Things Don't Go to Plan... Even for God

A couple of stories in David Eagleman’s collection of (very) short stories, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives, have a wicked sense of humour wrt God.

 

One such tale is titled “Mary”. As in Mary Shelly, the author of the famous Frankenstein’s Monster. It turns out that’s God’s favourite book!

“The first time He read Frankenstein, He criticized it the whole way through for its oversimplification of the processes involved. But when He reached the end, He was won over. For the first time, someone understood Him.”

Let’s understand that last part. Apparently, God’s “medical career” started with yeast and bacteria and went on to beetles and dolphins:

“But then, unwittingly, He crossed His Rubicon. He created Man.”

Before long, man’s savagery and destructive capabilities were out of control. Even God’s control. Hence His fascination with Frankenstein:

“All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.”

 

Another tale starts with what spiritual people will tell you about God:

“She is the elephant described by blind men: all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole.”

And God likes things to be that way!

“Deep down She was afraid that an especially clear-thinking theologian would guess the answer. All the clues were there, and only people’s personal backgrounds got in the way.”

Yes, She likes religious folks better than the atheists, but not for the reason you thought:

“She likes them because they are intellectually non-adventurous and will be sure to get the answer just a bit wrong.”

But when those folks arrive in the afterlife, She finds Her plan had a flaw:

“The truth does not convince. The newly arrived Loyals have an imperturbable capacity to hold the beliefs with which they arrived, a deep reluctance to consider evidence that separates them from their lifelong context.”

The very apt title of this story? “Apostasy”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more