

Smashwords edition, Copyright © 2012, All Rights Reserved

## FOREWARNED

-00.17.15

Of course not! Don't you even begin to believe it! No way was it God I interviewed that night! I quizzed a man posing as God, pretending to be God, who might maybe have even THOUGHT he was God, or hoped he was God, or wished he was God. But would God dress like that? I am glad to say from the rage of comments that arose out of the religious furore following that broadcast, hardly anyone of any quality or reputation (apart from the odd bishop or equally nutty professor) thought otherwise than that I was speaking that night to a fraud and a charlatan, a sincere fraud maybe and a well-meaning charlatan perhaps, but believe me more fake than Father Christmas's snowy white whiskers.

-00.16.29

Then why, you ask, why this book's ludicrous title? For commercial reasons. Pure greed. I point-blank refused to consider it but the original out-of-their-league publishers (unlike the present reputable ones) would have no other name. So we finally compromised on their by-me unedited appellation in exchange for my by-them unedited Foreword. So consider yourself cautioned. This book is a fraud, as fraudulent a fraud as ever a fraud has ever been perpetrated on innocent mankind. I repeat, this is not the record of anybody's interview with God, least of all mine.

-00.15.45

Then why am I publishing a book of the verbatim transcripts of this "God-given" interview? Firstly because I am staggered at what now passes as the original. I have seen DVDs so doctored as to depict "God" advocating totally opposed churches as every conceivable brand of Christianity has cut out any and every utterance that didn't suit their doctrines and has had "God" endorse them and their outfit as the one and only One True Church mankind has ever been blessed with. These technically brilliantly altered DVDs are nothing more than superbly lying fictions. I wouldn't have believed the human race was capable of such technical dexterity had I not seen with my own eyes in astonished disbelief what could only be myself asking questions I never asked then watching God reply with words he never said. You can't trust your own eyes these days. As I get a cut out of every DVD sold, you can test my sincerity by the fact that I say "Don't buy it!" Or at least only from utterly trustworthy and totally reputable official sources.

-00.14.34

Yes, it is true that I did ask him that question: "Which is the one true church?" but I also heard his original evasive answer. I've even heard some church leaders excuse their fraudulence by saying they felt they had to get the DVD doctored just to protect their denomination from fraudulent denominations who had beaten them to it! It may be true that there has been a huge outcry and public condemnation by those churches' highest leaders and those adulterating ministers have been (so we're told) disciplined, yet their lying DVDs roll on, unstoppable. I have a personal grudge against all these so-called holy religious paragons illegally copying my DVD which is protected by law under copyright yet they flout the law in the name of the righteous religion they believe in for their own and their church's personal gain.

-00.13.39

Did you know that I—I have been accused of initiating the DVD-doctoring? True! An interviewer recently asked me: "Why should believers endlessly endure your antagonism to the one they truly believe is God? The very first doctoring of the videos was by those who only wanted to tone down your hostility, who wished only a reverent questioning of one they took to be Almighty God." Reverent questioning? Since when did I ever reverently question anyone? God must know my reputation. Yet God chose me. So He wanted to be grilled over a white hot fire, right? You can't have it both ways. If God wanted respect He sure would not have chosen THIS interviewer. But He did, so He didn't. Try that on for size!

-00.12.48

Actually this proves for once and forever that wasn't God: Would God choose me to interview him, a person who's not the slightest bit religious and never will be, who never darkens the door of any church except for weddings and funerals, and only if I can't get out of it? What do I know about theology? Every day I get thousands of letters from wingeing Christians asking why didn't I ask this or that convoluted theological prolegominal paraplatudinous inexactitude—Because I didn't know to, that's why, and boy do I plan to keep it that way!

-00.12.14

But secondly (sigh), I want to make a stand against the utter endemic gullibility of mankind. Some sage said "Man is incurably religious," and after this experience who could doubt it? I would never have believed that tens of thousands of people would mob our TV station even before the broadcast had ended just for one glimpse of "God", or that in the ensuing days gentle, law-abiding citizens would pour in from all over the world and tear down an entire building with scissors and pocket knives and many with just their bare hands, solely to take back to their homes an icon of good luck from a building God may or may not have visited. Some interviewed said they didn't really believe it was God but what if they were wrong? Many said they had never defied the police in all their lives but standing a few feet away from where maybe God had stood turned them into defiant monsters and no police force on earth could hold back that psychological mind-set. It is so unreal nobody can believe it happened, least of all those who partook in the wrecking. Now even the dust is being scooped up and sold by the owner who at first bewailed his bad luck and now can't believe his good fortune. He is mailing dirt worldwide—Earth's first dust billionaire. So my interviewee "prophesied" that, did he? Made it happen, you mean! HE planted the idea of wrecking the building! HE made it happen by clever suggestion! Very cunning! You got to hand it to him! A master manipulator!

