Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.
There I was, the God of the Creation, doing what Stephen Dedalus so rightly says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
remain[ing] within or behind or beyond or above [my] handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring [my] fingernails.
But this guy Sessions comes along and claims that people should “obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”* This to justify the ripping away of children from the arms of their parents. This Sessions person says he got that idea from something called “Romans 13” in the Bible, which sets down the words—not mine—of a misogynistic hallucinator.
Hell, there are tons of “laws of government” that if I were human I wouldn’t hesitate to break—starting with the prohibition against jaywalking. (I’m not even going to bother to cite the obvious example of the Nuremberg Laws.**)
*
And then there are these guys down at the University of North Carolina (aren’t they supposed to be spending their time figuring out easy courses to keep their basketball team from flunking out?) who decided to ask people what I look like. (As if they have a clue!)
In the study, the participants—511 American Christians from all around the nation—individually viewed 300 sets of faces placed side-by-side on a computer screen. They selected "the face from each pair that better characterized how they imagined God to look." These were assembled into a composite image reflecting each person's notion of God.***
For example: God vs. Anti-God:
Summing up the results, Tom Jacobs of psmag.com says,
all believers seek comfort by imagining a deity who fulfills their emotional needs. As these needs vary, so do their images of the supreme being.
If you really want to know what I would look like—if I were a human being, that is—here’s a hint: Think Cary Grant.
Enough of this nonsense—I’m off for a manicure.
***
**Those of you with a classical background will notice the Ciceronian touch.
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