I'm thinking, just musing in text, that if I were a god, I
might do it something like this:
I make you fallible, able to do right and wrong. You can hurt, or you can help.
I give you a brain capable of reason. You know right from wrong, perhaps in the sense that helping is generally better than hurting.
I make you capable of exerting free will. You get to choose to help or to hurt. But there will be consequences for both, good and bad.
And I make myself and my abilities widely known to you all. I am active. I take part in your lives, by making reward and punishment immediate and pertinent. You don't have to "choose" to believe in me, because I'm real, and I'm here and you all know it.
Pretty much like Ur Mom. Only I really DO have eyes in the back of my head, and my reach knows no limits.
So, what happens now? Provided I covered everything....like I said, I'm musing in text.
There is no Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which you cannot eat. Doesn't exist. I give you this knowledge freely. You're going to need it.
So. I want you to work, to contribute to others and keep yourself occupied. I want you to earn what you have, so you'll appreciate it. You can choose not to work. But if you don't work, you don't....anything, really. You do without. How much you "earn" depends on how much you do. You do just enough, you get the necessities. You do more, you get more. But you are gonna have to work really, really, really hard to get rich. It frankly won't be worth it.
What about sickness? Hmmm...why have it? Ah, some of you need to die, and some sooner than others. We have to make room for more, and living forever isn't fun for lots of reasons. But, that kind of assumes I make just the one earth, and that you get old. I could make more planets. I could let you live as long as you like, and just move the excess to new planets, infinitely. I could create a place for you to go rest from life for a while; like death, but temporary. Whenever you were ready to be born again, just say the word and do it again. I think the idea of eternal paradise is just lazy.
Maybe I won't have sickness. Unless it's a bring-it-on-yourself kind of sickness. To encourage you to be clean about yourselves, I'll create bacteria and junk that will make you sick if you go dirty. I'm not forcing you to choose cleanliness (which is, after all, next to me); I'm just saying if you don't choose it, you're gonna be one sick mamma-jamma. Not an eternal punishment: one that is pertinent and immediate. And one you can rectify by taking a bath and washing the dishes. Simple.
But things like cancer....I might give those a miss.
What about crime? Hey, I'm the police, judge, and jury. You hurt someone, I know it. You hurt someone bad, I send you back to start all over again. It's diaper time for you, junior. But why are you going to want to hurt someone? All you have to do is work at a job that pleases you (because it's going to be possible to have that, in my cosmos), and you will have the things you both need and want. A lot of the pain that causes pain will simply not exist. No one should be going hungry, or naked, or hurt....
Mental illness. Nope, I'm just not going to have that. Everyone will have a good brain. If you get injured, I'll fix it. And ugliness. Nope. You can all be reasonably pretty. And you can explore ways to make yourselves prettier, if you want to.
Now, what about the things we do to hurt ourselves, like over-eating, binge-drinking, drug-abuse?
That's hard. I have to let you choose. But your choice could end up hurting someone. Okay, so if you do, I'll fix the damage you did, and send you back to Nappyland. Start over; try again. But there should be no harm in sitting home or with friends, having a couple of drinks. No harm in making a pan of "special brownies." Although I'm torn on smoking. Well, if life can be generally pleasant, why am I creating things that mess with your head and your health? I have choices to make here, too. If life is good, do you really have a need for things like alcohol and heroin? For example, I mean? Maybe I won't make stuff like that. Boy, that's a hard one.
Sex. [cue trumpets] It's good for at least two things: it makes more of you, and it can be lots of fun. But it's not a toy, although it might utilize a few. No sex with kids. Period. They have better things to do, like learning about the rest of life, in order to be better able to cope with highly emotional and physical things like sex. I think I ought to change things up just a bit so that your bodies and minds develop into their adult forms without all the horny-making hormones. I'll turn those on at maturity. In fact, maybe it would be better if puberty happened really fast, and a lot later. Say, at 20. One month you have a tall but childlike body, and in about a month, you've transformed into an adult. However I do it, I'll make sure that first the mind is ready, and then the body follows. Yeah. The other way is just backwards.
So, did I get it all? What do you think? Can I be god?
