Archangel Michael went to God and said:
“There is a fellow down there, I find him terribly annoying…He is an atheist.”
God said: “Why is that bothering you so much now, Michael? We always had atheists. Just let him be as we always have.”
“I know. I too have nothing against atheists…Well, not much…It’s just that this one is a nasty piece of work, real nasty. You should hear the things that come out of his mouth…He reminds me of that detestable fellow we once had… The Russian Guy… What was his name?”
“How should I know? There have been so many Russian atheists, I’ve lost count.”
“That man was bad news too…from St. Petersburg.”
“You mean Leningrad?”
“No St. Petersburg. There isn’t a place called Leningrad anymore.”
“It used to be St Petersburg and then it became Leningrad.”
“Now it is back to St Petersburg.”
“Thats appropriate but still alarming. What is wrong with these people? Same city and they keep changing its name! Same rivers change their names from country to country. Do you suppose they do it on purpose? To confuse me?”
“I don’t know…But this detestable fellow was from St. Petersburg, and he used to say that even if it was proven to him that God existed, he would still repudiate it and do so with even more vengeance.”
“You mean that madman who raved on and on about ‘…. for as long as there is one sick child…’ and so forth? I remember him, Ivan. Tall, skinny, deluded. What sort of reasoning is that? I mean how can I argue against such irrationality. The more I prove myself to exist the less he believes in me. He was full of shit. Tell me Michael, did we punish him sufficiently?”
“Oh yes…. Lucifer took care of him. We gave him some nasty nightmares. Drenched him in fear and cold sweat night after night.
But regretfully when someone is so fixated there is not much we can do…He just had a miserable life. That was his punishment.”
“Good, good, well done! I liked his father though…He was delightfully immoral, conceited and just sufficiently religious”.
“Yes, my Lord, and he got what he deserved. He had a good life.”
“No doubt…I liked the older brother too. I have a soft spot for people with faults. I much prefer people with troubled hearts to people with troubled minds. We don’t unnecessarily punish them, do we? But I could not stand the youngest brother. Remember him? Goodie, goodie, nobody! What a loser. He made me sick. He brought vomit to my testicles. I suppose they are all dead by now.”
“Indeed, long gone…But this fellow we have now is worse than Ivan”
“How so?”
“Well, he claims that he is hundred percent certain there is no God. We tolerate atheists, you even sympathise with some of them; although we differ a little on this point, I appreciate you being God and all that need to keep an open mind, but this man does not deserve any sympathy. He is constantly showing off at our expense. Constantly bragging.”
“Hundred percent certain! What insolence! Who does he think he is? That’s incredible. How can a human being have such certainty? It’s just foolish. Even I am not 100 percent certain that I exist, how can he be 100 percent certain that I don’t. He should at least say 99 percent or 99.9999 percent. You are right…He must be punished.”
“Well, I have tried. Nothing seems to work.”
“Just figure out what he wants most in life. Give it to him. Then take it back. If it doesn’t work repeat. Every human has a breaking point. That’s how I designed them.”
“We’ve done that. He believes it was all an accident.”
“If that’s what he thinks we’ll give him a real accident that will put him into his place. But gently; tricky-trickly-tricky. A gentle accident to shuffle cells is often more effective than a wholescale one. We’ll be ‘humanistic’ with him. Oh, how I adore that word! Lately, I must say, I prefer humanists to the rest of them. I am bored with religions. Muslims are backward. They plagiarised everybody else’s book and now they won’t make any changes to it. I am bored with it myself. Hindus should be paraded at carnivals. Jews still harp on about being chosen, well, yes once I made a mistake but that was centuries ago. I had to appease their ego, after all they kindly got rid of my entire competition. Christians, I don’t even take them seriously, they are the most prolific liars the world has ever seen, Oh my God!… So much bullshit! And Buddhists; they never know what they want, they just sit on the fence… So, you see Michael, after all atheists are not too bad…”
“It may be so, My Lord, but trust me this guy is really over the top.”
“Have you tried a miracle? That usually confuses them…”
“Not in this case because he has a different name for miracles. He calls them singularities.”
“What’s that?”
“Something that just happens once.”
“Isn’t that a miracle?”