-00.10.37

What was even more unreal was after we were forced to move to new studios and thoughtlessly took our cameras and clip-on mikes and broadcast equipment with us, how all that was first wrecked, then filched presumeably by fanatical Christians who yea verily believe "Thou shalt not steal!" Give it all back, you hypocrite ratbags! Even when we bought replacements they did it to us again! Why? Just in case we'd faked reports of the first thefts! (Why didn't we think of that great idea!) I've read their reasoning: "God spoke through those mikes, was recorded through those cameras, so they are too sacred to be left in the hands of unbelieving atheists"—then pay for them, you fake Christians! Or at least buy us replacements. What kind of Christianity is that?

-00.09.47

Then they turned on me. I refuse to become a saint by association. I have never softened my assertion that that fraud wasn't God, but a con-God. Many have asked Aren't I afraid of being struck by lightning for making such statements when so many adamantly believe yea God verily? Listen. I wasn't ten minutes into the interview before the boss came on the earpiece to tell me to soften my antagonism as we were receiving threats for not treating God with sufficent respect. Yet not another ten minutes had elapsed before the boss was advising me to hit harder than ever because we were receiving even stronger threats for broadcasting blasphemy. I have now had so many death-threats from both for and against extremes the police have quit investigating. I wear bullet-proof vests, even to bed!

-00.08.49

But my negativity hasn't stopped the saint-seekers. God wouldn't choose just anybody and God chose me to be his interviewer. So there must be something special about me or God wouldn't have wanted me. So they need my signature, my potted autobiography, any spare photos or cast-off clothing or even a snippet of what's left of my hair. Why do they want to hasten my baldness? Because I breathed the same air and spoke face-to-face with God! Not! So what if I did? Would that make me anything I wasn't before? When nobody wanted anything of mine other than my money, just like any normal person? Listen. I am nothing special and never will be. So stop bugging me and let me sleep at night. Or I might forward a few of those death-threats to you non-thinking time-wasting saint-makers.

-00.08.01

But, I'm asked a thousand times an hour, didn't I see something special in the man opposite me? Wasn't there a glowing golden aura around his head, an awesome resonance when he spoke, and when he said I AM, didn't I want to fall backwards in my chair and knock myself out on the floor? Answer: NO NO and NO. I thought he looked utterly stupid in that toga thing. And his explanation of it and the unwashed dust was so ludicrous I just wanted to laugh. The only thing that impressed me as a professional was his ability to act. He was clearly of the Stanislavsky Method school and never once moved out of character in the ad breaks. That was impressive. He had also soaked himself in his subject. I've heard that he's made some theologians re-think their formerly airy-fairy belief-system. Yes, I could believe that. The guy is clearly intelligent and given a decent-enough role could put together an Oscar quality performance. Perhaps he already has. He'll be tracked down and "discovered." There are already thousands of sightings of him recorded daily on the Internet. I don't hold anything against him personally. Someone probably paid him to do a job for them. He did it well. I look forward to seeing more of his work.

-00.06.42

But how unreal is this: I've read that a massive number of churches worldwide have opened their doors just to play the DVD daily to crowds who seem to never tire of seeing it. Many churches replay it day and night non-stop. They record masses of people joining their churches. Apparently churches have come into being with the DVD as their sole "sermon". Such info makes me ashamed to be a human. Gullibility seems to be a basic human trait. Now as an atheist or agnostic or something, I'm no advocate for religion, but this time I'm totally on the side of the more staid mainstream clergy. If religion is that DVD and God is that dust-covered phony, then I'm quitting journalism to become the next Pope.

-00.05.53

Everyone asks, "How did it happen? How did it all begin?" Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I'm still in la-la land and will wake up sometime soon. I mean, think of it: the Dream Interview, the Dream Subject, the Dream Interviewee, and mine, all mine...Yeah.

-00.05.32

Well this is blow for blow how it began. All I know is that one stinking hot miserable night I was twisting and turning in bed, searching for some comfort and failing, with the clock leering 10 to 3 at me. So I clobbered the light switch and interviewed the ceiling, "God, why don't you let me sleep?" I switched off the light and the phone rang. I've got an unlisted number—in my job you have to—but the occasional crank call gets through. Just what I needed.

"Yeah?"

"This is God. I heard you. I'll be on your show tonight. I'll answer your questions. I'll give you two hours. And you don't have to shout. Silent shouts are the loudest—"

"Tonight? I've got the Mayor on tonight—"

"He'll step aside for God. Ask him."

