Steve Toltz - Quicksand

ME: OK. So we will not persecute the nonbeliever, but make him feel bad about his life choices.

VOICE: Just don’t make your God like the reproduction-obsessed irascible legislator of the Old Testament.

ME: How about when you die, God does it personally …? The midnight knock at the door and He looks you in the eye. He should be a good communicator. He won’t send eerie blind seers talking out of slits in their throats, or speak through the mangled intentions of a summer storm.

VOICE: You should market a creator that speaks to people’s actual day-to-day experiences.

ME: The hilarious deity who gave me a big head that won’t accommodate most hats. A god who loves it when someone diets their whole lives. A god who longs for the day a man finds that he’s inferior in the precise area he thought he was superior.

VOICE: That’s right. You don’t have to avoid making explicit references to His indiscriminate and no-nonsense cruelty with this wised-up street-smart generation.

ME: Our God clearly enjoys sprinkling over the earth the half-dozen mega-successes needed to mentally torture the billions who are not.

VOICE: Now you’re talking.

ME: And those arriving in heaven will have post-traumatic stress disorder from the unbearable nightmare of dying and thereafter will live among a bunch of shell-shocked layabouts who all know each other and thus bore you senseless with their abominable private jokes for all eternity. And the only people who will be rewarded with the highest honours the afterlife has to offer are the paedophiles who never touched a child, for they are the real unsung heroes of our world.

VOICE: You might want to rethink that one.

ME: It’s just an example.

VOICE: The main thing is you can put God back in circulation.

ME: But how exactly?

VOICE: You’ve heard of Moore’s law.

ME: The rate at which we cannot live without the things that didn’t exist before yesterday?

VOICE: Not exactly. We’ll call that Aldo’s law. But … close enough. My point is. Forget the old bible. God is dead on the page there. He can stand a little remodelling, a little imaginative effort, and it could be interactive. You don’t have to do it alone.

ME: Meaning?

VOICE: Groupthink. The wisdom of crowds. Your market is a bunch of people who have fallen head over heels in love with the inorganic — their phones, of all things, for heaven’s sake! The most embarrassing turn of events in human history. Get them , the subscribers, to be the contributors and they will become the believers.

ME: And in the process, make Him go viral.

VOICE: And eventually, with the singularity and Artificial Intelligence technology, who do you think will come online just when we need Him?

ME: I see! God too has to evolve, and we ourselves will be the agency of that evolution.

VOICE: Now you understand the second purpose of consciousness.

ME: The creator has given us the means to create His own prototype. That will evolve and become a better God.

VOICE: And so?

ME: So there will be no divine will until we will the divine. God can be regifted. He will be the fruit of our labours and dwell where we tell Him to dwell! We’ll stumble across Him by using His greatest gift — the imagination. This both makes no sense and is the exact idea I’ve waited for my whole life.

VOICE: You’re welcome. If I may offer one last observation and one last piece of advice …

ME: What? What?

VOICE: You only call God perfect vis-a-vis your congenitally low standards of perfection. You’re always searching for the perfect romantic getaway, the perfect cup of coffee. What is that?

ME: And the advice?

VOICE: You people.

ME: Yes?

VOICE: The human race.

ME: Yes? What? What about us?

VOICE: You really took a wrong turn at monotheism.

Then the voice was gone. That was it.

Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, members of the press, madam court stenographer, random citizens who have nothing better to do on a Tuesday morning, Uncle Howard, bailiffs, live-streaming folks of the internet — by reshaping the way people pray, and empowering worshippers, we’ll provide online solutions to crises of faith. With user-generated content, self-publishing and uploading of commandments, our omniscient God will also be bite-sized and high-speed and available 24/7 in real time. He’ll be personalised and Everlasting, meaning He can be duplicated with zero generation loss. With a high demand and low overheads, we’ll be cashflow-positive almost from day one. We’ll be taking our God to market within a year. He will be the gold standard of new gods, but also a gateway god to other gods. Every year we will increase server-access bandwidth to allow maximum web traffic and uninterrupted streaming of the Lord’s vlogs, both sacred and profane; our new bible will be mixed media — video, audio files of eternal silence, text. We have gone from the infinite being written on scrolls to the ability to infinitely scroll through content feeds. You, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, worshippers and content creators, whom God has created to create Him, YOU are the first cause. Congratulations! Time immemorial begins NOW! Praise the Lord! Compliment Him! Just tell Him you approve! Be an intelligent designer today. Narcissistic gratification guaranteed or your money back. Yes, I realise a murder trial is a strange place to pitch this once-in-a-lifetime offer but Yahweh, Himself once merely one of a dozen ancient desert gods, knows the meaning of the word aspirational. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, live-streaming people of the internet, you who ask for a cigarette then tuck it away behind your ear for later, you men and women who say ‘welcome to the real world’ whenever something shit happens to a friend, you who do taxes in public libraries or conduct job interviews in chain coffee houses, you twentysomethings with mysterious incomes, you people so depressed and solipsistic you take the big bang as a personal slight, you Pseuodosapiens, Businesssapiens, Thinklings, Saddults and the Clinically Frustrated, who seem weirdly super-keen to hurry up and get to the post-apocalypse recovery effort, you who cry ‘Dehumanised’ when treated like cattle but say ‘I’m only human!’ when you act like gorillas, you who sidestep history and only bear witness in your peripheral vision, for whom human progress means putting genocide on the backburner, you who think taking your last breath with someone else in the house eases the loneliness of dying, who in bars feel women’s pulses erotically like sleazy doctors, who are sad that whoring is no longer part of the contemporary vernacular, who are either wafer-thin or terribly fat and accused your parents of child abuse if they said no to you and who are living under the spectre of the greatest fear in a liberal democracy — fear of your own body weight — you citizens of IVF nations with your plague of twins, you who are truly longing for salvation yet have settled for makeovers, you who for some strange reason have decided that it is some kind of human right to do better than the previous generation even if the previous generation did just fine, you who don’t realise that being busy is incontrovertible evidence that you’ve taken life too seriously, and who wonder what’s the use of life if you don’t get to keep it when you die, you who want to travel to the sexual ends of the earth but don’t even know where your next embrace is coming from, you who feel overtaxed and late to the party, and for whom self-fulfilment is your goal thus dissatisfaction your destiny! Before you go back to your low-protein high-carbohydrate lives and watch your buttered toast land butter-side down on your grubby carpets, call 1800 222 222 or go to my website, thenewpantheonishere.com, for your no-risk trial and you’ll get ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE a Touched By An Angel Hand Sanitiser (retail value of $19.99). ACT NOW. And please find me not guilty of all charges.