Here’s a journal entry I wrote many years ago and recently found while organizing my computer’s archives. I thought I’d share it with the world. Experiences like this led me to study philosophy at USF.
Toward a Deontological Obfuscation of God
God is a cheeseburger. Or so I convinced myself when I was 16. It was my junior year of high school and I decided my formal education was a total waste of time. Rather than study for my pre-calc final exam (after only attending the class on occasion) I thought I would try an experiment: I’d pray for a passing grade. But I wouldn’t pray to God; I would pray to a cheeseburger.
I was raised in a traditional Roman Italian Catholic family. I attended church every week and I had the Bible beaten into my brain. My mother wasn’t a very good bible-humper, though. She raised me to believe that all God cared about was my actions toward others. She led me to believe if I was a caring, decent human who put others before myself, God would approve and take care of me. She raised me to be a good person.
So I defamed God. I envisioned him/her to be a ridiculously juicy cheeseburger and I facetiously worshipped said entree for the week leading up to the exam. I was under the impression that if God took offense to being burgerfied while I made a sincere effort to follow the Golden Rule, God was an arrogant douche bag with no sense of humor and not something I was willing to look up to. I mean it was funny: God being a cheeseburger and all. Come on. (Yes, I trolled God). If God wasn’t full of herself I’d get a decent grade on the exam and pass out high-fives all around.
The episode taught me three things:
1. My teacher was an idiot. The exam was a multiple-choice Scantron test. I solved every answer by the process of elimination and scored an 82%. It was the most poorly written test I had ever come across with each set of answers able to be reduced to one of two possible solutions. Paired with one third the knowledge of pre-calc i should have had, I had ~75% chance of answering each question correctly. I have no idea what the guy was thinking.
2. If God exists, she really only cares about the motives of my immediate actions. If this were not the case she would have set me on fire because I blasphemed her mad hardcore-like. Hey, I meant no harm, though. My intended goal was good-natured enlightenment.
3. God is a cheeseburger. If you fear God rather than befriend her, you are an idiot because how can you seriously be afraid of a cheeseburger? Prayer should not be painful or scary. If you worship God because you fear Hell, you are willingly imposing a sort of metaphysical totalitarianism upon your consciousness. God means nothing unless you create meaning for her. Why not choose something that will make you happy inside? You should really reevaluate why you take the Bible so literally.
God is a cheeseburger. Or a glowing white ball, or a jar of mayonnaise, or an old man with a beard, or a sliced pickle, or two strips of bacon, or a thick slice of cheddar cheese, or a fresh sesame bun, or… mmmmmmm… God…