And the line went click. That did the trick. It was so stupid my mind could only grin, and I slept like a baby.

-00.04.37

When I got to the station and outlined all the above to the boss, he replied:

"What will you do if he turns up?"

"If who turns up?"

"God."

"What do you expect me to do?"

"Interview Him of course."

"But you know it's not God. You know it's some publicity-hungry crank who somehow overheard me—"

"Of course, some crank. Of course, there's no other possibility. But just think: if it WAS God—man, what a coup! What a scoop! What a show! The greatest show on Earth! This station's greatest moment! The highlight of my career, of your career, of my whole life, of your whole life! Walter Cronkite couldn't hold a candle to you, even Oprah would envy you—"

"Oh come on! A religious nutter? An addle-brained crank? Seriously, what if he does turn up?"

"Put him on! Interview him."

"A fraud? A loony? Maybe criminally insane? I ask him something he doesn't like and he leaps up and zaps me with a thunderbolt—"

"Only God can do that—"

"Well his equivalent. Something painful. You interview him then—"

"Gladly. But it's your show. People will expect your incisive cut-throat questions. And God will too. Or else he wouldn't have chosen you." And off he went laughing. He spent the whole day laughing. Every time he looked at me he laughed. I didn't appreciate it. I hired a security guard for that night and charged it to the station. Only then did I laugh.

-00.03.06

Did I dare ring the Mayor? I mean what would I say? But the station manager stuck his head around the corner and grinned, "You needn't bother phoning Mayor Robbie. I already have, and your caller was right: he'll gladly step aside for God. In fact he's even agreed to be your stand-by in case God doesn't show. As he said between chuckles he always wanted to replace God." And off he went heehawing again.

-00.02.38

The boss enjoys seeing me on the spot. I think he blames me personally for our often so-so ratings. So what if my "In Town Tonight" programme is rarely the station's top rater? That's because he saves money by not advertising it. Not this time though! He splashes out on radio and TV spots as though the station's life depends on this one programme. Maybe it does. Maybe there's something he's not telling me. Maybe this station is at last about to fold. Wouldn't surprise me. Maybe God is our only hope.

-00.02.05

As for me, I prepare for twelve minutes of God tops. By then he'll be so abyssmally exposed he'll flee from the studio and I'll have 36 minutes to grill the Mayor about the proposed multibillion dollar transport scheme the whole city is enraged about. I phone for authoritative quotes like estimates of rates hikes and cost overruns and hone everything down to barbed one-liners. Only when the Mayor is mentally fricassied and fried do I take God off the back-burner. I jot down ten unanswerable questions in maybe a minute. And should he survive that onslaught I know I have enough 'suivis' from a lifetime of living to make him look stupid. A 'suivi' (James Bond) is what I call a follow-up question. I know I have enough in my brain to last an hour if I have to. I know I'm good at my job. I know there's none better. In choosing me God made a good choice. Too good for God.

-00.01.04

God was late. While we waited, the Mayor and I glanced several times at each other: he wouldn't be used to playing second-fiddle to anyone, not even God. Then what appeared was what I feared: an undistinguished guy in maybe his early thirties ludicrously draped in a not too clean brown toga-like Middle Eastern throw-over thing coupled with dusty well-worn sandals on filthy dirty feet. One glance and I knew what had happened. He had overheard or been told of my ceiling shout, had seen his chance to go on television, dressed what he thought was accordingly, and sight-unseen got the part. The boss should be shot. There was nothing for it but to play along. Our cameras were recording from the moment he showed, and I had to go with the joke until I could move seamlessly from the prankster to the politician.

-00.00.07

I was angry as I seated Him, still angry as I was cued, and it showed.

-00.00.00

## THE INTERVIEW

00.00.00

ME: It is not every night that an interviewer can say he has God as his guest, and this may not be that night. You decide for yourself whether this—er—gentleman to my right fits your conception of what God is, or at least what God ought to be if there WAS a God. I take it that You have no doubt as to Your existence?

GOD: As little as you have of yours.

ME: I'm not given to doubting myself, but let me tell you, in case you don't know, many doubt God exists. What do you say to them?

GOD: I say this to them: In three days not one scrap of this building will be left standing, and even the chair you are sitting in will be torn to shreds and distributed all over the world. By this you will know there is indeed a God.

ME: Why? Do you intend to blow the place up?

GOD: This building will be ripped to pieces by human hands, by a power no force on earth can stop.

ME: Not even God?

GOD: My will isn't done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Within three days much of what you see here will be high in the sky then spread to every country on Earth.

ME: No point in asking Why? I suppose.

GOD: Because people are incurably superstitious. They want good luck charms. What I want with them is a personal relationship. What they want from me is endless good fortune and clear skies with never a drop of rain.

