Fuck You, God

How I'm feeling. 

That's right, you old white patriarchal motherfucker, I'm talking to you. 

Not that there is a God, mind you, but for the sake of having some Prime Mover or Higher Power to blame, let's just pretend (along with billions of other people) that there is. 

I do not feel thankful today, on Thanksgiving. I am thinking about injustice, fascism, torture, duplicity, inhumanity, war, rape, a mother's horror on being separated from her children, genocide (such as the genocide that underpins this very holiday, or for that matter, the unimaginable carnage in our own Civil War that preceded Lincoln creating the holiday), guns and stupid heartless fucks with their fucking gun addictions, bigotry, demagogues who derive their power from inciting terror and hate in their followers and the plain fact that this trick, one of the oldestin the books, actually fucking works, dismembering of people while they are still alive simply because they have expressed themselves, police shooting or otherwise publicly executing black people, hardening of hearts, fire, flood, climate change, insatiable greed, elephants tortured alive for their ivory, factory farming, people dying of curable medical conditions in the richest nation on earth, fucking Kickstarters for cancer treatment, fucking theocracy in what used to be a civil society based on the rule of law, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of a passionate intensity. 

Should I not be furious at any God who could allow all of this and more? What would the appropriate response be? Should I obsequiously grovel and say stupid shit like "everything happens for a reason" or "God works in mysterious ways" or. You name it. After another mass shooting, should I just send thoughts and prayers? 

It's funny that I only got in touch with how fucking furious at "God" I am last night. I was lying in bed, trying to sleep, and the torments, injustices, horrors, outrages and nightmares of the world would not stop presenting themselves, from the most personal sufferings on a relatively small scale of those I love all the way to the global fuckfest of horror that we currently face. I broke through some old, stale, childish fear of authority and said, out loud, FUCK YOU, you fucking asshole God. What the fuck? FUCK YOU. 

I guess this might be a moment of growth? Especially for a non-theist like myself, who doesn't even "believe in God" anyway. It's good to have someone to hate for all this shit though. The loneliness, torment, injustice, silence and darkness. Big Sky Daddy is to blame. Obviously. 

I don't adhere to banal Richard Dawkins' overly facile formulation that God can't possibly exist because of all the suffering in the world. I like Jung's formulation more, of the great mystery of a 360 degree God as malicious as it is loving, as Jung outlines in his Answer to Job. The shadow as much as the light. This seems to square much more with reality. Dawkins and other petulant atheists are like children whistling in the dark by comparison. Jung's concept is real and it's terrifying, just like existence.  

God is as likely to nail you to a cross as "he" is to provide you with miraculous blessings, *especially* if you catch "his" attention. 

Basically, I'm tired. There seems no narrative line, no reassurance, no cohesion to the behavior of my species. Of course I acknowledge that we are also capable of unimaginable goodness and love. But this seems to arise as much out of us as our tendency to fuck each other into the ground and cause as much suffering as possible while doing it. None of this is cosmic or divine. It's fucking squalor. The image of the young girl in Iraq, splattered with the blood of her parents after they had just been executed by American soldiers right in front of her, comes to mind. What kind of fucking barbaric asshole God would allow something like that to happen? 

So there's my gratitude post. It's like saying, golly, I am so grateful I am not starving to death, suffering miserably as I die of a horrible disease that could be treated except I'm poor, tortured by a fascist regime, separated from my own children because I dared to seek asylum, raped and then publicly shamed and humiliated for reporting it, randomly shot in a mass shooting by yet another white male asshole, struggling merely to survive while the CEO of the corporation I slave for owns five houses, etc. 


"Being thankful" feels like groveling, given reality. Thanks for leaving me the fuck alone, God. It's looking better than the alternative. 

Troubador of the dark, Leonard Cohen comes to mind, with his final arch salvo regarding these topics, a perfect summation of his world view, and an anthem for our times. 

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission to murder and to maim....