My wife pointed me to the current Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker online; this issue’s is “God’s Blog” by Paul Simms. It is witty, as usual, and the comments outshine the divine post. I had a good smirk and soon forgot about it. I found my thoughts turning to recent events and the idea of God blogging returned to me with a greater intensity. What if God could blog? The responses of online experts might be notoriously predictable.
Most politicians and Tea Partiers would fail to recognize the author, I’m sure. The conservative life-style and outlook have their own particular structures that may have had roots in Christianity at one time, but have now taken on an agenda of their own. God, admittedly a long-haired liberal in his last incarnation, certainly doesn’t advocate the way his dad’s name is taken in vain by such political bluster. I suspect he’d be denied more than three times before the stock market bell sounds.
The theological liberals would probably find such an anthropomorphic activity distasteful for a being as abstract as the divine. After all, by stooping to our level and showing himself active in the world he would be raising the ugly question of theodicy again. If the Big Guy can afford the time to type out a blog post from his android in the sky couldn’t he at least solve one of the more pressing human problems such as starvation or war?
Bibliobloggers would surely rate his posts pretty low. Erudition is born of online prestige and although God is a big draw, his book is still a bestseller and literary types are much more comfortable deconstructing the written word. Besides, since he doesn’t belong to any denomination (or monotheistic religion, for that matter) his authoritative comments would certainly be disconcerting.
I suspect the atheist camp would suggest it was all a hoax. With sufficient skill the source of the posts could be pinned to a physical machine and the words themselves would be traced to a physical brain that is no more than an organic computer. The God Blog could safely be ignored.
We live in an age that has outlived the need for a live feed from the divine. Real-time responses from on high would make everyone uncomfortable. Since we construct God in our own image, those who blog already know what the divine would write if s/he could blog.
