IF YOU THINK YOU WANT GOD, AND I’M PRETTY CERTAIN that is what I’m after, it’s very difficult to know where on earth (if that’s the right place to start looking) you might find him. You’re unlikely to run into God in Sainsbury’s and even for lapsed believers I don’t think there’s been a single instance of him having popped up on Facebook with a ‘Hey, remember me? Don’t look at my profile pic … We’ve all aged sooooo much. Watcha up to? See any of the old gang? Had a text from St Peter but … Anyway, get in touch, we’ll have a beer. Remember the song? Chuggalug Chuggalug …’
In the olden days God was about all the time. You barely had to sneeze and God would pop up in one form or another and give you instructions as to what you might do next. There was a time when one could barely move for burning bushes, visions, visitations and heavenly interventions. People popped to the market and as they struggled back with their reusable hessian bags of locally sourced fruit and veg, who should they run into? God, floating down to check in on his new creation. I can understand God’s enthusiasm for the new project. I’m the same when I plant stuff in my garden. I’m a menace for it, nipping back every five minutes to have a look and see how the tomato seedlings are progressing. Any new shoots on the runner beans? Slugs been at it? Birds have probably eaten the lot by now … Come the autumn, half of it’s gone to seed and most of the fruit hasn’t made it past green and bullet-hard or it’s been missed and become a pulpy dollop of snotty rot on the vine. After the first wave of enthusiastic fiddling and interference, I’m sorry to say I lose interest. There seems to be a better than average chance that God is the same gardener I am. I’ve a horrible feeling this may be autumn and the heavenly father’s wellies are nowhere to be seen.
God hasn’t visited Earth for a very long time. Sure, there are odious bigots like Stephen Green from Christian Voice who say the floods in New Orleans were God wiping away the sins of America’s Sodom and Gomorrah and an alarming number of American Christians with similar theories about the 26 December 2006 tsunami in south-east Asia, but no one sane thinks that. Sometimes people claim some sort of visitation but it usually amounts to little more than a bit of bread with a faintly Jesus-shaped image on it or a sweet potato that looks like Mary as long as you ignore all but one bit of it, in a certain light, from the right angle, if you’re pissed and lonely. Muslims tend not to find images of the Prophet Mohammed in slices of bread. Thank goodness, too – no one wants to see Hovis the subject of a mental jihad because they accidentally baked a forbidden image into a loaf of malted granary.
Perhaps with the advent of cheap travel God no longer chooses to spend His holidays here. I’d hate to think of Earth being like some sort of musty and neglected Butlins, which no longer holds any appeal for God because He’s realized that for the same money He can have two weeks all-inclusive in some exotic Galaxy far far away. If our home is God’s Butlins then I hope He remembers fondly the exceptional value and entertainment we provided with our hilarious knobbly knees and old-fashioned singalongs. It seems more likely that God viewed Earth as a business destination and now He’s either done a merger and moved on or He thinks there’s no future in the humans market. Whatever the case, He doesn’t come and see us any more and that’s a shame. I say it’s a shame because if I were Him (and despite the boorish over-confidence afforded by a private education I make NO such claim), I would come down, just once should do it, and make it plain to everyone that I existed and that the correct path for those who wish to spend eternity with Me is to become (insert whichever religious viewpoint you find most appealing here). Druid?
Some people have suggested God no longer comes to see us because He’s dead. Maybe He is, but if the God of Abraham ever existed then a large part of His appeal seems to be predicated around the idea that He is eternal. Evidence suggests otherwise, but the evidence for or against God’s existence or the promise of his eternal presence doesn’t concern me as much as the need for Him to have done so. That fascinates me, and the possibility of it and the recognition of my desire for that sort of heavenly reassurance resonates right through my atheism. You can’t prove for sure that God does or doesn’t exist. I concur with the theory that the burden of proof lies with the believer, not the sceptic, but it’s very unlikely ever to be a provable thing one way or the other. That being the case, is there a more interesting question to ask? I hope so.
