Only An Atheist Can Help God Save The World

Only an atheist can help God save the world

Matthew James

Copyright 2015 Matthew James

Published by Matthew James at Smashwords

Email: onlyanatheist@mail.com

Twitter: onlyanatheist1

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Smashwords Edition, license notes

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All characters in this publication are fictitious, or based on fictitious religious characters, and any resemblance to real persons (or deities), living or dead, is purely coincidental (or for satirical purposes). None of this is meant to be taken seriously.

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Chapter One

In which we meet God and explore the situation He now finds Himself in, we find out who the power behind the throne is, and a decision is reached

Meetings, endless meetings or how God got into this situation in the first place

God was in a meeting. God was always in a meeting and these days they seemed to stretch to eternity. And God could tell you a thing or two about eternity. But these meetings were necessary.

In the beginning it was just Him and He didn’t have to suffer meetings. But the Universe had continued to expand and God, even as all-powerful as He is, had needed help. So he’d created the angels and, for a time, they had all gotten on famously. The angels had carried out His will and pitched in with all of the necessary management tasks that continued to endlessly pile up. They had even helped Him to keep His temper when it all got a bit too much.

So the angels were necessary and God had accepted that. He knew that a smaller Universe would’ve allowed Him more time by Himself but a larger one produced so many more interesting things; worlds to explore, creatures and creations to investigate.

But all of the worlds and peoples needed so much care and attention and were constantly getting into difficulty when He wasn’t around to supervise them directly. God did understand the difficulties that some of His subjects experienced. It wasn’t easy being mortal. Take the humans for example: they just couldn’t get on. He didn’t blame them; they had evolved from apes and had all the baggage that came with that. He had tried talking to them. He had tried making them see reason. But it hadn’t worked.

And then He’d lost His temper and there’d been plagues and famines and floods and so on, and so He and the angels had established The Committee, a group of His closest angels that worked to ensure that He would never again be able to ravage a world and punish its population without first consulting them to ensure that He wasn’t overreacting. And it had worked. God hadn’t ravaged the Earth, or any of the other worlds, in a long time.

He was forced to slow down, take a breath, assess the situation and see if His reaction was fair and just. And He wanted to be a just God. That was His aim as creator and caretaker and with the help of the angels He’d been just that; a more even-tempered and all round calmer deity.

The downside was that The Committee had imposed an incredible amount of bureaucracy into their, and His, lives. There were so many departments that it made God’s head spin and He wondered where they had all come from. Each wanted His attention and input which resulted in Him sitting through a great many dull meetings. The angels took such delight in the tedium of bureaucracy and schedules and paperwork, and He didn’t understand why. They were perfect bureaucrats and seemed to delight in mountains of the stuff, creating more each and every day for them, and Him, to fill out. There were forms required to perform almost every action that He could think of. When He’d created the angels He’d designed them to be efficient and a little bureaucratic. A bit too damned bureaucratic if you asked Him, not that anyone did that anymore. Despite His input, all decisions seemed to be made by angels in other departments and Metatron, the chief angel and head of The Committee, was the worst of them all.

God tuned back into the meeting that He was attending just to see what was happening. This particular meeting was with the DWFMB. That’s the Department for the Wellbeing of Formerly Mortal Beings. They were airing a laundry list of grievances from those who had arrived in Heaven but found it not to be as they’d hoped. And they expected Him to know how to fix the situation. It was somehow not enough to have actually made it into the Heavenly Realm; they wanted cable TV. God thought they should be grateful they weren’t in the pit and wondered what the consequences of sending them all there would be. They were His worshippers, not His bloody customers and He was God, the Almighty, not some customer service representative.

The angels made the situation worse by actually listening to these ingrates and God had briefly considered banishing them too, but they were all just too damn good at their jobs. He knew that He needed them and that without them things would probably fall apart. He was only one deity and there was just so much to do. So, for now, He could do nothing but endure and wait for the meeting to end. He knew that eventually it would, as all things did.

Eventually the meeting did indeed conclude and God returned to His office, a token gesture on the part of The Committee. They had also provided Him with a secretary and the current one, the latest in a lengthy list of long-suffering angels, was particularly young. He wondered who the angel had crossed to be given this assignment. The deity knew that He could get away with almost anything and so was notoriously difficult. All of His previously secretaries were desperate to please him, that was until their patience ran out, and eventually even His most ardent fan came to loathe Him. But His current secretary was relatively new and had plenty more suffering to come.

Welcome back, sir, said the angel, whose name He had not yet learned, as God rushed past him and into His office. He slumped into His chair and waited the five seconds that He knew it would take for His secretary’s head to appear in the doorway. Right on cue his head appeared.

Would you like a hot beverage, sir? asked His secretary. God’s days were filled with endless, dull meetings and the secretary was, unfortunately, responsible for arranging said meetings. Consequently, he spent a lot of time trying, and failing, to keep the deity happy and a never-ending supply of hot beverages was one way that the lad could do so. God knew that the angel was just trying to be nice but He’d had a never-ending line of sycophants over the years and couldn’t stand any of them.

No thanks, He replied. Before the angel could disappear God anxiously asked has that report arrived yet? He didn’t need to say which one. The secretary knew that God was nervously awaiting a report on the Earth situation, the outcome of which was unlikely to be good, and so he was trying to be extra nice to soften the blow.

It was widely understood that the humans were destroying their wonderful world. The paradise that they had been born from was being wrecked by their greed. The last report God had read had shown serious problems that were, by now, very likely worse.

The thing was that God couldn’t just decree that the world be changed and let that be that. He no longer had the power that He once did and He needed The Committee’s permission to do almost anything, even something as necessary as fixing the Earth. When the report came in He hoped that He could use it as leverage to get that world restored to its former glory, but even then there were rules to follow. He may actually have to go to the Earth and convince the population to change their ways. And convincing humans of anything was hard work, even when you were God. Then there was the mountain of paperwork that would inevitably follow. That would take an age. First, though, He'd read the report. Then He’d know where things stood and what had to be done.

Not yet, answered the secretary, nervously.

Well, please let me know when it does, God replied.

Will do, replied the angel. In the meantime you’ve got some meetings scheduled for this afternoon. At two you have the UHB, that’s the Union of Heavenly Beings, who want to talk to you about working conditions and the possibility of strikes in the near future. Then at three you have a meeting with SEE, or the Survey, Exploration and Expeditions department who need to go over the latest data from the Ignomius cluster with you. I’ve heard there are some rather interesting new fungi they’ve found during their expedition.

Fungi, thought God. They want to talk to me about fungi?

The angel continued. Then, finally, the EPD, or Environmental Planning and Development department wants an hour of your time, continued the angel, something about waste disposal? God wasn’t looking forward to that one. Where have all these departments, associations and unions come from? He wondered. And how did He get out of all the meetings that He was supposed to attend? He hadn’t yet found a way.

On second thoughts I will have that beverage, something caffeinated, said God. That’s the only way I’m going to get through these interminable meetings, He thought. The angel left to fetch His drink and God sat thinking about the good old days when He didn’t have to deal with any of this crap.

Metatron, the Chief angel

Metatron sat at his magnificent desk, sipping his chamomile tea, going over the paperwork for the day. As the chief angel, the big Cochise, he had a lot of paperwork but that was simply a part of the job. Actually that was the best part of the job. The worst part was having to frequently deal with God, who’d become even more of a problem recently.

God had ceded control of Heaven to the angels a long time ago and as far as Metatron was concerned the real power now lay with him. What God had really done was retire in all but name and His role now was confined to Grand Designer of the Universe with duties concerned with seeing that things ran smoothly without actually doing that much. God may have set things in motion but Metatron was now in charge and the angel thoroughly enjoyed his job. He was the ideal bureaucrat; officious, petty, and loved using his power as much as he could. Actually he was damn good at getting things done and Metatron knew that God needed him to ensure that things ran smoothly.

Unfortunately, Metatron now found that he had no real need for the deity and all that He did was really annoy the angel, forcing him to find more and more pointless things to keep Him busy and out of Metatron’s orbit.

Currently the angel was going through recent reports from some of the worlds that fell under their purview and editing them before they were sent to the deity. He always did this; ensured that the information God received was actually suitable for Him to see. But Metatron knew that there was only so much he could do to massage these particular numbers. They were so bad that God would likely want to intervene directly.

