We need to talk about God. He’s becoming a bit of a problem.

The Church of England is in a crisis. Again. This time its falling numbers. While you can’t get a season ticket for the Emirates without a 20 year wait, you can join any church in the land today, at no charge. Because they’re all empty. And not only that people aren’t going to church any longer, most people in England don’t even classify themselves as ‘Christian’ any more. They’re just ‘people’.

The problem is that we don’t really need God any more. We have smart phones instead. And computers, we have the O2 Arena, we have the British Museum, cars, air travel, bars, restaurants, flat-screen HD tvs and everything. Why do we need God?

Gods (plural) came about to explain everything that we didn’t understand. A thunderstorm? The gods are angry. An earthquake? Now they’re really pissed off. Four sheep die? You didn’t pray hard enough. The gods were the scapegoats, in a way. They were the causes for all the shit that happened ‘back in the day’.

Then the Jews invented monotheism. One God does all. A kind of Tesco Superstore of gods. And someone wrote the bible. Which instead of just writing down an ethical code of conduct, chose to represent that code in a (very long and protracted) allegorical tale. Moses came down with the stone tablets just to copy Ed Miliband.

But then tragedy occurred. Enlightenment. Along came Galileo and da Vinci and Isaac Newton and they started to explain stuff. Like the world, and how it worked. On a natural, physical level. Using the maths started by the Greeks. The Ancient ones who back then knew that if you spend 874 billion Euros and only earn 263, the Germans will get pissed off, even if the gods don’t. Stuff the modern Greeks seem to have lost.

Then came Faraday and Darwin and Einstein and they were all game-changers. They took the power from God. How dare they. They explained things in the way of a BBC weather girl; this is what’s happening, and this is why.

The religions realised that understanding posed a massive threat to their power. Which is why, rather than embrace man’s wonderful new knowledge, they repressed it. “The world is round?? How dare you? God made it flat, so flat it is, as everyone can see. Lock that man up for 20 years as a heretic”.

Yet God, according to all doctrines, is ‘omnipotent and omniscient’; he sees all and can do anything. But instead sits round all day watching cricket and eating cornflakes out of the box. Because He doesn’t actually ‘do’ anything. People pray like mad (in so many ways) and yet genocide happens, murder, plagues, FIFA, death, destruction. Ahhh, but that’s because He gave us free will. Or ‘enough rope to hang ourselves’ as its now known.

So forgetting the question of why anyone would bother praying to someone/thing that never does anything, as a matter of principle, we live in a post-technological world where everything is known. How it started, how it works, the stars, the planets, a tea-cup, Shroedinger’s Cat, everything. Except death. The one remaining mystery. The great unknown. The last God.

I’m happy with church-goers, with religious types, and I’m happy for them, because they get comfort from telling God how wonderful He is 200 times a day (He might be a bit lazy but I don’t think he’s so vain and narcissistic that he needs that, really). They choose to put God as the final cause, as what makes it all happen. That’s their choice. The world is either just like it is because that’s the way it is, or you can say its because God chose it to be so. All that does is add another level of unknown. To my mind. It doesn’t answer a question, it just asks another.

But heh, what do I know? To me religion means chopped liver and bagels. And I’m a deeply religious man.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx