James Frey - The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

We all laughed. Ben laid down on the ground so he could stare up at the stars and brought the woman down with him and held her in his arms. It was really super sweet. She had been shaking before, her hands and her whole body and even her lips had been twitching and shaking. Ben just held her and ran his hand through her hair over and over and she got really calm and peaceful. We all laid down on the ground like him, like we wanted to see whatever it was he was looking at, and because he looked real comfortable. And Ben just looked up at the stars, and so did everyone else, and they went on forever and ever and ever. Nobody said anything for a long time. We just stared. And I saw stars that twinkled, and stars that looked like they moved, and really bright stars and stars that I could barely even see at all. I tried to count them, but there were too many, so I tried to count them in just one little square in the sky, but there were too many to do even that. Eventually I just got lost in them. I wasn’t even thinking about anything. I was just staring at the wonder of the sky and stuff. And everyone else was the same way. We were lost, and when we had all forgotten he was going to, Ben spoke.

God isn’t what you think, or imagine, or have been taught to believe. Much of what you have been taught to believe about everything in this world is wrong, but so much of it is tied to notions of God that it’s easiest to start there first. We are animals. We were not created in the image of anyone or anything. We are a biological accident, and we are what we are now because of a long process of natural selection, and occasional spontaneous genetic abnormalities that made us stronger, and eventually became part of us. We started as single cells in swamp water, and rose from there, became fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, apes. It happened over the course of billions of years. The idea that this planet, this solar system, this galaxy, and this universe were created five thousand years ago is ridiculous. We know better. We might not have then, but we do now. And even then, when the stories were created, regardless of what culture they came from, they weren’t created because the people creating them actually believed them, they were created in order to consolidate power, and to enslave people. They were created because a few men understood that if they claimed some direct relationship with God, some unique understanding of God, and that God was a God that created all life, and judged life, and knew everything everyone did at any given moment, and if that God was a God that controlled fate, and decided who would live and when we would die, and after death granted eternal life in either Paradise or Hell, they could use that power, that supposed relationship, that supposed understanding, to make people live as they told them to live, and make them do what they wanted them to do. They could use that power to make people slaves. Religion. It’s remarkably simple. A beautiful con. The longest running fraud in human history. I know God. God created all, knows all, and is all-powerful. Do what I say God tells me you should, which also happens to make you subservient to me, or you will burn forever. The Christians are the masters of it. They have built empires with their scam, murdered, tortured, and terrorized literally billions of people. All in the name of their bearded superhero, in the name of their crucified fiction. In today’s world the Roman Catholics, American evangelists, and fundamentalist Muslims are particularly good, though all are guilty: the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims, all the leaders of all the various sects and denominations, anyone on earth who thinks there is one God with the power to know and judge all. They’re all wrong. And they are either slave masters, or they are slaves, worshipping things that don’t exist. God is not a man. God is not a reflection of man. God is not a being or a spirit or a consciousness. God does not live in some place with a staff who does God’s work. God is not a he or a she. God does not have an army of angels or a mortal enemy who was cast out of his kingdom. In terms that mean something to us, God is nothing. God plays no part in our lives. God doesn’t care about earth or about humanity. God doesn’t care about the petty dramas that mean so much to us. God doesn’t care what we say or who we fuck or what we do with our bodies or who we love or who we marry. God doesn’t care if we rest on Sundays or if we go to some building to sing songs and say prayers and chant and listen to sermons. God doesn’t care if we kill in God’s name. God doesn’t give a fuck. God does not give a fuck. Look up. There are twenty-five hundred stars visible in the night sky. Twenty-five hundred. Not that big a number. In our galaxy, our little galaxy, there are three hundred billion more that we can’t see. Three hundred billion. We don’t know how many galaxies there are because we don’t have the technology to know, if it is even possible to know. There are estimates, guesses, darts thrown at a board. Some say a hundred billion, some say five hundred billion, some a trillion. Some say the universe is infinite, which is a concept we pretend to understand, but is beyond our minds. Humans worry about eating, finding shelter, fucking. We worry about jobs and money. We worry about class and status and what other people think of us. We worry about rules imposed on us by men who know nothing. We worry about death and when it is going to find us. We can’t conceive of infinity. We can’t grasp the idea of something that has no boundaries and no end. And that’s where God is. That’s what God is. Beyond our minds. Beyond our understanding. Beyond anything we can categorize or write about or preach about or place into one of our systems of rules. God is infinite. An infinite number of galaxies, an infinite number of stars, an infinite number of planets. Look up. Try to imagine infinity. Your mind shuts down and moves back to some number you can understand, some image you can grasp. Look up. Beyond what you see, beyond what lies behind what you see, beyond what lies behind what lies behind. What stretches out forever. That’s God. All of it is God. An infinite God that we can’t understand. That does not care about our little lives. That is beyond caring about anything, anywhere in this infinite universe. Look up and see God. Look up. Look up.

And we did. We looked up at all those pretty stars, and they were there shining and blinking and maybe moving around a little, but that was probably my eyes playing tricks on me. I tried to imagine all those numbers of billions and trillions and think about things just going on forever and ever and I couldn’t do it, just like he said. My brain would come back to stars I could see and to the little sliver of moon glowing and the grass I was lying down on that was tickling my arms and the sounds of crickets playing and bugs winging real fast and a sweet little breeze moving through the trees and the other people around me breathing, just looking up and breathing.

After that we started doing it every night. It wasn’t like it was required or anything, not like school or church, nobody was going to get in trouble, but almost everybody did it. We’d have dinner and go outside and lie on the grass and Ben would talk. He’d talk about life, about what he thought of it, and how he lived it, and about our world, about how we had allowed it to be destroyed, and about how it was going to end soon. He said life was simple, we were born and we were going to die. There was nothing for us before we were born, and there would be nothing for us after we died. While we were here we had choices. While we were alive we had choices. We could choose to be and do whatever we wanted. We could choose to become part of society, and follow its rules, which were mostly designed to control us and keep us in whatever place we were born into, or we could make our own rules and live our own lives. For him, he’d say, life was about love and fucking and helping other people. Life was about feeling everything he could and experiencing everything he could. Life wasn’t about the accumulation of money and possessions, but the accumulation of friends. He’d talk about living simply. That the more complicated our lives became the more miserable we were. The more we had the more we wanted. The harder we worked the less we lived. He’d talk about patience, and say that there was nothing in life that was made better by being anxious or nervous or aggressive. He’d talk about compassion, how we should have it for ourselves and for other people and for the earth, and that if he could stop people from inflicting pain on everything around them, that the world might have a chance to survive, and that we might have a chance to survive. He said we needed to let go of the idea of death. That death was the end, very simply, and nothing more. That when death came it was blackness and silence and peace, but nothing we could experience. That our obsession with death was killing us. That our obsession with life after death, which did not exist, was destroying what we did have, which was consciousness and all of its gifts, the greatest of which was love. He said life, not death, was the great mystery we all must confront. He said it over and over again. Life, not death, was the great mystery we must confront.