided an accident.

  Right after he went to bed that night there was an earthquake that shook the man’s whole house. Luckily, there was no damage, and he wasn’t hurt in any way.

  The next morning at 9:00 since the prayer had not been answered, the man gleefully took out a radio ad to broadcast to the world that God didn’t exist because he didn’t answer prayers. Naturally he again started receiving lots of hate mail, death threats, and condolences about how he was going to hell. He felt happy, of course, knowing that he was fulfilling his life’s goal.

  However, his happiness was not to last. One day he had a visit from an old friend (one of the few he had left), who was an attorney. After the usual exchange of pleasantries, the attorney said, “I hate to break it to you, but the prayer attempt you advertised on the radio was a total flop.”

  “What!” cried the man in shock. “Why is that?”

  “No judge in the world would accept evidence like that, where a party created his own test to prove something on his own terms. It’s like a return to the dark ages when an accused person was ‘proven’ innocent only by surviving an ordeal, like being dunked underwater for 15 minutes.”

  “Blast it!” cried our hero in despair. “And I thought my prayer idea was scientific.”

  “Not at all,” replied the attorney. “Of course scientific evidence is different from courtroom evidence, but as far as that goes, you didn’t even come close to following the scientific method of proof either. No scientist could hope to prove his own theory by a single, arbitrary test like yours.”

  “What am I to do?” cried the man in despair. “It’s my life’s goal to prove God doesn’t exist, and so far I’ve failed.”

  “Your problem is that you’ve assumed what we attorneys call ‘the burden of proof,’” replied the attorney. “You’re trying to prove a negative, and that’s not easy. You need to shift the burden of proof from yourself to all the believers in God, and make them prove that he exists and that you’re wrong, not the other way around. That will get them all defensive and scrambling while you just sit back and watch.”

  “That sounds like a good idea,” said the man thoughtfully. “But how do I get started?”

  “You need to do like us attorneys,” his friend replied. “Ruin your opponents by using their own arguments.”

  “What do you mean?” the man asked curiously.

  “It’s simple,” said the attorney. “Get into the details. How do most churches define God? Isn’t it as some amorphous, unknowable being who has no shape, size or substance? That’s a perfect description of hot air, or of the word ‘nothing!’ Just simply say that the definition of God that everybody goes by is childish and an obvious fantasy, and you’ve done your job. Then they’ll all scramble to prove that you’re wrong.”

  “Fantastic!” cried the man
excitedly. “Why didn’t I think of it before?” But then he looked at his friend sharply. “But what about churches that define God as a believable being instead of a gaseous ball of nothing?”

  “There’s only one of those that I know of,” laughed his friend. “All you have to do is just pretend that they’re a non-Christian cult to get them all defensive, self-conscious and flustered. Then after that, just ignore them.”

  “Wonderful!” cried the man excitedly. “I’ll do it!”

  “But you can’t stop there,” his attorney friend warned. “You’ve got to replace the fantasy ‘God’ the churches have created with something more rational and believable than what they have to offer. The theory of evolution and the ‘big bang’ creation of the universe is just the thing. Those theories have the appearance of explaining everything.”

  “Beautiful!” cried the man, vigorously shaking the hand of his friend. “I’m going to start right away!”

  This time the man had much greater success. In no time at all he had angered an amazing number of ministers into proclaiming that he was the devil incarnate for questioning their definition of God. But many of their church members agreed with him that it simply wasn’t rational to believe in a God that paled in comparison to the weirdest aliens created by Hollywood writers of science fiction movies. He soon had a large following, and started holding his own anti-God revival meetings on TV, in which he preached evolution and the big bang as the only creators.

  But sadly for the man, there were still some who did not believe him. One chief example was his old nemesis, the garbage collector. When the man cockily went to the garbage collector’s house one day and confronted him with his new argument, the garbage man simply scratched his head, and said, “The God I believe in and picture in my mind looks just like you or me. Except he looks more glorious, and he’s almost always smiling. That’s what I’ve always believed, regardless of what any church says.”

