It's a Good Thing I'm Not God

The news is not good, is it? There's trouble brewing all over the world, enough trouble to keep all the 24-hour-news reporters hustling to gather every fact and opinion and regurgitate it to us whatever time of day we tune in via our media of choice. It's enough to give a sane person ulcers or inspire a crazy one to go out and buy an assault rife.

No school shooting or other mass murder today? Wait for it; it won't be long now. In the meantime local newscasters will keep you up to date on the latest drug-related, drive-by shooting in the nearest city. Or the domestic violence in your own quiet suburb that ended up in the death of a family. There's plenty of that kind of news to go around.

So your crazies and your druggies and your abusive spouses keep things stirred up, and then there are your religious zealots all over the world--all sorts of sects and denominations who are convinced their way is the only right way. If they can't force their fellow citizens to follow their rules through political means, they sometimes become angry and self-righteous enough to take matters into their own hands and kill the dissenters themselves. They're that certain that God (or Allah or any of His other names) has their backs.

Right now the latest upheaval in Iraq has many of us rightly concerned. We don't want to lose any more of our young men or spend any more of our tax dollars on wars, and we're worried about how this is all going to shake out. I wonder if peace of mind is as important to God as it is to some of the rest of us.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I have an idea. Some say God created everything, right? And they say He is omniscient in that He (like Santa) "knows if you've been good or bad" and plenty of other stuff, too. What if God were to retrofit the earth with a modular anti-gravity system? Then, if He decided there were too many troublemakers in any given area (let's say some Middle-Eastern hot spot or, I don't know, the right side of the aisle in Congress), He could flip a switch to turn off the gravity supplying that little section, and everybody there would simply float off into the atmosphere: no fuss, no muss, no bloody bodies to show us on TV. Instead, we might see Anderson Cooper on the screen talking to Wolf Blitzer: "Uh...wait...what happened to Mosul and Tikrit?" And Wolf would reply, "I don't know, Anderson, it's the most bizarre thing. People were fighting there a minute ago, but it appears that everyone's vanished. Wait, what are those things floating way up in the sky?"

Granted, there'd be some collateral damage--there always is in human-instigated wars and conflicts, too--but the important thing is that God would be the one making the decisions; it wouldn't be necessary for you or me or some non-omniscient, elected government officials to institute violent action on His behalf.

Personally, I think this idea is worth His consideration. It would definitely improve the tone of the news coverage.