A Sunday Sermon

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It only took him six days, which explains Anne Widdecombe. Then he created Adam and Eve and a snake and an apple and it was all downhill from there. Some time later, God realised he’d made a right old hash of everything and decided to flood the whole planet and start again - a cosmic reboot, if you will. Unfortunately, like Microsoft products, the world v2.0 was still a big pile of shit that kept crashing for no reason and throwing up meaningless error messages all over the place and refused to network with Jupiter. At this point God seemingly gave up and went on an extended skiing holiday and left the whole place in the hands of some rich people with strange ideas about sexuality. A few thousand years passed and it appears that the same idiots are in charge of the asylum and God is so fed up of the whole thing that he refuses to do anything about it apart from occasionally painting a picture of his kids face on a piece of toast or deforming a Monster Munch. Poor deluded fools the world over (well, mostly America) point to the malformed snack as undeniable proof of the existence of The Heavenly Slacker and the whole sorry farce carries on as before.

Of course humanity is so enlightened now that we’ve stopped believing in all this sort of thing and now there are no more wars or crazy pieces of legislation being brought in and everybody lives a happy and fulfilling life. And then I woke up.

Now I don’t want to stomp around the place like some kind of hairy hungover Dawkins, visibly shaking with anger every time I pass a church. I don’t have any proof that God doesn’t exist in much the same way that I don’t have any proof that BBC3 isn’t pointless. I have, however, definitely come to the conclusion that if a large portion of His disciples on Earth are anything to go by then God must be some kind of massive swaggering dick. He’s made a bunch of arbitrary rules about how people should behave, then he contradicts them, then he contradicts them again but in a different book, then he contradicts a bunch of them again but in a more squiggly font, then he allows people like Simon Cowell to become massively rich, then he makes sure millions of people die every year for no good reason and then he gets old ladies to give up bits of their pension to fix the roof on his house. And he’s got a lot of houses. I mean, forget Philip Green or Donald Trump. God has a house every few miles. It must really frustrate the guy from Ocado.

I personally don’t believe in God. It all seems just a bit too convenient to me. The whole idea of religion seems to stem from a need to control the masses, make them behave in a way that won’t interfere from the local land-owner’s lifestyle, keep them from giving up in the face of the whole unruly pointlessness of the universe so that they carry on growing turnips and emptying bins. Humans search for meaning in everything from existence to Eastender’s - it just seems to be one of the things we do. Mostly this is a good thing. We are constantly probing the boundaries of our existence and in some cases probing our arseholes with kitchen utensils. It’s how we learn, develop, grow, invent, explain… Unfortunately one of the things we’ve got really good at is inventing ways to be dreadful to each other and frequently we use religion as the basis for it.

If there is a God he must be so fed up of us all that he probably buggered off years ago to try again in a different universe. I think making trees out of chocolate would be a good starting point.

I suspect that when I die the most exciting thing that will happen will be that I’ll slowly turn to dust and the sales of Hot Donkey EP’s will drop off.

But I’d never want to stop you, dear reader, from believing in and taking comfort from a religion, or indeed any other belief system. Just don’t be an arse about it.