  When the man countered with the theory of evolution, the garbage collector just commented that in his business, he had often seen garbage deteriorate and evolve into something lower than itself, but never into something higher, like an ape evolving into a man. No matter what the man said or how many arguments he used, he couldn’t seem to shake the garbage collector from this simple belief. In frustration, he went to see his friend the attorney, to get his advice on what to do about such unreasonable people.

  “That’s easy!” said the attorney with a laugh. “Just ask them how there can be a God who allows the terrible things to happen that are going on in the world today. If he was really such a smiling, loving being, he wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Great idea!” said the man, turning to leave.

  “But wait,” said his attorney friend. “That argument will convince many, but you should be prepared for some who will say that God allows such things because he gave men freedom to chose, and he can’t take away that freedom. It’s the old Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil thing. After they ate the fruit, they had the knowledge, but needed some time to use that knowledge in making choices.”

  “Isn’t there a way to overcome that argument?” asked the man.

  “Simple logic,” replied the attorney. “First ask if they believe God is perfect and therefore knows everything. When they say yes, then ask if God knows the future. When they say yes, then you’ve got them. Just ask how he can know the future if everybody has the absolute freedom to chose? His knowledge of future events means they don’t really have free choice after all. There are some excellent writings by philosophers on this. At the very least, this argument should confuse and create doubt enough to pull off lots more of the God-believers from their silly notions.”

  And so, that is exactly what the man did. His new arguments greatly increased his flock of followers, and made the ministers so frenzied that many of them started driving by his house every day to throw eggs at his front window. This only made the man happier, of course, since he knew he was succeeding at his goal. (It also made those in the egg industry happy as well)

  In the spirit of carefree gloating, the man once more visited the garbage collector. But once again, things did not quite go as he had planned. The garbage collector wasn’t swayed by any of the man’s unbeatable, logical arguments. He wasn’t troubled at all about God’s knowing the future. As far as he saw it, God wasn't subject to time like men are. He couldn't see how God’s knowledge of future events somehow took away men’s choices, since God and men were separate beings who thought and acted independently. As a comparison, his own personal knowledge of garbage didn’t alter the fact that people kept choosing to produce it. Then, after a few minutes, the garbage collector said one of the most horrifying things our hero had ever heard.

  “You know,” said the garbage collector while thoughtfully scratching his beard, “I think you and I believe mostly the same thing. Neither of us believes in a God who doesn’t smile or is mean or enjoys punishing people. Neither of us believes in a God who is described as some big, gaseous, impossible-to-understand being.”

  The man was so appalled by this statement that he spluttered incoherently (spitting saliva all over) for a full two minutes before he said, “You’re crazy! We don’t believe at all alike! You believe in prayer and I don’t!”

  The garbage collector smiled. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said amiably. I’d just say we both learned by experience that God answers prayers HIS way, not ours.”

  By now, our hero’s face had turned purple, and the blood vessels on his neck stood out so much they looked like garden hoses. Not being able to tolerate the conversation any longer, he fled.

  Yet what the garbage collector had said hung in his mind like a fish hook onto his clothes. The garbage collector didn’t believe in God either! At least not the God most everybody else believed in, which was a gaseous, unknown and unknowable being. In fact, the more the man thought, the more he realized that the garbage collector was right! The two of them were indeed a lot alike in their beliefs. Both of them rejected the common perception of God. It was only what they did after this rejection that differed. The garbage collector had responded with faith in a loving, believable God, while he had responded with disbelief.

  This realization was simply too much for the man. He completely gave up his goal of proving there was no God, and drove all thoughts of God from his mind forever. He became a food taster at a cheese factory, and spent his spare time counting the number of blades of grass in the city park (1,697,204,511 blades).

  MORALS:

  1 Since you can’t prove a negative by being positive, it’s better to adopt ignorance as your standard and remain blissfully neutral regarding the big questions in life.

  2 It is at least as likely that man created the idea of a gaseous God who doesn’t smile (because he apparently has no lips) than that such a being created man.

  3 Since the definition of God used by the religion of non religion is no different than that of many religions, both groups may be identified as ‘Christian atheists.’