Dear Atheist Foundation of Australia…

Where Women Glow and Men Chunder

Dear Chosen Ozians,

  Are you trying to make the Baby Jesii cry?  If you go through with your planned… er… plan of Divine Denial of Service, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.  I know you mean to put Me, personally, offline because of something one of My brand-loyalists did to you, which I can understand.  Believe Me, I know what it’s like to attack someone for something someone else did.  Been there; done that; designed the t-shirt.

  However, I’m not sure you understand how this prayer thing works.  That’s understandable, as you tend to think along the lines of reality-based actions, whereas My brand-loyalists fully grasp the ways of the meta-natural, super-physicality that is My domain.  It’s ineffable.  You wouldn’t get it.  My old pal Cthulhu’s minion, PZ Myers, almost has it right.

“[A]ll modern prayers are first funneled through a 110 baud modem, then passed further upstairs by telegraph, then pony express riders gallop it over to the Pearly Gates, and then a rewritten version is passed on to a team of long-dead Sumerian scribes for transcription into cuneiform on wax plates, and then and only then is it in a format that a bronze age patriarchal deity can understand.”

  But, the crucial bit of the chain he is missing is that those wax plates are then stored in a warehouse complex outside of Santa Fe, NM for safekeeping. I never actually look at them.  To be honest, I got a C- in Cuneiform in school.  If it hadn’t been for cheating off of Enki, I probably would have failed the class.   The only prayers that I actually receive are those which are handwritten on postcards and mailed to Me at whichever hotel I happen to be staying in at the time.  So all you’re going to do is make extra work for the telegraphers, riders, scribes and forklift operators.

  Normally, this wouldn’t bother Me, since I don’t pay those guys, anyway.  The problem here is with My boys, the Jesii.  That 110 baud modem is what They use to access the interwebs.  You can take it from Me that if Republican Jesus can’t get on to glennbeck.com and Hippy Jesus can’t download Peter, Paul & Mary mp3′s, there will be some weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  Actually, the real problem is that if the Jesii start calling Me up while I’m on vacation, whingeing away about no access to blogs, music and porn, I’m liable to start smiting.  As you are a subset of My Chosen People, the atheists, I know you understand the way I deal with problems.  I won’t take out My annoyance on the Jesii, who will actually be bothering Me, I’ll take it out on you by causing a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico next hurricane season.  I’ll take it out on you by smiting a telephone repairman in Sweden with lightning.  I’ll take it out on you by causing a statistically insignificant rise in the number of miscarriages in Alabama.  If I’m really cheesed off I’ll take it out on you by not helping some of My brand-loyalists find their missing car keys.

  By now, I know that you’re literally quaking in your cork-festooned hats.  You can thank your lucky stars, (and by “your lucky stars”, I mean “Me”), that you didn’t come up with a Divine Denial of Service that would have inconvenienced Me, personally.  In that case, you would have had a lawsuit from Fire, Brimstone & Wrath, LLC in your hands faster than you could say “G’day”.

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd

Dear Archbishop of Lecce…

Somewhere in Southern Italy

Dear Cosmo,

  Hey!  Long time, no see, pal.  How are things in lecce?  How’s celibacy treating you?  We should get together with Ratzi for a poker night soon.  Oh, and thanks for all the “Our Fathers”, those were great.

  Right.  Polite chatter finished.  Now for why I’m really writing.  It’s this lottery thing.  I am in complete agreement with you.  Of course, lottery idolatry, or whatever, is a bad thing.  Yes, playing it leaves the proles that much poorer.  Certainly, Sicilian mayors using council wages to buy tickets because they have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting money from the state is slightly dodgy.  And, obviously, it’s laughable to think that praying for My ex-wife to help them win would do the slightest bit of good.  The only person Mary The Cheating Whore ever helped was Herself.

  So, as I say, you and I are definitely on the same sheet of music here.  The problem as I see it, and I’m sure you do too, is that none of that money is going to “The Church” – or, to be more precise; to Me.  I have yet to see a centisimi of that money.

  If people start treating the lottery as their idol, instead of My boys and Their old posse, then they won’t feel guilty about not tithing.  I don’t mind them giving all that Mary bollocks a miss, but the boys are My legacy and, frankly, They bring in buckets of cash.  And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that if the faceless masses, (That’s a little pun, there.  Get it?), are giving their Euros over to the lottery, it’s just that much less they have to give to Me.

