Open letter to God

I guess I'm supposed to be asking, "Why, why?" Okay, I'll play along, just for the look of things.

Really, I did have one thing I'd like to ask...
Look, you make all this, right? The earth, the air, the land and sea. You decided how all the world would be, what it looks like, how it behaves, what happens when I press this. And, of course, you make us. Humans. Homo Sapiens.

Now, one thing you did was to set up the world in a very specific way. You set everything up so that things make sense. B follows A; reaction comes after action; if A then B, A, therefore B; if A then B, not B, therefore not A. It was a very deliberate thing you did. Couldn't be by accident, of course.

So, you plunk us down in this world, with all these systems going on around us, things that we learn, things that we can see repeated over and over again, and can begin to predict. What's happening is we're starting to develop reason.

Reason isn't a human invention. Oh, no. It's the way the universe works. B follows A, mass attracts mass, if train A leaves Detroit heading east....
Well, you get the picture.

You made the world like this. And you made us able to see the world like this, able to see and appreciate and learn rational thought. And you made it so that our lives are much, much better off using it.

Medicine. Agriculture. Iron-working. Written language. Mathematics. Biology. Physics. Our lives are longer, gentler, and better. It's like giving us a cookie every time we use our brains; the universe you created rewards us when we use rational thought.

So, we have this faculty that allows us, with a little effort, to turn rocks into plows into wheat into bread. To turn wood into paper into words into Moby Dick. To turn dust into concrete into Hoover Dam. You gave us reason, and it was good. We went forth and multiplied upon the earth a million-fold.

Then, we come to the most important questions that each of us as individuals ask of ourselves in our lives. Who am I? Why am I here? What is this place? What should I do? How ought I live?

And we are commanded to throw down our hard-won reason, our dearly-prized rational thought. We are told to ignore all that we have done, and the faculty with which we achieved. We are told to take the answers of these questions on the polar opposite of reason.

We are told to take it all on faith.

We are told to believe that there is an all-powerful god out there, who is indeed swayed by our prayers, but chooses (for his own inscrutable reason) to not show himself directly.

We are told to live by a code of ethics that worked perfectly fine 2000 years ago for a tribe of nomadic shepherds.

We are told to forsake reason and embrace it's antithesis.

Now, I've always known you to be good for self-fulfilling prophecies. "God helps them who helps themselves," and such. I admit that this is all possible. But I only ask one thing.

Why did you go to such great pains to engineer a universe where reason is the rule, and then expect us, on pain of damnation, to forsake it for our most important questions?

Of course, everyone knows that you must not question the will of god, for he works in 'mysterious ways', ways that we as humans are not supposed to be able to understand. And yet god imbued us with a monkey-curiosity that compels us to stick our fingers in every light socket and press every button just to see what it does. We are creatures with immense curiosity, great capacity for logical thought, and you made us that way.

Some people may say this is the eternal tragedy of the human condition. I say to hell with that. They say it as if there were some kind of poetic beauty about tragedy on that scale. It is one thing to see a Shakespearean tragedy, but would you really want it to happen to you? For every day of your life? Because that's what it is. A sick practical joke played by you on us, to create a world in which things appear to make sense, but the only real winners are those who throw away reason.

I don't even care what the answer is. I don't. If this is the way the world works, then so be it. But I'll continue living my life as I have, by my rules, for my reasons. Rules and reasons that line up with reality, unlike some I wouldn't care to mention.

Special thanks to anyone reading all of this.