If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways by Daniel Quinn Read Free Book Online Page B

AIDS, cancer, plagues — all these things have natural causes.
    Daniel . Yes, that's what you and I and probably most people think, but you need to get inside this person's head and understand his vision of God.
    Elaine . His vision of God... I'm not sure what to say.
    Daniel . Talk about his God.
    Elaine [ after some thought ]. His God is, I'd have to assume, omniscient and omnipotent.
    Daniel . I'm sure you're right. Go on.
    Elaine . I don't see where to go.
    Daniel . I'm trying not to lead you too pointedly. You have to get behind the thought processes that prompted this question. You have an omniscient and omnipotent God, and...
    Elaine . He sees that we're overpopulating the world.
    Daniel . And...
    Elaine . And it's within his power to send diseases and catastrophes to reduce our population.
    Daniel . Why does he need to do this?
    Elaine . Ah. Because the world doesn't regulate itself. Or you could say that God can't depend on the world to regulate itself.
    Daniel . And because the world doesn't regulate itself — or can't be depended on to regulate itself...
    Elaine . God has to do it himself. He has to manage the world personally.
    Daniel . Otherwise it doesn't work properly. At least not automatically.
    Elaine . Right.
    Daniel . So he sends diseases and catastrophes in order to reduce the human population. Or at least he has the option and the power to do this.
    Elaine . That's right.
    Daniel . But...
    Elaine . But?
    Daniel . He has the option and the power to reduce the human population by all sorts of means, but...
    Elaine . He can't manage to do it.
    Daniel . So he created a world that can't be counted on to regulate itself and that he can't seem to regulate, either. What kind of a God is this?
    Elaine . What kind ? According to who?
    Daniel . According to the person who asked this question.
    Elaine . I don't know, beyond the obvious — beyond the things we've already discussed... I mean, he's omniscient and omnipotent. I suppose I could add that he's benevolent. That he exerts himself on our behalf — or may be doing so.
    Daniel . As always, I'm trying to get behind the words, back to unvoiced assumptions and beliefs.
    Elaine sighs.
    Daniel [ after giving her a couple of minutes to think ]. Let's give God a performance review, starting with the Garden of Eden, where he planted a tree whose fruit Adam and Eve were forbidden to taste. Put yourself in his place in an analogous situation. You're the mother of two children, a boy and a girl. You tell them, "You can play with anything in the house except the loaded gun I'm putting here on the kitchen table." Then, as you leave, you knowingly allow someone into the house who will undoubtedly encourage them to play with the gun.
    Elaine . Uh-huh. But a believer would say that God put the forbidden tree in the garden as a test.
    Daniel . And being omniscient...
    Elaine . He'd know they would fail it.
    Daniel . Even a human mother would know better than to leave her children with a loaded gun in plain sight, wouldn't she?
    Elaine . Yes.
    Daniel . I don't know what sort of religious upbringing you had.
    Elaine . Oh, I was raised a Catholic. Went to a Catholic grade school, had the Bible stories, learned the catechism, and all that.
    Daniel . Then you're in a pretty good position to evaluate God's performance. His early experiences with the human race were pretty disappointing.
    Elaine . Yes. He finally became so disgusted that he wiped it all out except for Noah and his family. Even the results of this weren't too satisfactory.
    Daniel . Eventually he decided to adopt a chosen people to be his own. What was his thought in doing this?
    Elaine . Hmm. I'm a bit hazy on that one. I mean, on his long-term plan for the race as a whole. But the idea in the short term was to champion this one people and help them surpass all their neighbors, as long as they remained faithful to him.
    Daniel . And how did that work out?
    Elaine . Not too well. In the end they were so faithless