Where is God? I know how to get next to God – you do that through cleanliness. I know how to meet my maker – you do that by picking a fight with someone devoutly religious. God is everything or God is nothing. Well, if He’s everything in the truest sense, He’s also nothing, and then I’m confused. Even a narrower take on that notion still makes God a bogey and a virus and a parasite living in a child’s eye and that, to me, diminishes Him. I can’t buy into the notion that God is everything and everything is as it’s meant to be. This is because I arrogantly believe the world to be an imperfect and improvable place in need of our effort. A lot of the time it’s chaos down here and if there is a plan, it’s a shitty one. Maybe I’m wrong, but whoever it was that planned dementia, childhood leukaemia, AIDS, cancer, malaria and for BAE Systems to be one of the UK’s biggest exporters needs to take their plan back to their celestial drawing board and have a think.
It’s been suggested to me that I judge God by too many of my own criteria. I wrongly assume that because I have created an idealized moral code for the world, it must be the right one. I am told sometimes the presumption that God should meet with my approval is not the point of God. He sees all, does all, created all and knows all. He knows the dire suffering that is so commonplace in the poorest areas of the world is no more than they can cope with. It serves some higher purpose only He understands. Of course, empathy makes me imagine how I would feel if fortunes were reversed and I found myself living on the edge of starvation in a shanty town while a very confused Kenyan man tuts and paces up and down the corridor of a Wandsworth semi waiting for the bloody dishwasher man to come. When I imagine myself trying to manage in extreme and challenging conditions, I see terrible outcomes. I’m not used to it. I’ve been to Wolverhampton but apart from that I’m totally ill equipped. I’m ‘Westernized’, comfortable and weak. Leave me in sub-Saharan Africa without a mosquito net and water and (fat reserves aside) I’d be a hopeless wobbly wreck within minutes. I’d give it all of three days before I’d become little more than an additional burden on the people who live there. Perhaps they might put together some sort of telethon fronted by Lenny Henry to save my sobbing white ass. Who knows? But if my empathy gland is too swollen, if my assumptions about the world are too fixed or just plain wrong, if my morality is not supposed to apply to God and His divine higher plan … if all that’s true, then why in God’s name did God make me like this? If He’s all-knowing and has a plan, then I’m right to think the way I do about Him. I’m part of God’s natural order. My scepticism, my cynicism, the questions I have for God – they’re all just as they’re meant to be. God made me mind about what He does. God made me hate the versions of Him I’ve been offered so far. God knew I wouldn’t believe in Him and that I’d find most of the routes to His house impassably thorny and distasteful. God is everything? God sees all? Knows all? Created all? Really? God, I need to talk to you, because this is a shitty and mean trick you’re playing. Now, where are you? Hmm? Seriously now. Come out, come out, wherever you are …
Nothing so far. I’m still searching. I have been told that God lives in Heaven and the only way there is through His son Jesus Christ … That’s not helpful because I’ve no more idea where Jesus is than I do his neglectful father. I don’t think it’s too much to say that as dads go, God was not a good one. Personally I’d put him up there with Josef Fritzl, but once you become a dad you do find yourself more judgemental about other parents. Granted there was no ‘Fathers For Justice’ movement back in Jesus’ day, but even if there had been I doubt the heavenly father would have popped on a Batman costume and climbed up the side of that tower in Babel to get his boy back. My son once asked me why I worked away from home so often. I felt a sharp sting of regret and sadness as I tried to explain to him where I went and why. It was a painful moment, but it’s not a patch on being asked, ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ I mean, ouch. What a question. ‘Sorry, son … erm, Daddy’s been really busy with work. You got the Action Man I sent, right?’
God is in your heart. I’ve heard that a few times but He doesn’t show up on a CAT scan, and open-heart surgery to see if He’s in there seems dramatic and dangerous. Sure it might end up with my death and then I’d get to meet Him anyway, but that’s not the point. I had a heart murmur once. If that was God then I wish He’d speak up. I can’t bear mumblers. I want to know where to find God while I’m still alive, and I can’t find Him anywhere. He’ll probably be in the last place I look. That’s where things usually are.
