Dear God,

I read in today’s news that attendance at a popular rugby game has postponed a threatened coup d’etat in Fiji. How is such a thing possible?

- Bob

Bob,

It’s a matter of simple physics, really.

Fiji’s military leader, Frank Bainimarama, set a deadline for the Fijian government to meet his demands by noon yesterday. If that deadline were not met, Bainimarama promised, there would be a coup d’etat and he would take over the government.

What Bainimarama forgot is that the annual army vs. police rugby match was already set for yesterday. So, Bainimarama went to the rugby game and promised to hold his coup d’etat tomorrow instead.

This surprising turn of events is possible because rugby is powered by the elementary particle known as Whee. Whee is a particle that, when assembled in great quantities, enables objects to move with force out of proportion to their mass and energy. Whee particles are present during air shows, curling competitions, and rugby matches. The Whee particle also, coincidentally, has the power to stop armed revolution. So, whenever there is an air show, a curling competition, or a rugby match, it is is nearly impossible for a coup d’etat to take place.

Frank Bainimarama knows this, and so he watched the game, and bided his time. Rumors exist that the Samoan secret service is attempting to bring a curling team to Fiji in order to prevent the coup tomorrow, but apparently there isn’t enough ice of sufficient quality to support a match.

- God

Dear God,

I write have written a blog for about a year now, and so have become used to the daily stream of comment spam messages, trying to get a place for pharmaceutical advertisements in the comments sections of my posts. I was surprised, though, to find a piece of spam in the blog filter this morning that began with the following line:

“Who would have thought of my meeting with, perhaps, a nephew of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in this assembly!”

I recognized this immediately as a line from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, from the scene in which Mr. Collins grovels before Mr. Darcy.

God, you are the only contemporary of Jane Austen still alive, so I thought I would ask you: Would Jane Austen approve of the use of her writing in spam?

- Kitty

Kitty,

Jane Austen would have much disapproved of the easy availability of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Remember how Maryanne Dashwood was reprimanded for being too forward with her attentions to Mr. Willoughby. The original title of Sense and Sensibility was Sense and Spam, but I convinced her to change the focus of the novel.

I believe that Miss Austen would have regarded spam as somewhat similar in worth to the desperate letters written by Maryanne Dashwood to Mr. Willoughby, though in a commercial sense. Jane Austen had no antipathy to commerce, so long as it was conducted in an honorable fashion.

My opinion, however, differs from that of Jane Austen. I believe that the cause of literacy is promoted by the distribution of lines of classic fiction in what would otherwise be completely worthless correspondence.

- God

Dear God,

I was reading in this morning’s newspaper that in the US House of Representatives, the Republicans, joined by a large number of Democrats, passed a bill that would make it illegal for any court to hear any lawsuit challenging the legality of the religious devotional in the Pledge of Allegiance. You know the part. It’s where everybody chants in unison, “one nation, under God”.

Well, this got me wondering. Is America really under you God? If so, how do you deal with the constant rotation of the Earth? Are you a satellite in Earth orbit?

- Palloni

Palloni,

I’m shocked that you could suggest such a thing! Heresy! Don’t you know that I’m at the center of the Universe?

What happens is that there are elaborate maneuverings of all the heavenly bodies in the universe that make it appear that the Earth rotates, but in fact it does not. In fact, the Earth always keeps one side pointing right at me. That side of the Earth is where the United States of America is. Specifically, Davenport Iowa is under God. The rest of America is only mostly under God.

- God

God,

I’m hoping that you can settle a meteorological dispute between myself and my boss.

I work at TV station Action 5 in Clearwater, Mississippi, where I’m the weatherman. I always understood, as Pat Robertson says, that you cause hurricanes in order to attack and punish cities that have fallen into sin.

So, every mornig during hurricane season, I do a trademarked segment called Action News 5 Sin Watch. People call in from different cities and towns along the Gulf Coast in the region, reporting sins around where they live. We rate those sins on a scale from 1 to 10, and then create a Sinzone Action Hurricane Warning Map, showing where hurricanes are most likely to hit.

Now, my boss says I’m wrong about all this. He says that hurricanes are natural occurrences that result from the force generated by warm oceans between the coast of Africa and the Caribbean Sea.

Who is right?

- Raymond

Raymond,

You are absolutely correct. I do punish sinful cities with hurricanes.

For example, in a week and a half, I’m going to send a hurricane to Miami in order to punish a Big Truck conference they’re having there on Father’s Day this weekend. Global warming is serious stuff, and big trucks that guzzle gasoline and pump out greenhouse gases conspicuously and purposefully contribute to the problem.

It’s a sin, and oh, boy are they going to pay for it.

- God

Dear God,

My husband is an avid player of the video game Civilization III. He doesn’t pay attention to me any more. He’s always saying something to me like, “Just give me one more minute! I’ve almost vanquished the Greeks!”

He won’t even come to bed with me any more. He stays up half the night, and from the next room, I have to hear him muttering things like, “I can’t believe that the Aztecs just built the Pyramids. I almost had them done!”

So, God, I want to know who to blame. Did you design this Civilization video game, or was it Satan?

- Odette

Odette,

You can blame it on me. The code for Civilization III is divinely inspired.

You’ve heard the Catholics talk about natural family planning? Well Civilization is information technology family planning.

Have you thought of taking on a technophobe lover?

- God

Dear God,

I just read in the June edition of Discover Magazine that Americans spread over 300 million pounds of fertilizer on land within the United States every year. I would think that a lot of those pesticides end up in our food.

What are the theological implications of this?

- H. M. Fields

H. M.,

Well, if you Americans are eating pesticides, then it’s obvious, isn’t it? You’re pests.

I work in mysterious ways. The first time that humans were acting like a bunch of bad sinner people, I kicked them out of the Garden of Eden. The next time, I drowned them all except for one family in a worldwide flood. I don’t like to repeat my methods, you see?

So, this time, it’s pesticides. And you’re doing the work for me, you silly Americans.

I’ve got a guy in Oregon establishing an organic farm where he and his family can survive and repopulate the Earth, once the rest of you are poisoned out of existence.

Someone’s got to make the coffins, after all.

Well, that’s all the time I have for now. I’m busy working on a new verse for that nursery school rhyme that starts out, “God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for our food.”

- God

Dear God,

I recently heard about a Christian blogger who says that dinosaurs and human beings once lived together on the Earth, just a few thousand years ago. You were around back then. Is what this guy says true?

- Bernie the Blog Reader

Bernie,

Let me clear this misconception up right away.

No. Human beings never lived alongside dinosaurs. I made sure it never happened.

Let me tell you why. People and dinosaurs are like sheep and cattle. They just don’t get along. Try to put them on the Earth at the same time, and they get into this ridiculous competition to see who can take part in the biggest mass extinction. I tried that with the Beta version of planet Earth, and it ended in disaster. The humans drive the dinosaurs crazy saying that they don’t need a comet to come along and blast a big hole in the Yucatan to die out, that people can cause a mass exitinction all on their own. Then the dinosaurs call the humans posers for using industrial technology to cause extinction, saying that doesn’t really count.

It’s unbearable, the squabbling. So, on the officially-introduced final product Earth for end users, I decided to put dinosaurs and humans millions of years apart. It makes the planet a less egotistical place, you see.

- God

Dear God,

It’s been a while now since the big object Sedna was discovered in its distant orbit around the Sun, way out past the planet Pluto. Some people say that Sedna is big enough to count as a planet, but other people say that it’s just a big hunk of rock and ice that’s more like a gigantic comet than anything else.

You’re the ultimate authority, God, so what do you say? Is Sedna a planet?

- Carlos

Carlos,

Let me settle this little misunderstanding. Sedna is not a planet. It’s a golf ball.

I was playing cosmic golf with Zeus a few hundred years ago, and he hit his ball into the rough, which is the Oort cloud. We thought we’d never find it, but now we can start our game up again. Thanks for pointing it out. I’ll give you a bit of grace in return, okay?

- God

Dear God,

Why is your Wiki Bible offline?

- Karl Gustav

Karl,

One of the difficult things about using wiki technology to spread my Holy Word is that there are lots of spammers who like to replace substantial edits with mere advertisements for viagara, breast implants, and other kinds of spam.

I am omnipotent, but I am also lazy. You can kind of think of me as a divine underachiever. So, I’m tired of the open source, and will be working on a New New Testament in a new format that is not vulnerable to Satan’s hordes of spam writing demon bots

- God

Dear God,

I read just yesterday about how the Bush government has been demanding that search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Google turn over their databases of private information about what web sites Americans have been looking for and visiting. Apparently, President Bush decided that he needed to know what kinds of pornography Americans are looking at. Yahoo and MSN are said to have caved in to Bush’s demands, while Google did the right thing and said no to Bush.

On a legal level, this news disturbs me because it seems illegal for the President to go snooping into Americans’ private behavior just in order to find out what kind of pornography they like. On a more philosophical level, it makes me wonder about what Google really is. The Google database is many, many times bigger than the Holy Bible, or any human-compiled library, for that matter.

So, what I want to know is this: Is Google bigger than you, God?

- Irving Bonn

Irving

Google is bigger than me. In fact, Google is bigger than the universe.

It makes sense, if you think about it. After all, the universe is only the universe. Google, on the other hand, contains the direct records of the universe, plus a huge stream of comments about the universe.

So, if there’s a big rock outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, Google will have the picture and measurements of the rock, a satellite photo of the rock from space, a map of the rock in relation to prominent roads, a web site about the rock, a blog chronicling developments related to the rock, and a discussion board debating the various qualities of the rock.

Medieval monks illuminating the Bible had nothing on the Googleverse.

Yet, I still have a leg up on Google. Google is bigger than me, but I speak through George W. Bush, the President of the United States. Can Google say that?

- God

Dear God,

I saw that a fellow named Clifford A. Pickover asked about time as one of his top 12 cosmic questions. So, what is your take on the issue? What is the nature of time?

- Felix

Felix,

That is the stupidest question of all time.

If I am asked that question one more time, I’m going to hurl.

I refuse to take the time to answer such a ridiculous question.

Do you get my point, Felix?

The essential nature of time has nothing to do with anything Albert Einstein wrote about. Time is, fundamentally, a pun. Time is the punchline for a joke I set up aeons ago for the archangel Gabriel. Gabriel still doesn’t get the joke, do you?

The joke started out as a knock knock joke, but also included an element in which I asked, how many clockmakers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Want to know the answer? 27.

It’s hilarious, this joke, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t get it. Anyway, the secret is in the delivery. Wait for it… It’s getting funnier all the time.

- God