ME: Then why don't you give them what they want?

GOD: Because no rain creates a desert.

ME: So this is your ridiculous ludicrous claim, and we only have to wait three days to see you proved an utter total fraud? Or are you simply mad?

GOD: I'm often called worse.

ME: Of course you are. And with good reason. In my opinion we don't have to wait three days. Why are you in such a crazy get-out? I suppose this is the way you think God should dress, in sackcloth and sandals and covered in dust?

GOD: When he is in first century Israel and walking the dusty road to Jerusalem—yes.

ME: But you're not in first century Israel. If you were God you would know this is 21st century New Zealand—

GOD: That's where YOU are, but it's not where I am.

ME: You mean if I reach out and touch you, you won't be here?

GOD: Of course I'm here. God is everywhere. There is nowhere where I am not at every Moment of any time, including Israel and New Zealand—

ME: Then that should save you a dusty walk to Jerusalem since you're already there.

GOD: But at that time in Israel I am restricted to all the limitations of being a man. Except that it is impossible to restrict God, which of course is why I am here today. You seem to have some problem with this.

ME: All the world has a problem with what you just said.

GOD: Your Einstein didn't. He understood that all things immaterial are eternal. Time and place can't control them. I am immaterial. I am spirit. This human body you see me clothed in is temporary and will die. But I will raise it into a transformed body that will never die.

ME: God throws Einstein at me! Incredible.

GOD: And a hundred years after Relativity you humans still don't understand him. You are incredible.

ME: So you are wearing two thousand year old clothes?

GOD: Of course not. This was woven for me only last year. This is normal in Galilee for artisans of my kind.

ME: I think you are going to tell me you are a carpenter.

GOD: You knew that? Excellent. Though for the last three years—

ME: You are claiming to be Jesus Christ. That is blasphemy. Aren't you afraid of thunderbolts from Heaven—?

GOD: From Heaven, no. From men, yes. In my hands and my feet.

ME: It has already happened. You don't need to fear it. It's already been and gone two thousand years ago!

GOD: To me it will soon become present enough—

ME: Why don't you turn and run from it? Stay in this century in this country. We need good actors like you—

GOD: Even if I could, I wouldn't. I must return to Jerusalem to die for sinners like you.

ME: In my case, a waste of time and pain—

GOD: I would not say that.

ME: Who are you really?

GOD: I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep. I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end, I am the door. I am the bread of life—

ME: You've learned your lines well. You're very good at this, aren't you.

GOD: I am not good, I am perfect.

ME: Perfect? Come now, You're not THAT good.

GOD: I am.

ME: You're quick.

GOD: Soon to be dead. You too are in danger here. You have one security guard but you need more. Ring now. At least ten. Six to the front door and four to the back. And this building isn't safe—

ME: Because you are in it?—

GOD: Believe me, even the dust the building sits on will be lifted up and will fly all over the world—

ME: Another nice testable piece of false prophecy—

GOD: And you: you don't realise your life has already utterly changed. Your life will never be the same—

ME: Because I met you? Aren't you overestimating—?

GOD: Don't wait. Get security in place before time runs out on you—

ME: Not my decision. Maybe my manager—

GOD: It is always and only your decision. Take my words very seriously—

ME: If you were God, I would. But you can't be more than 35. I would have expected the Creator of the Universe to be at least as old as his creation—

GOD: In human years I was still in my 30s when I died—

ME: You died? This IS news! God dead! For a dead God your answers seem quite lively—

GOD: Where have you been? The whole world knows that I died—

ME: My advisors have failed me I'm afraid, not that I blame them. I thought it was only Nietzsche who thought God was dead—

GOD: And Nietzsche was right. For three days he was right. But then he overlooked my resurrection.

ME: Your resurrection? After three days? Then once again you claim to be Jesus Christ, and maybe not God at all—

GOD: I am the only God your world will ever see. To see me is to see God. No man can ever see God, but I, the only begotten God, I continually reveal him. But surely you know this?

ME: And that's you? The only-begotten God? Aren't you being just a tad blasphemous?

GOD: My Father has children by creation and children by adoption, but I am his only child by generation.

ME: What generation? This generation?

GOD: I am all that he is. In terms your generation might understand: I am the only photocopy of God the Father, so infinitely perfect there is no way of telling the copy from the original—

ME: Except that a father must precede a son—

GOD: Only to your limited earthly understanding. In earth terms we both sprang into being at the same moment. In eternal terms, there never was a time when we both were not.

ME: Now you have your audience utterly confused. Time for a commercial break, and when we come back, more wisdom from the mouth of Almighty God...