The point is, if God’s here somewhere, my wife will know where He is. She knows where everything is. She does a number of things extremely well, but the location of missing items is her speciality. She’s like a sort of domestic sat nav device. She doesn’t like it when I call her TomTom. For a while she was excellent at remembering where I was supposed to be, and held in her head an astonishing number of addresses and contact details for our friends. All this, and I get to have sex with her. As nicknames go, Filofux went down even worse than TomTom. These elevated powers my wife possesses to locate missing stuff could be a form of voodoo bestowed upon her by a wild Haitian priestess. An exciting and exotic thought, though locating God through the powers of voodoo is almost certainly frowned upon by the sort of people who do frowning upon things so very very well. If God’s anywhere nearby, He’ll be in the second drawer down, I suspect. My wife seems to locate most stuff in the second drawer down, though, mysteriously, it’s never there when I look. Voodoo … My wife has no more idea where God is than I do. If she can’t find Him, then He’s properly lost.
If you can’t get to God through religion, then it’s hard to know where to look. I could go to a church, mosque or temple and see if God’s really in there somewhere, but I don’t think He is. I feel more conscious of the idea of God in a holy place, but this always leads quickly to my feeling more certain than ever there isn’t a God and never has been. Often when I visit a church, or better still a cathedral, I am truly and profoundly awed by the grandeur of the place. The towering ornate ceilings, the whispering enclaves, the chapels inviting your exploration to touch the cold, exquisite stonework, the solemnity of quiet in a place capable of amplifying the still small voice of calm into a cry to the heavens. The soft flickery glow of a candle lit in remembrance of a lost friend. The beatific face of a sole worshipper in the tidal swell of empty pews tilted up towards the warmth of a stained-glass window, eyes misted as the journey into faithful meditation soothes the crumpled brow … It moves me and then I wonder to myself – isn’t this massive, imposing, empty building missing the point? Is this really what God wants? Is this what Jesus was talking about? A great, big, expensive, pointy, inspiring but usually empty building? I hope not. I’ve enjoyed a lot of churches I’ve seen, though I’ve learned that, like laws and sausages, the less you know about how they were made and by whom the better. There’s barely a decent cathedral in the land that didn’t involve poor people giving their time and effort for nothing but the promise of eternal salvation. That’s all very well, but the people making the promises were in no position to do so. They didn’t know they could offer that. The descendants of these people are now bankers. Most big religious buildings involved exploitative building methods and dead construction workers. The Health and Safety officer was a priest telling people that to plummet from the roof to the floor below would constitute a great honour and the Lord would look down on them favourably. Then He’d post the video up on YouTube.
I don’t think God’s in the big cathedral, and even if He is, that’s not where I want to meet Him. It’s too quiet and too removed from the life I lead. If I met God I’d want to be excited by it and do some shouting. Wow! It wouldn’t do at all to meet God, to stand face to face before the Lord and, before you could begin to express your excitement at this defining event, to be shushed into embarrassed silence by a lady with a cat’s bottom where her mouth should be. That’s not the God I’m looking for, and if that’s the only place you can find Him then I’ll go without. Thank you, and here’s a quid for the new roof.
I’d like to visit New Zealand one day, but if I have to swim there I’ll probably not bother with it. That journey seems dangerous and long and who knows if I’d even survive it. As it stands, the long flight, the time change and the over-representation of backpacks and extreme sports enthusiasts are enough to put me off making the voyage to Kiwi-land anyway. I’m not a lazy man but the route to God through conventional religious observation is a swim to New Zealand as far as I’m concerned. I want God, but if the only way to have a belief system is to hand my life over to people whose politics make me shudder with disgust, I’d rather stagger my way through this existence without Him, thanks.
There are, of course, many places of worship where devotional practice is not hushed and maudlin but rather a no-holds-barred celebration of the coming of the Lord. The gospel and revival church gatherings I’ve seen have been alive with excitement and praise. Even as a posh English white man it’s hard not to leap headlong into the upcurrent of these powerful and sincere meetings of the faithful. Hands clapping awkwardly and always out of time, head swaying to the soul-shaking harmonies of a gospel choir in full voice, mouth open waiting for the Lord to enter me and have me speak in tongues and pass out on the floor. It’s exciting and happy and I want in … until you talk to the individuals involved. Once the singing subsides and the red palms of hands clapped in reverence and celebration have turned back to pink, you will find these are places where bigotry most vile is as alive and vibrant as the services themselves. Great music thrives in many Christian churches, but so does illogical, unchallengeable hate, fear and selected ignorance.
