Illustrations by Joost Swarte
Humour
Are You There, People?
It's Me ... God
JAY MARTEL
Here’s my problem: I don’t believe in people.
To me, human beings and their world are nothing more than the product of our collective imagination, a sad manifestation of our need to feel important beyond our actual existence. I also can’t help feeling that our lives would be better if no one believed in people; only then would we be able to truly deal with our problems without nursing the delusion of a universe that’s completely dependent on us.
The bottom line is that there are no easy answers to the questions we all have about life.
Why are we here? Why are we all-seeing, all-knowing and immortal? How are we able to be everywhere at the same time?
I don’t pretend to know. I do know, however, that these questions are not made easier by believing there’s a planet of people somewhere out there who depend on us to land their planes safely.
Like most of us, I was raised by parents who believed in the existence of people. Before every meal and every bedtime, we would sit quietly, “listening” to their prayers, and every Sunday morning I was awakened early so we could all go sit on our heavenly thrones for an hour, pretending to be worshipped.
How ridiculous that all seems now!
At the time, though, I never questioned any of it. In fact, for most of my teens, I spoke to a person named Moses who I believed was completely dependent on my advice. I now realize, of course, that this was nothing more than a delusion I needed in order to break free of my cloying parents and their needs.
As I grew, persistent questions nagged at me. I asked my father: If we have ultimate power over peoples’ lives, why can’t we just make them perfect and alleviate their suffering? That way, they wouldn’t need to pray anymore, and we wouldn’t need to listen!
My father shook his head with a long-suffering look as if he’d caught me playing with his best lightning bolts. He explained to me that of course we couldn’t intervene in peoples’ lives like that, because then how would they grow and become purer souls? It’s hard to believe that I actually believed this. Absolutely crazy -- the idea that we created people just to torture them!
After rejecting my parents’ faith, I dabbled in different forms of people-belief. For a while, I believed that people became happier when they killed animals for me. Then I believed that I buried a gold tablet for people to find. I even flirted with even flakier religions, believing that the peoples’ sun wouldn’t rise in the morning if I didn’t haul it up with my chariot (I was on anti-depressants at the time).
Then, at perhaps my lowest point, I imagined that I had a son who I sent to the people to do with as they wished -- some kind of bizarre loaner, I guess.
Then I had a breakthrough: Why did the people I believed in need me so badly?
If I truly had dominion over every aspect of their lives, as I was led to believe, why were they so screwed up? I was familiar with the arguments of theologians -- that somehow peoples’ sorry existence was further proof of their need for me. But I just couldn’t buy it anymore.
Since throwing off the shackles of believing in people, it hasn’t been easy living in a culture where everyone seems to think they’ve talked to some guy in a desert. When I recently tried to get medical help for my now-senile father -- who actually believed that dead people with wings had come to live with him -- I was told that my father was “comforted” by this delusion.
When will we realize that there is nothing comforting about ignorance?
I’m frequently asked: Don’t you sometimes, late at night, at your lowest moments, wish that you were worshipped? When the chips are down, when you feel completely worthless, don’t you wish you could hear the prayers of billions of people asking you for help and comfort?
And I would not be completely truthful if I didn’t say that sometimes, I do. After all, I’m only a god.
[Courtesy: The New Yorker]
December 12, 2012