And the cameras show I lean forward in the break and say, "You're doing quite well. Keep it up. Unexpectedly well—"

"You think so?" And he throws back his head and laughs.

00.09.22

ME: Welcome back. I am talking to a very dusty individual who claims he is Jesus Christ, which I realised in the break is an enormous gaff on your part. Do you claim that Jesus Christ has been walking around Palestine dressed in a First Century carpenter's costume for the last two thousand years—?

GOD: Whatever made you think so?

ME: Then why are you dressed in clothes that are two millenia out-of-date—?

GOD: Because I AM two millenia out-of-date. I have simply paused time over 1st century Israel to fast forward to this studio to be interviewed by 21st century you. But in reality I am actually in Israel right now walking towards Jerusalem and crucifixion, and to those around about me it will seem I never went away, not even for an instant, but I've already—

ME: Oh come now! If you've frozen time in one part of the world, even supposing you had the power to do that, then wouldn't time be frozen everywhere, including here—?

GOD: Maybe it is. Maybe you are just dreaming all this.

ME: No, I just pinched myself and I'm not.

GOD: Maybe you just dreamed you pinched yourself—

ME: If you're Jesus Christ and you're really in First Century Israel, then I challenge you to do this: I've grabbed some nail scissors. Let me snip a piece off the hem of your garment and subject it to scientific carbon dating. Then we will know if you are two thousand years old as you claim—

GOD: But I'm not. I am 33 years old and this robe is, right now, at this precise moment, some fourteen months old. That's what any scientific dating would find—

ME: Which proves you're a fraud. Because if you were the real Jesus you would be two thousand years old and so would your clothes, if you and they were authentic—

GOD: How few of you humans understand eternity! Why don't you read and believe your Einstein, who said there was no such thing as the future and the past but only the eternal present, a fact that only followers of Physics come even close to understanding? As for me, I am crucified yet on my way to be crucified. I am crucified from the foundation of the world. Everything that happens to God once, happens to Him forever, because God only inhabits eternity. Before Abraham was, I always was and will be. Time is merely the platform on which I choose to act and be acted upon. As the creator of time I am greater than time and in no way subject to time as I was and will be forever the determiner of time.

ME: I suspected you would try to dazzle me with mysticism, and attempt to confound me with loquatiously verbose semantic clap-trap. But you should know I'm not buying a cent's worth. The fact is that isn't Palestinian dust at all. I'll guarantee that if I had it analysed that dust could be sourced to within 50ks of this studio. Will you let me take a sample?

GOD: Be my guest. When this interview's ended you can hand me your paper and I'll shake off as much dust from my feet as your heart could hope for—

ME: Thank you—

GOD: You're welcome. As the creator of all true science I welcome every truly scientific test—

ME: Yes, just what IS your view on Evolution? Was Darwin right, or do you still touchingly root for Adam and Eve?

GOD: Despite the fact that it affords our favourite comic reading in Heaven, and that new publications have been known to send all Heaven into laughter, Atheistic Evolution is an attractively imaginative theory that quite often has many elements of truth about it—

ME: And Adam and Eve?

GOD: Personal friends of mine. And as for your aversion to dust, I am pleased to name myself a Son of Dust, and that from dust you humans were taken and to dust you shall each return—

ME: And on that rather grubby note we shall pause for our sponsors to catch up.

The tape shows that I then lean forward and say: "I haven't seen you around these parts before but it's obvious you are a professional actor. What is your name? Who did you train under? What other parts have you had?"

But he has leaned back, closing his eyes, and doesn't reply. Method acting, of course. Staying in character. Through my earpiece the boss's voice: "We're being swamped with calls. Many think he's the real thing. Go a bit easy on him— "

"Like hell I will," I hear myself say.

"Death threats," says the boss.

"To be taken seriously?"

"Religious nutters are the worst."

"Ah yes. Unpredictable."

"You've got it," says the boss as I glance at Jesus Christ.

00.14.42

ME: Welcome back. I am talking to a man who claims he is Almighty God. If you are God, and almighty, why is the world in such a mess? Why don't you stop crime? And suffering. Why don't you stop all that pain and misery?

GOD: I am not permitted to.

ME: What? Almighty God? Who stops you?

GOD: You do. You humans.

ME: Of course we don't! How could we stop all-mightiness? If you ARE Almighty God the entire human race couldn't stand against the omnipotence of your little finger—

GOD: Oh yes you can. And you do. Very often and very easily. You take away my moral right to act.

ME: And how do we do that?

GOD: By preferring Satan's values to mine.

ME: Maybe his are better.

GOD: You humans certainly think so.

ME: Now let me get this clear: what values are you talking about?

GOD: Virtues like truth, love, honesty, forgiveness, respect, unselfishness, sexual chastity, righteousness—every and all forms of goodness—

ME: And don't we humans go in for those?