The way Muslims worship has a profound and moving devotion to it. The preparation, the washing and gathering together to face Mecca and literally prostrate oneself before Allah speaks to a passion I wish I could find in myself. It also speaks to a rebellious defiance that insists any God who took the time to create me would not be so vain as to require that five times a day I stop what I am doing to say thank you and lie about on the floor with my shoes off. I can do that at home with a box set of The West Wing and a beanbag. I’ve seldom been inside a mosque. The impressive ones do some of what cathedrals do for me. It’s easy to be awed by them, and to admire elements of the commitment made by worshippers inside them, but none persuades me that Allah is alive and Al Qur’an is the answer to my questions. Men in one room, women in another … not for my God, thank you. Frankly there’s not enough music either.
Jewish temple worship is based on a version of the Old Testament, so, to be blunt, even if they were giving away pie at the door and the ceremony included letting loose to the strains of a deep James Brown soul classic and God showed up every Friday to say, ‘Yep, you’re doing great, kids, I love you and here’s a present’ – it would still hold the same appeal for me as an appointment with a dental hygienist whose wife I’d been caught shtupping the day before. Jewish temple and their reverence for the Torah make me turn on my heels as quick as you can say, ‘Hey, but Neil Diamond’s a Jew.’ I don’t care, the God of the Old Testament wouldn’t like me and I know I don’t like Him. This is not where He lives.
So where do you find God if you can’t go to church?
In my search for divine guidance, I’ve checked in all the most obvious places. They don’t do God in John Lewis. I asked and was met with a very blank stare and the offer of a squirt of ‘Something-or-other’ for men. She blasted a mist of something sickly at my wrist, missed and soaked me in it. I don’t mind people thinking I’m odd or even crazy. I have a view of the world framed by my experiences and I’m ashamed of very few of them. Crazy is fine, but smelly sort of bothered me. I only asked if they thought God would be down in household items or whether he’d been moved to the Christmas department, what with the family connection and all. Next thing I knew I’d been squirted and I smelled like Peter Stringfellow’s neck. You cross the line from charmingly eccentric into dangerous and untrustworthy nutter if you’re strange and smelly. It’s a shame neither John Lewis nor Selfridges do God. There are plenty of people who would no doubt put Him on their wedding list. Anything to guarantee that church venue and a place in the local school. I decided that God was unlikely to be available in ‘all good stores now’. That said, I was surprised to see how much religious insignia was available on the high street if you don’t mind looking like you’re a magnet who’s just been dunked in a tub of cheap metallic tat. River Island and Topshop looked like they were expecting Mr T from The A-Team to pop in and stock up on crucifixes.
I checked on eBay to see if anyone was selling an old God they didn’t need. Plenty of people have abandoned their faith and perhaps one of these desolate lost souls had considered its resale value. The seller would have to photograph their God for sale, so I didn’t expect to see much from apostate Muslims, but surely, given the number of Gods once devoutly worshipped and fought over who’ve now been abandoned for the latest absolute, unerring truth, there had to be some unwanted deity on offer to the highest bidder. I was disappointed. There was someone who looked like they might be about to let God go, then at the last minute they pulled out. I’ve no idea which faith that might have been … Catholic perhaps?
I suppose you wouldn’t want to get God off the internet anyway, would you? For a start, it would be so hard to know what state the God you were buying was in anyway. Of the people who shop online, I would guess all but a very few will have made internet purchases that, on arrival, turned out to bear closer relation to ambition than to the actual size you were after. I am primarily referring to clothes here, although I suspect the same rules apply to sex toys too. You almost certainly couldn’t trust the seller in any case. How do you establish and then maintain your eBay trusted-seller rating if you’ve already sold one monotheistic deity to someone else?
If God were for sale on eBay, I’d have to bid against some of the large faith organizations and most of them have more money than they know what to do with. Instinct says they could spend it on the poor and needy, but as I said they literally have so much they don’t know what to do with it. In any case, if the Catholic Church wanted to buy God, they could probably afford to buy Him direct from the seller with enough left over for a really lovely new pair of red shoes for the Pope.
