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The Game of God:
Note: What follows is the first installment from The Game of God, a 320-page book which is half cartoons. Every right-hand page of text, which is formatted like poetry, is faced on the left by a full-page cartoon drawn by Arthur Hancock.
What kind of universe is this any way? Does life have any meaning or purpose? If there is a "God," why did God create the universe? Many religions have tried to explain God's motives for creating the universe, a universe filled with suffering and death, but these theologies are often illogical and filled with contradictions, and thus fail to provide comfort when a true test arises: when real disaster strikes. A minister once told us that, in his experience, the death of a child was particularly difficult to "explain," and often resulted in expressions of hatred for God by the parents, and even the abandonment of their faith. Whatever "His-Her-Its" motives (let us not sex-type the Creator!), how could a "loving" God knowingly create a universe which is capable of this kind of cruelty: death, concentration camps, torture, child molesting, murder, rape, war, disease, mental illness, starvation, greed, addiction, violence, racism, gossip, sexism, etc., etc., etc.? The child's question, "Why did God let my puppy die?" cannot be satisfactorily answered by most of the theologies of the world. We are told we must "love" the Creator, but how can we when we behold His-Her-Its creation: a creation which lacks any sensible explanation for suffering, ignorance, and death? It might be argued that the "positive" aspects of life are reason enough to love God, but the question remains: Can all the good in the world justify the suffering of a single one of God's creatures?
Some religions believe that the ultimate horror comes after life to those who, after a brief lifetime in a world of total confusion, fail to locate and "correctly" believe in God. These "sinners," "infidels," etc., wind up in a place of never-ending torture, called "hell." Other religions believe in an endless cycle of birth and rebirth and that unless we live an exemplary life, we are doomed to return to the hellish struggle for "another round." Both theologies appear to have one thing in common: wretched humanity is held hostage by the whim of God. Saints throughout the ages have declared: WE MUST LOVE GOD, and the only way we can know we are loving God is when we are loving all of creation. The loveless state of the world shows that "love of God" is, to put it mildly, exceedingly rare. There is a reason for this: there is something blocking our love for God. This "something" could only be fear, thus anger, towards God. The basis of all fear is the unknown. The basis of all hatred is fear. What we fear is what we hate. What we hate is what we fear. We are afraid of a mysterious God Who would make a universe of suffering, and we are angry at this God for putting US in it! We cannot love God until we can forgive God. As long as we see the Creator as separate from creation, as many do, we can only be resentful toward the Creator (no matter how deeply we deny and suppress it) because She-He-It must have KNOWINGLY created suffering in others (THIS MEANS US). An all-powerful Creator Who deliberately creates suffering in inferior creatures is a monster. The notion of "free will" (self-inflicted suffering) is ludicrous because God, as creator of all, must have created evil in order to give us a "choice"! Observably, God created humans with an overwhelming inclination to "choose" evil. We fear and hate God because we are misunderstanding God's nature. Until we face the existence of our fear and anger towards God, and relinquish it by gaining a deeper understanding of God, we can never love God. This book is about recovery in the ultimate sense of the word: in the sense of universal recovery. What most of us think of as the evolving universe will be presented as the recovering universe. What the universe is recovering is consciousness that was intentionally lost. What the universe is recovering from is the pain that is the intentional result of intentionally lost consciousness. We will present the theory that paradise was intentionally lost for the pleasure of regaining it. The universe was created as a Game...for the experience of hell and for the experience of recovering heaven. Without intentionality, that is, without a deliberate Creator, the universe is devoid of all purpose and meaning. In a Godless universe the life of a saint and the life of a hired murderer would be equally "worthy" and equally pointless. We hold that an intentionless universe is the stuff of madness. Sanity demands a Purpose. Intentionality requires a Conscious Creator. We will offer a theoretical model of Creator and creation as ONE. The universe, we will assert, is a Game of God. We hold that this model allows us to absolutely forgive, and thus absolutely love, God. Loving God is the only way to win the Game. n
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