GOD: Look at your television. What values does that depict? Truth? love? honesty? sexual morality? all forms of goodness? Any station showing nothing but such would quickly lose its audience and go off the air. What you humans value is crime, violence, hatred, sexual licenciousness, all forms of evil, the badder the better—

ME: And these values you attribute to Satan?

GOD: Yes, and to you humans, who listen to Satan.

ME: Then I have the perfect answer for you: just wipe out Satan and he won't be able to tempt us to have his values.

GOD: Unfortunately I can't do that.

ME: You can't? God can do anything—

GOD: God cannot do wrong.

ME: But what's wrong with that?

GOD: Do your political leaders murder their opposition? What would you do to any national leader who did? It is just as morally wrong for me to murder my opposition as it is for your nation's leader to murder his opposition—

ME: Why? since it would benefit all mankind so much?

GOD: Because right from the beginning I made a decision to be infinitely perfect, and because of that I will not do anything that is morally indefensible.

ME: Then you made a bad decision, didn't you? If it ends in wars and crime and pain and suffering for the human race—

GOD: It was a terrible decision.

ME: Then why did you make it?

GOD: Because I had no choice. Think of the alternatives. Would you prefer a God who was imperfect, who had even a small aspect of evil in his character? Who could trust such a God? I couldn't even trust myself. I wouldn't want to live as a being who made such a blemished decision when he had the ability and freedom to make of himself a perfect character—

ME: Then why do you say it was a terrible decision—

GOD: Because I can foresee everything. Before the world was created I could foresee all the pain and suffering that would come upon the human race because of my decision to be infinitely perfect—

ME: Then how was that an infinitely perfect decision? We are chasing our tails here—

GOD: Let me tell you what it was like for me at the beginning and then all will become clear to you—

ME: That sounds like time for a break, and when we come back, the birth and boyhood of God! Hah!

I would have quizzed him off-air but the moment the adverts begin the boss is shouting in my ear, "This is the last ad-break. You're going to have to keep going. We are being besieged with threatening calls and even some advertisers are saying 'Pull them. It's counterproductive.' And I was going to tell you to lay off him because we're getting death threats. But we're getting death threats both ways. We're probably more at risk from those who think it's all blasphemy and want us to stop the broadcast. The police are on their way but already it could be too late, a mob is forming outside. You could become all sympathetic and make it sound as if you believe him but even then we'll be lucky to survive this—"

"Surely to God it's obvious he's a fake—!"

"You'd think so, but people are incredibly gullible. From the way they're talking they could invade the station before we end. The police have advised us to pull the show—"

"And will you?"

"Hell no! This is the best television I've ever done—"

"Yet you want me to change—"

"Just tone it down a bit. Much the same, but tone it down—"

"I don't think you know what you want—"

"I want to live long enough to get rich off this interview!"

00.18.42

ME: Welcome back. You are looking at a man who thinks he is God—no, not me, but the guest I have in the studio. He is dressed like this because he claims he found a loophole in time as he was walking to Jerusalem two thousand years ago and suddenly found himself here, zapped into 21st century New Zealand—

GOD: That is nothing near the truth, as you know. Raise your right hand—

ME: Why? Am I volunteering for something?

GOD: Good. Now fly.

ME: Don't be ridiculous. Have you gone mad—?

GOD: Understand this: just as it was effortless for you, a human, to raise your hand, so it is as effortless for a bird to raise its wings and fly. Likewise it is as easy for an eternal being like me to move through time to any moment in history, future or past. As with moving your hand, I just have to want it and it happens. But you have limitations: you can't fly, no matter how much you wish it, though a bird without thinking, can. I have no limitations. I would go on to tell you that being without limitations thus omnipresent I in fact am always everywhere at every moment past, present and future, and you would realise if you knew your Einstein who realised time and space are a continuum—

ME: You and Einstein must have great conversations in Heaven.

GOD: Unfortunately, Einstein...

ME: You are not going to tell me he didn't make it through Heaven's immigration—

GOD: Intelligence is not a requirement, fortunately for the human race to—

ME: So there is a Hell, and Einstein is in it?

GOD: Of course there is a Hell! Why else do you think I would be walking to Jerusalem to die nailed between Heaven and Earth on two planks of wood—?

ME: And why would you?

GOD: To save mankind from the Hell you wouldn't want—

ME: Well in Einstein's case it seems you failed, so wasn't it all just a waste of pain—

GOD: I came to my own but my own did not receive me. But as many as received me they became the children of God. Children by adoption. My brothers, my sisters.

ME: Anyway, Hell is old-fashioned. Nobody believes in Hell these days—

GOD: Do you expect your house to burn down?