Even if you did manage to find the right God at the right price from the right seller, you’d then have to get your deity delivered. ‘Collection only’ might be an answer, but if it’s collection from a place of worship I probably don’t want that God anyway. You couldn’t very well turn up at a synagogue and tell them Barry said it was cool if I came and took God out the back way. If He’s not to be collected from a place of worship, then where? And how did they get hold of God anyway? What qualifies it as a worthwhile deity? It might be knackered. I don’t want to turn up at a warehouse and have a pair of ill-fitting overalls shuffle into a back room, only to return with a crumpled cardboard container, a clipboard and a mumbled ‘Sign here, please’, then watch him bump my parcel-taped packet through the hatch, the contents of which are to become the ordering principle for the rest of my existence. It’s all too risky. I don’t expect that would be a serviceable God as we would recognize Him anyway.
There’s a good chance that any God bought off the internet would end up in the box with my video camera, electronic picture frame, MP3 player, mobile phone, leather coat and signed INXS record waiting to be put back on eBay. Return whence you came, minidisk player. I cast thee out, USB-powered desktop hoover device. Back, back, I say, thou slightly wonky Ra the Sun God. I haven’t got round to selling these items back yet because I’m a bit scared of that sort of thing and I might not get what they are worth. Much better, then, to leave them lying in a plastic tub gathering dust and obsolescence. It turns out I have the same view of unused electrical items as the church has of reform. Who knew?
You couldn’t get God delivered, because that would mean that at some stage He’d fall into the hands of the Post Office. I don’t care if your atheism falls on the cynical side of Richard Dawkins. No one really wants to see God fall into the hands of the Post Office. Many have argued convincingly for the end of faith altogether, but not like that. Not for all human belief in the supernatural to cease in an instant because God got ‘lost’ in the bowels of a sorting office or conveniently dropped into the Postie’s ‘special’ pile with cash-stuffed birthday cards and missing rent cheques. If God came to us care of the Post Office, they’d almost certainly bend Him. God doesn’t like to be bent. God doesn’t seem to want anyone to be bent. I’ve heard His followers be very specific on this point. It wouldn’t matter how clear the bright red ‘Do Not Bend’ sticker was, if you weren’t in when they tried to deliver God, they’d fold the bugger in two and drive Him through your letterbox with enough force to take the door off its hinges. You’d come home to find God lying whimpering and crumpled on your doormat with the pizza menus and the ‘Polish Amelia – make good cleening howse’ card.
You’d hope that most people might choose to send God by recorded delivery, but then you’d have to wait in between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m., not daring to move more than an inch from the brushes on the letter flap in case you missed it. After time, the demands of a full bladder would tear you away for those few critical seconds and sure enough, as you sprint back towards the pair of deep, buttock-shaped indentations in the coconut matting, you’d see it. That little red, grey and white papery bastard that spells hours of frustration and despair.
‘We tried to deliver God but you were out.’
No!!!! I was having a wee! I was gone for less than a minute!
Tried? Really? You ‘tried’ to deliver my package, did you? How hard did you try exactly? You didn’t ring the pissing bell, did you? That, to me, would seem to be the entry level of effort. The step one of ‘tried to deliver your package’. Extend the finger, lean in, locate button, advance and stiffen finger upon contact with bell/buzzer, then depress for between two and four seconds. There, trying, isn’t it? Perhaps a knock too, or is that asking too much for grasping little mitts that can feel a gift voucher through four layers of envelope and card and have it away before the strains of ‘Happy Birthday to you …’ have subsided into embarrassment. Having made the heroic effort to ring the bell, how about, in the spirit of ‘trying’ to make the delivery, waiting more than the standard 0.0002 seconds before waddling off up the road in such a hurry. I can only presume that failing to accurately match up the number at the top of the address on the envelope with the one on the door takes more time than we’ve given it credit for, and this is the reason Postie can’t wait for more than a few seconds to see if anyone answers. How dare you go on strike? Better pay and conditions? Fine, have them, have it all, deliver the post from a silk and gold sedan chair for all I care, but deliver the post. Twice, preferably, like you used to. And while we’re at it … pick up those red rubber bands you’ve dropped. It looks like a sunburnt snake is shedding its elasticated skin in instalments on our pavement most mornings. My children believe that red rubber bands are a type of naturally occurring flora that only blooms after the shuffling feet of a daydreaming postal worker have germinated the rubber seed in London’s streets. Never trust a man who can’t whistle ‘Whistle while you work’ while he works.
God forbid the Tories get their wet dream fulfilled and knacker another public service by selling it to their mates. That way we would all have the right to have God not delivered by a deliverer of our choice and all for just £85 per letter.
I think it’s fair to say I have had some issues with the Post Office. Issues I now realize I probably shouldn’t keep mentioning on BBC Radio 4. All my letters smell of piss. Is that normal? No, I don’t think it is. I refuse to believe that everybody who writes to me is individually pissing on my letters. Although, when I think about it, I suppose it is a possibility. But that’s not the point. I don’t want God, in whichever of His many forms he chooses, to come to us ‘care of the Post Office’, bent double, late, with a red rubber band round Him, in an envelope, pissy, ripped or otherwise.
Having pondered where else I might persuade the Lord to make Himself known to me and drawn yet another spiritual blank, I decided to put a personals ad in the Daily Telegraph.
PERSONALS … Would like to meet …
Boy seeks deity for walks, chats and possibly more. Non-smoker, GSOH essential.
One assumes God is a non-smoker. I mean, He knew how damaging tobacco was before He’d even decided to create cigarettes, marketing and Big Tobacco. His is a high-pressure job though, so perhaps, since the ban on smoking indoors, He can be seen awkwardly avoiding St Peter’s gaze outside the pearly gates having a quick puff.
Usually in a personals ad the ‘possibly more’ means ‘I’d like to have sex with you’. The ‘possibly’ is also an opt-out in case the person who answers is horrifically unattractive. To write ‘I’d like to have sex with you’ would certainly be more upfront, but I don’t think the Telegraph would be comfortable with that and it spoils the charming allure of the coded personals ad flirt. Even the printed word ‘bi-curious’ is enough to get most men fizzy if the hotel room’s lonely enough. I don’t wish to have sex with God, He’s screwed enough of humanity already and frankly I’d feel cheap. The ‘possibly more’ in this context refers to the notion that I could become quite dependent on the relationship over time and look to Him for more than just chats and strolls. If, after a respectful period of courtship, the friendship leads to some kissing and possibly even some light petting, then so be it.
I chose to place my ad in the Telegraph because I think if God reads any newspaper it’s probably the Daily Telegraph, isn’t it? He’s the only entity large enough to be able to hold the bloody thing without needing to put an extension on his house. I mean, He made the Sun, but I don’t think He reads it, do you? I don’t think God reads the Guardian either. It would be very disappointing for religious people to get to Heaven and find wallcharts of interesting cheeses and charts of England’s Kings and Queens hung up all over the place. So I chose the Telegraph. They were slightly baffled by my phone call, but given that they regularly have announcements in the births/deaths/weddings column like Torquil Fartguard-Caffingham-Smear is delighted to announce his engagement to his thoroughbred hunter (16 hands) Lullabel-Blackshirt to be wed in his stables on January 4th 2011, I didn’t think they’d be too perplexed by my spiritual quest for an imaginary friend.
So up it went. Boy seeks deity for walks, chats and possibly more. I got no response at first, so I put it in again the next week and paid for an extra line. Likes: taking metaphors too literally. Dislikes: gays. I had one almost plausible response but it gave Croydon as the address … I thought He’s quite unlikely to have chosen to live in Croydon.
So it’s hard to know where to find God. As soon as you step away from the conventional religious route, then you’re very much on your own, with your best hope of finding Him being luck. This seemed very unlikely to deliver because I’m not usually a lucky person and God hasn’t been seen wandering about on Earth since about the first third of the Old Testament.
At one stage on my search I was offered a religious sat-nav system at a car boot sale. It wasn’t quite what I was after. When I turned it on it just kept on saying, ‘I am the way, the truth and the light.’ That’s all very well but I was trying to get to Cricklewood. When I reprogrammed the destination to take me to Heaven, the soothing voice said repeatedly, ‘At the end of your life … say sorry.’ I would, but who knows when the end of my life will be? I couldn’t bear to be one of those people who spend their whole time apologizing. I’m sorry but I just couldn’t. I don’t think the spiritual sat nav really exists but it would be an excellent gimmick for any church seeking to make a few extra dollars from the gullible.
Plenty of people decide not to bother searching for God at all but instead indulge the desire to have something to believe in by worshipping stuff. Steve Jobs at Apple Mac doesn’t exactly make false idols but he merely has to shove the letter ‘i’ on the front of a new thing and most of us are on our knees in wide-eyed adoration and worship. We are iSuckers. It’s no coincidence that the iCon for this false idolatry is an apple with a bite taken out. Come on, Eve, take a nibble of this iPad and experience original sin at the stroke of a finger.
