I do worry about God

I do worry about God. 

And not just about whether she likes a capital letter or not.

It's true that I do not worry about god a lot. After all, you know that I have ASD.  If someone finds relating to other people tricky, it's not exactly a shock to find them a bit vague about relating to god. 

But the thing that puzzles me is that God has done so little in the way of updates. I mean, yes, Microsoft is annoying, but at least they do update their stuff pretty often. If god had been running silicon valley, we'd still be working with the manuals for Babbage's difference engine.

It makes me wonder why god stopped when all those sages wrote down his most significant thoughts generations ago. You'd think he would have done something over the years to iron out the bugs, get rid of at least the misunderstandings and some of the wilder misinterpretations.

You'd think he would have told us to watch out for the next update, get ready for nuance and something taking our context into account.

It would be so easy to put people right. Homo sap has made some advances over the years, so you'd expect god to have another go now we are that bit smarter, and also when things seem so likely to come off at the curves.

Instead, we have the best advice transmitted by god to people in very different circumstances. Hard to get a clue about how god might view space exploration from his guidance to unruly tribes wandering around in the desert. 

Imagine that you need your car fixed. You take it to the garage where they go through the usual routine of pursing lips, silent whistling, and slow head shaking. It's about then that you discover that their latest manual is an ancient book, written down (with the best intentions) somewhere around 546 BCE, and it is mostly concerned with mules, harnesses, and wooden axles. You'd be a bit dispirited. And also ever-so-slightly nervous.

And yet, in the case of god, and issues of ethics, and sex, and life, and death, we are expected to accept crusty ideas in dusty tomes, thick with secretarial anomalies and myriad mistakes. It is also alarming that godly wisdom is dispensed largely by men in fancy dress, but I guess that's another issue. On the whole it's the male dominance and not the fancy dress that makes me jumpy.

If there is a god, and if she has half the qualities the most suspended-disbelief-adept among us imagine, she must sigh daily, by the minute or even second, that we have got ourselves into such a tangle. Why such a mad proliferation of beliefs, sects, deities and religious requirements ? Surely god could have put these right in an afternoon with a bit of celestial communication.

When things go wrong, Microsoft issues patches to sort problems out, even on a temporary basis. I so wish that god would catch on and do the same. It could save so much trouble.