Earth was the problem and had been ever since the early days. Those damn humans just couldn’t follow the plan, no matter how many times they were told, and they wouldn’t fall into line whatever it cost them. They were remarkably belligerent and Metatron suspected that was what God liked about them: that they were and always had been difficult to control. But the universe was all about structured order so why would God like something that threw a wrench in the works? Metatron didn’t understand it. Actually, there was a lot about the deity that the angel couldn’t comprehend.

But all that was really beside the point as Metatron still had to decide how much of this report to show God, how much He could be allowed to see. The usual rule was as little as possible but with the current state of that world Metatron thought that it might be better to deal with this issue head on and then see what God’s reaction would be and what He would want to do. Or more importantly what God could be permitted to do. The angel had no idea that God’s reaction would be as dramatic as it was.

The report that God was waiting for

When God returned from His latest pointless meeting the report that He was expecting was sitting on His desk. He asked His secretary to bring Him some tea and then He sat and He read it. He only got a few pages in before He immediately understood that the Earth was in trouble. Between a tremendous jump in the human population, rapid worldwide deforestation, a steadily increasing global temperature and the near extinction of a worrying number of the indigenous species it was apparent that things were not at all good. Really, not at all good. He read the report a second time to get it all clear in His head and then He took a deep breath and let it out.

Then He went ballistic and for God that’s quite a show. He blew His top, both literally and figuratively. He only needed His mortal form to interact with this Universe and it was quite easily remade in the Heavenly domain and so He had license to be dramatic. And seeing God’s head explode was pretty dramatic. He always put it back together a few minutes later but the first time a new secretary saw their creator’s head explode was something to savour. The time they spent desperately running around trying to figure out what to do was very enjoyable, in a sadistic sort of way, before someone assured them that God did this on a regular basis. It was His party trick.

Once God had reassembled Himself and calmed down He took another look at the report and nearly blew His top again.

The angels, especially Metatron, didn’t understand why He cared so much about the Earth but He didn’t want to and probably couldn’t explain it to them in terms that they would comprehend. Earth was the world that He was most pleased with. It had come together so well and, for a time, He’d been immensely proud of it. It was His favourite planet in the entire Universe and the world He’d show to friends if He had any but, being God, He had no equals, merely creations. There was little point showing it to them as they didn’t see what it was that He saw and He couldn’t make them understand. All He could say was that it was His favourite and that was that.

So, God was understandably upset with the state of that world. The trick with creating planets was getting them to a point where they found their own balance and then created and sustained life. And that took a long time. A really, really long time. But once that balance had been reached they looked after themselves and you got some truly amazing life forms out of them.

That was the fun part: seeing the creatures that arose, the incredible variation of life that were possible.

In a way they were His creations, but all He really did was get the worlds going and then sit back and see what happened. And with the Earth He’d been especially delighted with the variety of life that arose. Except for humans. It wasn’t that He disliked humans; it was hard to dislike something as interesting as they were, something that had come from His favourite world, but they had a unfortunate tendency to disrupt the balance. He’d tried talking and reasoning with them, He’d tried terrorising and threatening them, but nothing had convinced them to change their ways and now He had to try and persuade them to change while working under His current limitations.

The problem was He no longer had the power that He once had. He’d relinquished most of that to the angels in a desire to be a fairer deity and so now He had no idea of how to deal with the humans without the use of His box of tricks. He could request the use of His powers from Metatron and The Committee but it was unlikely that they would allow that. The angels would want to try a more delicate approach first and God had no choice but to accede. When that failed, and He couldn’t see any way it that could succeed, then maybe they would grant Him the use of the powers that He’d need to actually get the job done.

God decided to go home and clear His head. He told His secretary this as He headed out the door.

But what about all your other appointments? asked the angel. You’ve got meetings scheduled all afternoon.

Cancel them, reschedule them, whatever. I just need some time to think about this report. The angel nodded meekly and then God left. The secretary was disappointed. He spent most of His time scheduling meetings that God didn’t want to go to, or apologising to others for the absence of the deity at said meetings. And when He did attend God moped and didn’t contribute. And though He rarely said much, everyone wanted God’s input.

The angel knew he might as well not bother but this was the job that he’d been