ME: My house? Of course not! I hope not! Why—

GOD: Then you have spent thousands of dollars insuring against something you hope and expect will never happen!

ME: Fire insurance? Well of course I do. Every homeowner does. Your point?

GOD: Only that you invest a great deal of money to insure yourself against something that you think will never happen. You hope and think that Hell will never happen. Why aren't you even more willing to invest far more in case Hell happens to be true and you end up in unbearable agony for all eternity—Forever!

ME: Do you claim to be good? Kind? The acme of everything nice?

GOD: I am perfect goodness.

ME: Then why do you chuck half the world into Hell? Fire and brimstone and wailing and gnashing of teeth? I wouldn't call that nice—

GOD: I don't throw anyone into Hell. You choose it for yourself. You go to where you belong—

ME: Oh come now, NO one chooses being cooked alive in an everlasting fire—

GOD: Oh yes you do. You just don't know you do. Anyone living a life of Satan's values shares Satan's destiny. Everyone who loves obeying me, lives forever with me.

ME: I thought we were saved by faith?

GOD: An initial act of faith leading to a lifetime of obedience—

ME: There is always a catch!

GOD: There is no catch. It's plain and obvious. You end up where you belong.

ME: If you're good you go up and if you're bad you join your mates down below—

GOD: You never see them. The loneliest ever place is Hell. Solitary screaming. And goodness isn't good enough. Heaven is my home. If you don't know me personally, you can't come.

ME: I can feel viewers turning off in droves!

00.21.31

ME: You are watching "In Town Tonight" and my guest is God. Tell me, why did you choose this station, this programme, this interviewer, this insignificant country to be interviewed in? Wouldn't Almighty God be expected to—?

GOD: I chose this and you for the same reason I chose unimportant Bethlehem and funny-speaking Galilee. It is far less costly in human lives and my agony. It also places eternal treasure in an earthen vessel, a basic principle of ours which requires a Matthew revelation from the Father to each Peter, so that even a Lot recognises a heavenly angel when unenlightened men see only a man, and an Abraham sees me.

ME: Well thank you for that. I'm so glad I asked you that question though I'm not sure you haven't just grievously insulted me—

GOD: Then don't let me leave you guessing. I chose you because you are so average at your job, so mediocre, and your station and nation likewise. But don't frown, from this day on only those counted greatest on Earth will queue up to be interviewed by you. Believe me, even a donkey can be made famous if beckoned by God.

ME: You seem an average enough guy to me: Don't you feel embarrassed posing as God? Don't you feel in mortal danger of God's eternal wrath in that Hell-fire you speak of?

GOD: I feel in danger only of being grossly misunderstood by those who love me, which is the reason I am in this studio this day, being subjected to such inanities—

ME: Yes, why ARE you here? What purpose—?

GOD: My people are blaspheming me relentlessly. Pious blasphemy, unintended, but wicked insults none-the-less. I am not sovereign in anything like the sense many think I am. This world is nothing like what I want the world to be. Concerning Revival, they are waiting for ME to act sovereignly while I am waiting for THEM to act sovereignly. I placed man in charge of my world and this present mess is what he has made of it. Yet he insists on blaming me for what his own actions have produced. I can stand that blasphemy in my enemies but not from those who love me. It seems that you unthinking humans have yet to realise that Almighty God has the least free-will of all living beings—

ME: Now THAT really IS blasphemy!

GOD: That is truth. Down through the ages we have marvelled that none of your great thinkers, your clever men, have yet put themselves where God is and looked at all things from my point of view. Had you done so, you would have long ago realised I am a hand-head-and-foot fettered prisoner in the most solitary of confinements, and that I have been from the beginning and will be so world without end—

ME: You heap blasphemy on blasphemy—

GOD: You, the human race, have never worked out that I am forever on the horns of an insoluble dilemma, one which has already cost me my life and fatally injured the Godhead were it possible for God to die and remain dead—

ME: A paradox of blasphemies—

GOD: And the heartbreaking thing is that belief in this contrary blasphemy is paraded as an evidence of a strong godly faith, that good Christians can believe that God can be infinitely cruel and infinitely good at the same time—such unthinking faith is no faith at all—

ME: What are you on about?

GOD: It reduces me to the level of a Reverend Jim Jones, of a man claiming to be God yet by his actions denying everything God must and should be—

ME: Oh it does that all right! It does indeed—

GOD: Yet all you unthinking humans have to do is a scientific thought experiment such as Einstein performed to produce his Special Relativity—

ME: You're an Einsteinian, a worshipper of Einstein—

GOD: So why don't you thought-experiment? You shouldn't need any special revelation such as I am giving you tonight. Why don't you postulate that the God of the Bible is true and real and the world is as it is today and see if you can make sense of that contradiction—

ME: And you can, I suppose—?

