We live inside a virtual reality created by an advanced civilisation to entertain an individual we call God. That could be the purpose of our existence. The advanced civilisation probably is humanoid, which means God is much like us, with human imaginations and desires. The programme runs a script, so thinking of us as mere worms would be a delusion of grandeur. Real worms decide for themselves how they grovel and when. Welcome to the Theatre of the Absurd, where we are actors on a stage, and no one thinks. You might believe conspiracy theorists are nutters, and many of them indeed are, but apart from that, they are not paranoid enough by far. They are part of the plan, even if they do not want to. And they cannot escape their fate, not even by suicide.

So what about René Descartes, that world-famous fellow who once said, ‘I think, therefore I exist.’ Was he wrong? He begins with an assumption, ‘I think.’ He then arrives at a logical conclusion, ‘Therefore I exist.’ And so, he stamped a realness certificate on his person. But did Descartes really think? Even if he did not, he might still have an existence. Only that is dubious. Do Spike and Suzy exist? They are comic characters created by Willy Vandersteen, who does not exist anymore if he had ever done so because he stopped breathing. If you go down that road, everything you imagine exists. I just imagined a unicorn. Do unicorns exist?

Philosophers might discuss such questions for centuries, but scientists agree that merely thinking of a unicorn does not make it real. So, if God exists, we do not. We are imagined beings like unicorns. The God we imagine also does not exist because the things we imagine do not exist. There is only the God that exists in reality. But who is God? If we are here to entertain God, what is the fun of standing at the sideline? Why not take part yourself? We cannot know God. But if God plays roles and becomes one of us, we might identify some of those persons. The starting point could be Jesus, as there is a good chance he knew God as a person.

The gospels tell us that Jesus called God his Father as if it was a close personal relationship. And all four official Gospels infer Jesus was the bridegroom but do not mention the bride. The Church tells us that Jesus married the Church. But the Church did not exist when Jesus lived. A historian would call it an anachronism. An example of an anachronism is that the Roman Emperor Caesar took an aeroplane to Egypt to spend his holidays. There were no aeroplanes in the Roman Empire. And the Gospels do not say Jesus married the Church. Why should the Church lie about Jesus’ marriage? Is there something we are not allowed to know? Christians believe God is love.

The Bride of Christ probably was God in the person of Mary Magdalene. She made Jesus believe he was Adam reincarnated and that She was Eve reincarnated, that Eve did not come from Adam’s rib but that Eve gave birth to Adam, and that they were an eternal couple living from the beginning of Creation until the End of Times. Jesus was God’s son because Adam was. Hence, Adam is the Son of God (Luke 3:38), Jesus is the Firstborn of all Creation (Colossians 1:15), and Christians are born of God the ‘Father’ (John 1:13). Muhammad probably also married God in the person of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, but unlike Jesus, he did not know.

Jesus and Muhammad have lived. The accounts of their lives may not be accurate because they date from decades after they died, but the early history of the Jews in the Jewish Bible – the Jews call it Tanakh – is mythical. Archaeological evidence does not support it. Moses never brought the Jews from Egypt into the Promised Land. Still, this story likely has a historical origin. Around the time Moses supposedly lived, the Egyptians who governed Canaan left, giving the Israelites a victory for which they had not fought. They might have seen it as a miracle, and the Israelites came to suspect that their favourite Canaanite deity, Yahweh, had something to do with it. Stories retold in evenings at campfires grow more sensational over time. Eventually, God split the Red Sea, drowned the Egyptian army and let the Israelites escape.

The Jews gradually formed a nation after the Egyptians had left. The Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, calls it the Era of the Judges. Local tribal leaders organised warfare and settled disputes. Thus, they were judges. As the Tanakh tells us, these judges had nationwide authority, but that probably was not the case. The oldest source of the entire Tanakh is the Song of Deborah. Historians think this song dates from shortly after the Egyptians left. Such a song likely did not pop up out of nowhere. Deborah brought victory to one of the local tribes that later became part of the Jewish nation. Deborah attributed that victory to their God, Yahweh. Deborah, also called the Mother of Israel, could be the earliest historical figure in the Tanakh and the founder of the Jewish nation. And so, She could have been God Herself.