I was going to get an iPhone to see if there was an ‘app’ for God in there. For everything else ‘there’s an app for that’ so I had an iThought, why not God? Good, I’ll get an iPhone then and I’ll download God straight off the apps page … Then I realized that if I got an iPhone I’d be the sort of person who has an iPhone, and frankly I’d rather be a fundamentalist Muslim. I realize there are almost certainly iPhone users reading this book. Hello, I hope you’re very happy. Pop the book down and check your messages. Got any? No? Welcome back. Remember, I’m a book … Oh, what’s the point, you’ll have lost concentration again by now.
Here’s a couple of pointers for iPhone users. 1: Grow up. 2: You just bought one, you didn’t invent it. OK? I’ll tell you what, here’s an ‘app’ for you. Why don’t you see if you can leave it in your pocket for more than a minute? Apply that application and see if your real-life friends start coming back to you. You know, human friends, real people, with meat and skin on rather than an avatar and a 140-character update beamed through space concerning their fascinating day shopping for toilet paper.
In case you’re dismissing me as a Luddite, you’re wrong. I’m not scared of iPhones. I like them. I think they’re beautiful; I think the technology’s absolutely breathtaking. It’s exciting; who knows where it will go next? I don’t communicate with my friends by telegram and carrier pigeon. I’m into innovation and I’m excited by the fact that we live now in the age of communication. Lucky us. If I didn’t think I’d become one of you, I would get an iPhone. I know you’ve been enjoying yourselves with them and they’re amazing, and look at this – it fires angry birds at pigs and they’re beautiful and here’s the stockmarket price and they’re amazing and look my one’s making a light-sabre noise and everything. But you must accept the fact that while you hunch over your little handheld device, thrilling at the marvel of being able to scroll through screen after screen of improving and enlightening information with just the swish of your finger, to everybody else you just look as if you’re trying to wank off a gerbil. Trust me, once that image is in your head you’ll never see iPhone users in the same way again. Every time I see some finger-wiggler gawping into his fist on the train and see the concentration on his face as his wrist gyrates softly to and fro, all I can see in my head is a little mouse, lying on its back, being pleasured by a numpty. That’s the trouble with the iPhone. It’s entirely wasted on the kind of people that want one.
Now there’s the iPad too. The guinea-pig-sized pleasuring device. No, thank you. With the exception of Stephen Fry, who one assumes knows what he’s doing, there really is no excuse for the iPad. If it didn’t seem too ghastly and totalitarian I’d round up the first-generation iPad owners and make them stand on a rickety scaffold as I fired angry pigs at them from a huge trebuchet. People keep telling me, ‘Yes, Marcus, but you can take a thousand books on holiday with you.’ Good. ‘You can have the entire online library right there in your hand on the beach.’ Really? Well, I learned to swim and that’s what I want from a beach, that and rock pools. So, have fun swishing through titles and trying not to go blind from the glare of the sun reflecting off the screen, I’ll be in the sea having a laugh and looking for Neptune. In fairness, I’m more likely to go searching for Nemo. The new technology may be marvellous, but excuse me if I choose not to face iMecca every twenty minutes and touch my head to the floor in praise.
There is no app for God in the iPhone anyway. I’ve checked. There’s an app with beer in it; I’ve been shown that too many times. Twice. It’s because it’s a free app, so everyone’s got it. If you know an iPhone user, give it time and soon enough they will come up to you with their iPhone and show you the hilarious beer app. On the screen it looks like the phone’s got beer inside it. It hasn’t, it’s a phone. But it looks like real golden sloshy beer that seems to move about in much the same way that real golden sloshy beer does. When the scintillator who’s digitally pouring your time down the drain shows you this brilliant ‘app’, you’re supposed to look delighted as they tip the phone and the digital liquid inside seems to disappear as if being poured out of the device. They will then place the corner of the phone against their smiling lips and tip it backwards to complete the illusion they are an utter twat. Then, as they pretend to drink, they give a mumbled commentary of what you can see isn’t happening, but would be if they’d bought a pint. ‘Ooh, ooh, look, it’s like the beer’s disappearing. Oh, there’s a beer in my phone. Oh, where’s it going? Mmmmm. Delicious …’ They take the phone away from their mouth and without a trace of embarrassment make the ‘I’ve just had a refreshingly large drink’ noise – ‘Aahhh.’ They then look, smiling and expectant, straight at your face. What are they waiting for? Congratulations, perhaps? A round of applause? A real pint? A marriage proposal? Actual beer still exists, is available and does what it has always done. To me, digital beer would seem to be somehow ‘less than’ real beer. But, you know, go ahead and knock yourselves out, you lonely, lonely freaks.