  As for garnishing wages to play the lottery, I think I’d much rather they left that cash in the employees’ pocket where the hard-working brand-loyalists can more easily pass it along to Me.  I don’t mind them praying to My ex-wife to magic them some money to repair the roads and pay the cops.  I mean, you and I know how likely that is to happen, am I right?  If they use what is arguably My money to play the lottery, they’ve got something like a 1 in 1.2 billion chance to win, which is – to be honest – a much better chance than Mary The Spiteful Harpy doing anything for them.

  Looking at those odds just now, I had another of My brilliant ideas, (You’ll recall the time I decided to kill everything in the world that couldn’t fit on a party barge.).  My idea is… and you’re going to love this… is that you and your cronies encourage the brand-loyalists to use the money they would normally play the lottery with to pay for indulgences that will buy them bona-fide prayers for them to win obscene piles of free money.  Huh?  Huh?

  It is, if I do say so Myself, sheer genius.  Think about it.  The odds are pretty much the same, but this way they don’t have to feel like dirty, dirty idolatrous sinners who will rot in Hell for all eternity and the money goes where it belongs; in My vacation fund.

  So, you and the other archbishops get on that and I’ll wait for the Euros to come rolling in.

Wish You Were Here,

~Gawd

Dear Sick People…

Everywhere I Look

 

Dear Sickies,

 

  I usually don’t have the opportunity to read anything other than Skymall and barf bag instructions, but last Father’s day My boys got Me one of those newfangled telephonic contraptions you can read the intertubes on.  So I was sitting in Marseille Provence Airport, trying to tell the phone to upgrade My upcoming flight to 1^st Class, and suddenly I was staring at some story about how I am the most popular doctor in America.

 

  This was certainly news to Me.  Until relatively recently I thought you humans could survive inside a whale’s stomach for indefinite periods and new people could be made out of a hank of hair, a piece of bone and some mud.  So, considering that I don’t really know anything about physiology and I don’t have a medical degree, perhaps all of those people think I’m a chiropractor.

 

  Whatever the case, I think I should clear this up.  My brand loyalists are constantly sending Me postcards asking Me to heal someone.  Usually themselves or someone who owes them money.  However, I thought I had made it clear by never answering them, that healing isn’t really My thing.  To quote a bowling buddy of Mine, “I don’t roll on Shabbas”, where “roll” is “heal” and “on Shabbas” is “ever”.  I still kept getting tons of postcards, though.  When I decided I would just answer them all with “No”, the postcards just kept coming.  So, please, listen up America:  I am not saying “yes” and I am not saying “no”.  I am simply not answering your pleas.  First, because I’m on vacation.  Second, because I couldn’t afford the malpractice insurance even if I wanted to help.  Finally, (and I’m appalled this didn’t occur to you), you’re asking for socialized medicine!

 

  Why should you get medical care you didn’t pay for, hmm?  Every time you whine for something free like some sort of foreigner it not only makes My boys, the Jesii, cry – but it is an affront to everything that your country stands for.  Well, you can do what you want to My boys, but I’m not going to stand here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America!

 

Wish You Were Here,

 

~Gawd

Dear Tom Delay…

C/O Travis County, TX District Court Grand Jury

Dear Tom,

  As anyone who pays attention has noticed by now, I’m on vacation and don’t really answer the postcards that people have been sending me for as long as I remember.  However, since My slacker son recently got a job, I thought I’d have a go at answering one of yours.

  It seems to Me that making statements and then sending Me postcards asking to make the statements true is a little ass-backwards.  In fact, I’ve never really understood you and the other hooligans you run around with.  You make what are obviously meant to be derogatory comments about My boy’s new boss in one breath and the next you’re telling people you’re My new apprentice or something.  Keep it up and the only training you’ll get from me is how to take a boot up the keister.

  Of course, I’ve often wondered if this sort of thing is all My boy’s fault.  In one of His rebellious phases He went out and got piercings and, (don’t ask me how), He ended up releasing a bunch of brain-eating zombies.  It’s just the sort of thing that’s always happened around Him.  In fact, He once infected a herd of something or other with demons.  But I digress.  The point of this, which has become a bit of a family introspection, was to answer your postcard.  So, here goes.

  I’m on vacation.  Just do what you always do; make something up and pretend it’s real.

Wish You Were Here For That Boot-Keister Lesson,

~Gawd