The God of Abraham, known as Yahweh, the Father, and Allah, thus is a veil behind which the owner of this universe has operated so far. She only revealed Herself to Jesus. It made Jesus a unique prophet who developed grandiose views about himself as the Son of God who lived eternally from Creation to the End Times. No evidence suggests Jesus was indeed Adam. God made him believe he was. If so, he likely will not return, and we should expect a stand-in.

Jesus’ followers knew God married Jesus, but the Gospels don’t mention that essential fact. Scholars might have asked themselves why there are no eyewitness accounts or why Paul remained silent about what had transpired. Here is your answer. But why did the early leaders of the Church do it? To Jews, it was blasphemous to say God was a woman who married Jesus. Christianity had Jewish followers who had heard of the miracles Jesus did but did not know about his marriage to God. Non-Jewish converts had fewer issues with a goddess marrying a godlike human who lived eternally. Romans, Greeks and Egyptians all had myths about goddesses, godlike humans and gods having sex with humans. To them, it was business as usual, thus not particularly exciting.

Obfuscating the marriage, changing God’s gender, and introducing a virginity cult surrounding Jesus’s mother might have been the elected solution to resolve a controversy that tore the early Church apart. The leaders of the early Church probably felt uncomfortable about what they did, and some words in the Gospel of John suggest so. The compromise resolved the controversy and became Christianity as we know it.

God has a peculiar sense of humour. That can hurt your feelings. Try to understand the spectacle from God’s perspective. She lives eternally, or at least thousands of years, and uses us to pass Her time. And we are less than worms in God’s eyes. Those who anticipate the End Times expect them to be epic. That might still come to pass. The lyric Gimme The Prize by Queen could be a prophecy in disguise. It says, ‘I am the God of kingdom come,’ thus implying that the God of the coming kingdom will be a Queen.

That is a queer pun, also because Freddy Mercury was the performing artist. Queen also made a song named I Want to Break Free. In the accompanying video clip, Mercury dressed as a drag queen. Here in Western Europe, we found his performance funny, including Mercury’s gayish manners, and we had a good laugh. That was quite different elsewhere, for instance, in the United States. And now, it seems that early Christians have performed a gender change on God. This one is for the haters of the community of LGBT, and all those other letters and the plus-sign they added to make it even more inclusive, ‘Another one bites the dust.’ The leaders of this world are put on notice, ‘Give me your kings, let me squeeze them in my hands.’ And the battle is fought and won.

Lack of humour also plagues Muslims. Many are easily insulted. A Mohammed-drawing contest organised by the Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders angered Muslims in Pakistan. A Pakistani cricket player offered money to assassinate Wilders. But God doesn’t care. God even made Wilders do it. You can slit as many throats as you like, but humour will never die. If the nature of the relationship between God and Muhammad becomes public, it could alter gender relations within the Islamic community, and Pakistan will never be the same. Islam is one of God’s pranks. And so is Christianity.

The meddling of the Church Fathers with the relationship between God and Jesus gave Christianity its unique and baffling theology. Drinking Christ’s blood, eating his body, and the resurrection of the dead could be good ingredients for a motion picture called Zombie Apocalypse. Indeed, some of the Roman persecutions of Christians were due to a moral panic caused by a belief that Christians were a cannibalistic sect eating human bodies and drinking human blood. That is what they say about Satanists nowadays. But the outlandishness of Christianity begins with the idea that we are all cursed because Eve and Adam sinned. And then came Jesus, who sacrificed himself for our sins so you can save yourself by following him. There could be a silver lining to it. The belief in a Messiah might save humanity from destroying itself. And perhaps that was God’s plan all along.

Latest revision: 6 April 2024

Featured image: Lucretia Garfield