I also don’t believe that God invented man in the hope that eventually we would invent the iPhone and then finally He would be able to reveal Himself to us. Shining and full of love and pride at the marvel of His creation’s ingenuity …
‘Well done. You have passed my test. It is the iPhone. That is what humanity was for.’
And no one would notice. God would have to remount His cloud and sheepishly disappear back into the heavens alone, as every human being on Earth failed to spot He’d been to congratulate us. Stood as we were hunched and squinting at a tiny fistful of excitable rodent about to achieve yet another shudderingly good orgasm at the deft touch of a generation lost to the portable communications and gaming device. Gerbil wankers.
If you’re reading this with a BlackBerry buzzing away in your pocket, you can grow up as well. You only chose the BlackBerry so it would look like a business call was really a text inviting you for a pint and a curry. At least the iPhone users had the courage to try full-strength phone crack. BlackBerry users are still getting their fix from the digital equivalent of laudanum. Certainly if the human fingertip was two millimetres wide then the BlackBerry would come into its own, but as it is, trying to use the keyboard to type a message on a BlackBerry is like trying to do keyhole surgery with a JCB.
That last tirade seems reasonably likely to have thinned my readership down to you elite few who are not afraid of a touch of light ribbing. The rest will have thrown the book down long before this chapter anyway, as it has too many words and not enough pics and URL links to YouTube clips of fat people falling over at weddings.
What I’m stabbing at, like a fat finger at a BlackBerry keypad, is that this is a question of what and how we worship. Even the most devout atheists continue to put their praise and reverence somewhere. It might be somewhere better than the church. Maybe. There’s a fair chance it’ll be reverence for Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or someone similar. There are many people who have lost the ability to distinguish between the things you own and the person you are. The portable communications device, brilliant though it is, is often at the heart of this mistake. Those people most affected by this syndrome will have put this book to one side to send a tweet asking if anyone anywhere in the world has ever done anything as crazy as making a cup of tea but forgetting the tea bag. I know because I am one of those people. If God came to see us, the first and last I’d know about it would be a tweet with #Godcame on it.
I like my phone; I spend too long gawping at it in the hope of validation from another lost soul like me. But I don’t wish to worship my phone or have it define my existence. Anyway, I shan’t dwell further on the deification of the false idols, even if they do have an app that can find a Michelin-starred restaurant in Preston. Amazing what they can do these days.
Back to the search for God.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a documentary on the television, or perhaps heard one on the radio, about what it’s like sharing your life with somebody who has Alzheimer’s disease. It’s so very hard. For the person who has it, it’s a hellish, isolating and frightening condition, but for those who love and care for the poor soul who has Alzheimer’s, I think it’s probably worse. Because you can still physically see the person, they’re still there with you. And yet mentally and emotionally they are completely removed from you. Lost in a different world where the stark sadness of a loved one trying to reach you and to revive that human connection is a concept with no traction in your reality. It seems to me that the visible presence of the Alzheimer’s sufferer, the fact that you can still see them, that they are still there with you and they still look like they did before this disease took them to wherever it is they’ve gone – it’s that which makes the mental and emotional absence so much harder to deal with …
That’s what it’s like having a mate with an iPhone. You can still physically see them, they’re just not really there.
I can’t find God … Not in the Telegraph or the sat nav. He’s not in my heart and He’s definitely not in my head. He’s not available to download or to buy a pirated copy of and as far as I can tell He’s not tucked into the pages of any special book, just as He’s not loitering in a big imposing building waiting to be found. I really don’t know where to look, so if you’ve seen Him please let him know I was asking after Him, and then tweet me to let me know what His plans are.