“No, it seems not. He claims that the big bang was a singularity. He seems to think that once an event has occurred it is no longer miraculous.”
“But that is ridiculous. Where do they get these ideas from? It means miracles can only happen for as long as they don’t happen. That is not even logical. I created Man in my own image and look how irrational they have become. Entropy!”
“It gets worse, My Lord. Then he says that a singularity which repeats itself becomes a regularity. And regularities can be explained by Laws of Nature.”
“What laws of nature? They are just some imaginings of some deficient species on earth. After all what they perceive is only through the senses I have given them, and I know for a fact that they are far from perfect…Actually, just between you and I, they are pretty inadequate.”
“Apparently laws of nature are independent of senses.”
“Nonsense…. What is this ‘laws of nature’ anyway?”
“I think it’s a bit like what we used to call the Modus Operandi”
“That’s right. It means nothing. All it says that things are the way they are because that’s the way they are.”
“I know but this guy is really stubborn.”
“Did you send Lucifer to teach him a lesson? Tell him to do a Job on him! Let’s make him sick and then make him better again. That has worked in the past. Give him boils, ulcers, make him go blind, let puss ooze from his eye sockets, give him syphilis, typhus, buboes on his neck, let him beg…. and then we may reconsider…”
“It is too risky. Because from what I know of him he would not go along with it”
“What would he do?”
‘He will hang himself from a tree in Alexander Garden in St. Petersburg. He is very vain; he believes in free will.’
“Free will, shmokville! This guy has lost all his marbles. Even I don’t have free will. Do you think I have a choice to be anything else but God?
Have you tried giving him a near death experience? That might teach him some humility and even gratitude perhaps.”
“We tried that too my lord. It didn’t work. He came out more arrogant than before. He called it hallucinations caused by a neurological malfunction….”
“Did you take him up to see the 72 virgins?”
“Yes, we did my Lord; he called them blow up dolls! He had an explanation for everything. Even when he did not have an explanation, he had an explanation as to why he did not have an explanation.”
“You can’t win, can you…. I mean if someone can’t even appreciate the Garden of Eden with 72 virgins, what can we do? I pity any human being who puts common sense before pleasure! Waste of my breath.
Did you try appeasing his ego? Like, make him think he is the prophet or something. Remember all the prophets once used to be non-believers but once they got a taste for it, they really wallowed in their self-importance.”
“Yes, that too, My Lord. Lucifer whispered a few suggestive words like ‘you are my messenger…etc… etc’ but he completely ignored him. Didn’t even bother to see a psychiatrist.”
“Lucifer has many ways. He always told me that the most vulnerable and gullible of all people are the atheists. And they make good sport. I am surprised he hasn’t found a way yet.”
“We think there is only one way, My Lord. We must hit him at the foundations of his materialistic thought system. The whole edifice –if you may call it that- relies on the cause-and-effect chain functioning like clockwork. If we could alter the cause-and-effect chain, even for a few seconds…”
“For God’s sake just give him a book on Quantum Mechanics”
“We did- He said humbug!”
“Humbug! What is that?”
“Not sure, My Lord, heard it before but I don’t know what it means exactly. He basically said he was only interested in things of his own size and mass…. all else had no bearing on his life here and now.”
“How disgusting…. how Homocentric….”
“He also asked me to invite you to a game of Two-Up!”
“Tell him to get fucked.”
“I say we hit him at the nuts-and-bolts level, in the here and now, stab him in the heart of the machine…. We tried everything else and that’s why I have come to you with this case.”
“Well then,” said God, “I give you permission to change cause and effect, briefly, just enough to jolt him so he learns some humility and starts wavering towards the agnostic.”
“I don’t know how to do it” confessed Archangel Michael, “It requires fiddling with laws of nature.”
“Oh! That’s hard! I am afraid I can’t do that. It sounds like we need a singularity,” said God with a deep sigh. “What is this guy doing right now? I mean now, now?? I don’t mean exactly now now now but in his now.”
“He is now now now, in his now, writing this dialogue between us.”
“Well then doesn’t that prove to him that I exist? Why is he writing it if we don’t exist? Go and ask him why he is writing?”
“I already did, My Lord”
“And what did he say?”
“He said to pass the time and amuse his 2000 followers on Facebook.”
