Dear Donald Wildmon,

As much as I appreciate your organization giving me a little publicity, I must request that you remove my “letter” from your video.

See, here’s the deal: I get letters all the time, usually in the form of prayers, and I do my best to answer them all, but, I got to tell ya, I’m overwhelmed, and, I must confess, I have a few, um, ghostwriters, so to speak, to do some of the heavy lifting. Give me a break: I’ve got a full plate up here, plus we’ve been undergoing some serious restructuring lately. Anyway, that particular response letter your little video recites was not meant for publication. It was actually supposed to be in the “rewrite” pile but somehow got misfiled and ended up in your hands. I’m still trying to figure that out. We have a team on it and they should be getting back to Me shortly.

Anyway, since you’re so interested, here is how the rewrite would have gone:

Dear Supplicant:

It pains me more than you will ever understand to watch my children kill one other. But, as you might have noticed, I keep divine interventions to a strict minimum. It’s a standard policy I have for reasons that you could not begin to fathom at this point in time. Maybe someday.

I understand, though, that some people may think that these things have happened because of cultural changes, namely, the removal of mandatory prayer in schools, the lack or parental notification laws and so forth. Well, that’s a natural reaction, I guess, but it sort of ignores this much more pertinent point: all of the people directly responsible for these events were disaffected sociopaths who developed, over time, propensities for random violence.

For every prayer I’ve gotten asking Me what I could have done to stop this, I can give you twenty times where I’ve tried to nudge one or some of my followers to reach out to these sorts of people before it’s too late. Unfortunately, too many of my followers turn a blind eye to people like this, or, worse, openly shun them, making the problem even worse. I’m sorry, but having prayer in school isn’t going to do a thing for a person with these sorts of issues. They need direct intervention. Not from Me, but from you. I can’t do it all. If you people spent one-tenth as much time truly helping those less fortunate–not just financially, but also physically and mentally–as you do putting together cheesy Web videos (love the flying skull, by the way–that’s good stuff), I guarantee you’ll see a major improvement.

Is this really too much to ask? I guess it is, because I’ve waited many millennia for it to happen.

Sincerely,

God

P.S. You think I’m bad? Check out Christopher Hitchens. Not a believer, alas, but, if he was, oh! what I could do with the talents I gave him.

Share this post: