Saturday, February 19, 2011

God and His Ant Farm

The Christian God is supposed to be an absolutely supreme being. He knows everything that can be known and can do anything that can be done. Doesn't it seem odd, then, that he would waste his time with us? Christians often express awe at this idea, but then take it no further, never bothering to question why this should be the case. But think about this scenario from God's point of view. Here is this unfathomably complex and intelligent being, who could literally do whatever he wants. Yet he's just so incredibly, ridiculously interested in what from his perspective would be creatures no more clever or significant than ants in an ant farm.

God's fixation on this ant farm of his teeters on the brink of creepy, then plunges right in. Just look at the Old Testament: he's obsessed with even the tiniest minutiae in the lives of his pets. When there are too many "evil" ants, he floods the entire farm with water, drowning all the ants except a few, which he places back into the farm once it dries again. He becomes enraged when one ant mates with another of the same gender. Oh, and did you just give birth to larvae? Got damaged ant genitals? "Ritually unclean" in any other way? Well then you can just forget about coming into the presence of the Almighty, you disgusting little ant you.

Then later on, in the New Testament, he announces he wants to establish a relationship with each and every ant in the farm. He carefully crafts a tiny ant "avatar" and uses it to try and teach the other ants. After the ant avatar's death and resurrection, he promises to one day return and judge the whole farm. Those who believe in the ant-God will be put in a new farm with lots of yummy fruit and get to worship him forever and ever. Those who don't will suffer for all eternity under the burning sunlight refracted from a magnifying glass.

I hope this has illustrated the absurdity of an all-knowing, all-powerful God being as consumed with our every behavioral quirk as the Bible claims him to be, but here's one more idea to complete the image. In the Bible God claims to be the only one of his kind, but hey, for all we know he's just trying to make himself seem more important. Sometimes I imagine God as just one of a great many "supreme" beings. The rest of these beings go about their daily lives much as we do, and they look on our "God" much as we would look on an emotionally stunted man obsessed with his ant farm: with a combination of revulsion and pity. But hey, at least he has his ants to worship him, right?

2 comments:

  1. Great perspective, especially at the end, concerning multiple other gods (never considered that possibility before). I do not believe in any god, myself. But if a god exists, surely there would be better things to do than concentrate 24/7/365 on a little pale blue dot in the middle of nowhere inside an unimaginably vast universe?

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