What if God is not who we think He is?
God knows!

by Achinette Joy Villamor

What if the devil had written all the books?

Then maybe we would see God in a totally different light. But because the devil kept his counsel to himself, what we have is a concept of the traditional God, the God who rewards those who are good and punishes those who have been wicked with floods, and plagues, and angels of death. What we have is a banker God who keeps tally of the universal good and bad, like debits and credits charged to our names by a God as convenient as instant noodles.

But what if all these notions of God are but figments of our pre-programmed religious education? What if these concepts of God are nothing more than the twisted, lie-ridden legacies of our Spanish conquerors? What if, in truth, God was an old, cantankerous deity, no different from Greek mythology’s old, philandering Zeus, him of the multiple wives and just as multiple children? What if God was actually a deity with as infinite capacity for rage, pride, unkindness, bigotry, and temper tantrums as his beloved children?

In his book God Knows, Joseph Heller explored the infinite possibility of an eccentric, all-too-human God who played pingpong with Adam and his descendants. And his novel is truly as its jacket promised it would be. It’s an ancient story, a modern story, a love story. It’s a story about growing up and about growing old, about husbands and wives, about fathers and sons, about man and God. It’s a novel of emotional force, imaginative richness, and unbridled comic invention. It’s hilarious. It’s profound. Above all, it brings home a certain point. Since no one who has ever talked with Him is alive today, did we really peg our concept of God rightly? And is how we see Him now really how He is?

Heller thinks differently.

“Whoever said I was supposed to be nice?” challenged God. “Where is it written that I have to be kind?”
“Aren’t You a good God?”
“Where does it say that I have to be good? Isn’t it enough that I’m God? Don’t waste your time daydreaming. I ordered Abraham to be circumcised when he was already a grown man. Was that the act of someone kind?”

But really, Heller does have a point. Is it a kind God who would order the circumcision of a grown man? Is it a kind God who would order a meek man of forty, with a bad case of stammering, to go take on the pharaoh’s army and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? And is it a kind God who would harden the pharaoh’s heart, at the expense of the hapless Israelites, just so He could demonstrate that His powers are greater than all of the pharaoh’s magicians and gods?

“Why should we love and worship you?” Moses asked.
“I’m GOD. I AM THAT I AM.”
“I AM THAT I AM?”
“I AM THAT I AM,” repeated God. “And from the Pharaoh, I charge you to get permission to journey into the wilderness for three days to make sacrifices to Me. Tell him to let your people go.”
“It won’t work,” insisted Moses in a voice laden with doom. “They’ll never believe me.” The children of Israel believed, and boy--- were they sorry. To some, the petition for three days in the wilderness might have seemed a legitimate request but to the Pharaoh, it was proof that the Jews had spare time and were entertaining foolish ideas. “Ye are idle, ye are idle,” the Pharaoh reproved them. “That’s why you have time for sacrifices. Let more work be laid upon the men.”
“We are worse off than before,” groaned the children of Israel beneath the increased workload and the beatings. Moses, in bafflement, returned to the Lord to complain. “Why are You being so evil to the people?”
“I am hardening the Pharaoh’s heart.”
“Again You’re hardening his heart? Why must his heart be so hard?”
“To allow me to demonstrate powers that are greater than those of all his magicians and of all other gods. And to impress upon the world forever that you are the people I have chosen as favorites.”
“Will that make much difference?”
“No difference at all.”
“Then where is the sense?”
“Whoever said I was going to make sense?” answered God. “Show me where it says I have to make sense. I never promised sense. Sense, he wants yet. I’ll give milk, I’ll give honey. Not sense. Oh Moses, Moses, why talk of sense? Your name is Greek and there hasn’t been a Greece yet. And you want sense. If you want to have sense, you can’t have religion.”
“But we don’t have religion.”
“I’ll give you religion,” God said.

And Heller’s God did invent religion, one where His people bowed and scraped before Him and offered Him their lambs, their sheeps, their harvests, and even their daughters as sacrifices, one where his prophets spoke with Delphic disorganization, where kings and their wives and their concubines plotted against and assassinated each other. Heller’s God also gave the Jews, along with their promised land, such a complicated set of dietary laws. In Egypt, the Jews got the fat of the land. In Leviticus, He prohibited them from eating it. To the goyim He gave bacon, sweet pork, juicy sirloin, and rare prime ribs of beef. To the Jews, He gave a pastrami. It was a perpetual motion of ‘what He gaveth with one hand, He taketh with the other’ only Heller’s God was a naughty one. And He did his mischief with style. ‘Thou shalt not take another’s life” and yet He took David’s firstborn with Bathsheba. Some would call it poetic justice. “The punishment of the sinful,” the old bearded Nathan croaked. David, though, had another name for it. He called it pettiness.

It was indeed a religion as complex and as muddled as His reasons for hardening the Pharaoh’s heart. But it was His religion, and the world was at peace with it. And so civilizations rose, and civilizations fell, and God remained, among men, a deity so elusive and powerful we could only write about Him, never interview Him, or have Him over for dinner.

So how is Heller’s book relevant to us as Carolinians? Just this: God’s ways are not our ways. And His designs are far too big and complicated for us mere mortals to understand. Just like the school administration’s ways are not our ways and their designs are far too big and too ambiguous for us to appreciate, or understand. But is this so, really? Or just another Spanish legacy of unquestioning over-obedience? The same unquestioning over-obedience that the university expects of its students. And the same unwavering faith that the university expects us to exhibit that everything the “almighty SAS” does is “good for us.” Our faith is truly more corrupted than we could ever believe possible.

Athiests would argue that there is no God, that we invented him because we needed him. “If there was no God, it would be necessary to invent him,” wise, mad Voltaire wrote. Could it be possible that the good, kind God we know of today was simply an invention of a distraught, divided human race? Or if He did exist, is it possible that He was, as Heller suspected, a God who plays pingpong with the human race? And within that realm of supposition, could it be just as possible that the “goodness and infallibility” of established authorities, our university authorities for one, is nothing more than another ideological invention of a primitive society in dire need of order? Could it be that, like Heller’s God, they too play pingpong with the rest of us?

God knows.

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