I responded, "My answer would be that the meaning of life is to be found in the idea that all these people who go around asking the question and searching for the meaning of life must really piss God off. Here, he or she has created this wonderful mystery, which is supposed to be thoroughly enjoyed but thoroughly unknown, and people keep going around trying to know it."
I don't know if she thought I was serious or not, but I was. And my hypothesis may well piss off a lot of people, but I don't think God will mind at all. Thinking further, but I don't pretend to have covered all the possibilities, I came up with a few more human stupidities that probably piss God off.
Six Things That Piss God Off
1. Trying to find out the answers to questions we were never intended to ask.
Life is a magical, mystery tour, and if you can't just enjoy not knowing why we were created and all the specific details, then you're missing the point.
2. Messing up the perfect planet he/she created for us.
On the one hand, if we accept the almighty as all-powerful, we have to believe this old world of ours is indestructible. But not for lack of our trying. I suppose God sees us all as spiritual infants, who given a wondrous toy as a gift, must then expend a lot of energy trying to break it, or take it apart.
3. Human fears, taboos, distortions, and ignorance about sex.
Okay, God created everything, but the higher power so many people profess to believe in must have really have felt good about some very special divine creations, like chocolate and sex.
For 200 years, we pretty much managed to ruin what are now being revealed as the amazing healing powers of raw cocoa by adding milk, fats, fillers, and then heating it up to destroy 80% of the antioxidants. But sex is something we've been messing up for millennia. At the very heart of the gift of life, the force which created us all, created by God to give us pleasure and a taste of the divine in being able to create another human being. So we repress our natural desires, we try to get others to do the same, we do everything possible to make sex unattractive, unnatural, unobtainable, and unpleasant. I'm surprised God hasn't tried to take this gift back by making all of our private parts just fall off.
4. The establishment of religions.
Maybe it was celestial punishment for some major transgression, like the Tower of Babel. Here God creates life on this amazing planet, and gives us everything we need to make it wonderful, and what do we do? We create thousands of entities to supposedly worship the creator, each with its own interpretation of how and why it all came to be. Each with its misperceived and misguided assertion that it is the one true church--sometimes to the point of killing members of churches with opposing answers. So use your God-given intelligence for a moment. Do you really believe this omnipotent presence appreciates this polyglot substitute for spirituality? And out of all this hodgepodge, has personally selected one church and one religion to be the true be-all and end-all of human salvation? C'mon now, even God must have some sense of the ridiculousness of all this.
5. The Treatment of Women.
So God creates man, in the form of Adam. And then, realizing some important things were left out of this first prototype, as is true with most great creations, creates woman, in the form of Eve. Except, as a thinking, feeling entity unlike a new toaster or computer, human males immediately become jealous of this new version and spend the rest of history demeaning, abusing, and disavowing the obvious superiority of this superior species of human. And many of the world's religions have aided and abetted in this abuse.
6. Attempting To Read God's Mind.
This has been a problem throughout human history, but has become endemic in recent decades.
So many humans claiming to know exactly what God would think or do in certain situations. Clerics are the most offensive perpetrators of this, but it has filtered down to the lay public. So you're up there in your heavenly abode, trying to enjoy the fruits of your labor, despite how often those human fruits have disappointed you. And you begin to hear the cacophony of voices purporting and pretending to represent your views on every issue possible. One group says you will reward those who blow themselves and a large group of innocent bystanders up, another says you only will accept members of their church into a life beyond death, still another says women must be obedient and subservient to men, another says one race is inferior to others, and yet another says their winning their war is all part of your plan as is their enemy losing that war. It goes on and on, this mind reading act. And forget about trying to convince any of these poor unfortunates that they have it all wrong. It's like trying to convince a stalker that you don't really love them or appreciate the attention.
Maybe it's just time for another good flood. (oops, sorry Nashville).
Jerry
(comments welcome, as long as they don't involve any cross burning or voodoo dolls.)
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