God - Bad Designer, Poor Manager, Pathetic Motivator

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I suppose it was predictable, just as the sun follows the rain, as diarrhea follows Mi Puebla's deep fried goat burrito, today we have the professionally stupid invoking God's punishment to explain the Washington earthquake.  This time it's Worldnet Daily's Joseph Farrah, also known as the Man With MY Mustache, saying “Occasionally God really does shake things up as a sign to us of the consequences of disobedience and indifference to our Creator...”

Let's just quietly sneak past Farrah's unabashed belief that he understands the actions and motivations of the creator of the universe.  Let's even duck behind the hedge in order to avoid his hubristic expectation that the people will unquestioningly accept him as God's interlocutor.  OK, now let's just sit down on the curb here with a lemonade and think this through.

God's, like, omnipotent, right?  I mean, he can make anything happen.  Hell, he made the whole universe 'happen', right?  So if he wants humans to act a certain way, why doesn't he just MAKE them?  Just control their behavior so that they do things exactly the way HE wants them to.  Mission accomplished n shit, right?  Now I don't pretend to understand the motivations of the people who collectively pretend to understand God's motivations (go back and read that again, I dareya), but I suspect their answer to the "God's just a big bully" hypothesis would go something like "Something something Free Will Yadda yadda".  I dunno, I think it's kind of quaint that he sets up these rules restricting his own superpowers, probably to make the game more interesting because he's been around forever and most of that time he didn't even have a universe, let alone a Teddy Bear, and he's BORED!  So I guess the rules say he can coerce people with death and destruction, but he can't actually get in their heads and drive.  OK.  I'm not sure where it says that in the New Testament, but what the hell - I'm in.

But because we've all grown up steeped in the tradition of a vengeful old-testament Yahweh, we let a lot of this rubbish go by without considering how deeply weird and twisted these loonies believe their master of the universe to be.  I mean, think about it.  He makes the universe.  Eventually he makes some intelligent bipeds on planet Earth.  He makes them clever social creatures, with agile minds and a propensity to explore.  He endows them with free will and some sense of right and wrong and sends them on their way.  But then they DO things.  Things that bug him, that piss him off, that get right under his all powerful skin.  "Dammit", he thinks.  "Why are they doing that?  I don't WANT them to do that."  Now, he has a whole universe to tend to, he's a busy, busy supreme being, but those annoying homo sapiens just keep irritating him.  So he keeps coming back and trying to make them change their wicked ways, but he always plays by the rules of the game.  So he wipes out New Orleans.  Hey, the little bastards LIKED New Orleans.  Surely THAT'LL get 'em back on the straight n narrow.  But sure enough, they kept up all that stuff that just makes God CRAZY, so he came back by yesterday and gave Washington DC a good shaking - just a warning, you see, to go back to living the way he WANTS you to.  Then it was a quick hop over to let Joseph Farrah know what he was doing and why, and it was back to that pesky universe.

There's a lesson here.  Actually a couple, but we'll go with the cautionary tale at this point:  "Create a universe and you'll never have a moment's rest".
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