GOD: I live it. That is my biography. Why has no Christian thinker seriously attempted to reason their way through my Biblical biography?

ME: Perhaps because they wouldn't dare. Perhaps because they have too much respect for an Almighty God—

GOD: That is a respect I don't need. I don't wish to be lumped in with Father Divine and Jim Jones, an object of gullibility—

ME: Yet you sit before me in your dusty toga, being exactly what you appear to be: a rather ludicrous object of idiotic gullibility—

GOD: You will change your opinion. And soon. What do you think people first thought of Jesus, a horny-handed carpenter from nowhere? What good thing ever came out of Galilee?

ME: You don't convince me, and you never will. Give us your biography then. Where were you born and when? Who was your Mum and Dad? your Grandma and Grandpa?

GOD: You make the same mistake as Professor Stephen Hawking on page 166 in his "Brief History of Time", where this reputedly greatest mind since Einstein asks in impeccable Dalek, Who made God? Yet a mere 8 pages earlier he calls this very question a fallacy, quoting Augustine, that it is wrong to imagine God being subject to time as time is a only an aspect of the universe God created.

ME: You're saying the great professor got it wrong—

GOD: He saw the point intellectually but failed to apply it practically—a failing of most of you humans—

ME: He doesn't believe you exist.

GOD: Very obviously I do. Why is there something rather than nothing?

ME: So you are giving me a picture of God lounging around on the clouds of Heaven reading books on Science?

GOD: I can't turn off my omniscience, often as I want to. We automatically know all your productions, but Science is our favourite reading! There is nothing we in Heaven like better than a good laugh.

ME: Maybe you don't realise how ludicrous you sound! And you haven't answered any of my questions—

GOD: Yes I have. God could not have a beginning because beginnings are time things not found in eternity where God lives. I eternally am. God lives outside of time. However, as the question is so universal yet the answer so obvious, let's answer it: Who made God? Answer: I made myself: "I AM WHAT I AM AND I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE." That is what I said to Moses and that is what I eternally shall say.

ME: How could you make yourself when you already were? as you already had to be in order to decide what you would become—?

GOD: If you were a being of infinite intelligence I could tell you in detail and you would fully understand. But as you are a human and thus of limited intellectual capacity, and as your human languages can barely begin to contain infinite meaning I will equally dumb down for you as you would for a child of two. And even then you will never understand—

ME: Try me.

GOD: One day I will. For now, I ask you to accept Einstein's dictum that imagination is superior to knowledge, therefore emulate Tolstoy and imagine there is nothing and nobody in the universe except yourself, for that is the position I found myself in at the beginning—

ME: The beginning you just said you never had—

GOD: I am humanising for the sake of communication—

ME: Ah yes, that's so good of you—

GOD: Imagine waking tomorrow morning without a body—

ME: —without—?

GOD: You feel incredibly light. Floating. You stretch out your arm and touch—nothing. Your hand, it seems, travels a million miles without touching a thing. So you open your eyes and see—nothing. Not black, not white, not grey. Nothing. All around you, every direction possible, clear, empty. You look at your hand and see that you have no hand, no body. With that no hand you reach up and not touch your no eyes—

ME: Not an easy thing to do!

GOD: Nothing of you and nothing beyond you. You can see everything there is and there is nothing to see. You are alone in the Universe. Only there isn't a Universe. Just you—and nothing.

ME: That sounds lonely!

GOD: Not as if "it" or "they" have been been spirited away and placed somewhere out of your reach, out of your sight because you know you know you know somehow there IS no where out of your sight. You are conscious of Being you is all there is. Being conscious of being is all you are. Being you. Only you.

ME: (Singing) Only you—

GOD: Whatever 'you' are. Whatever 'you' is. Only you. Which makes you God. No big deal: a God of nothing. So you couldn't begin, because "beginning" has no meaning because time doesn't exist, because you haven't made it yet, because as something called Einstein will one day discover time can't exist without matter and no matter where you look there is no matter. No matter, YOU exist, though immaterially.

ME: Does that thing itch?

GOD: What?

ME: That toga thing you're wearing—looks itchy to me. I once had a—

GOD: Itch? No. As I was saying—

ME: I finally got rid of it.

GOD: What?

ME: My itchy shirt—but I interrupted you. Do go on.

GOD: Such knowledge doesn't daunt you because you know you fleetingly (which for you means eternally) enjoy a freedom no being will ever experience again, not even yourself: a freedom to do whatever you like, become whatever you want, invent anything you wish up to the level of whatever powers you have, which, you rather suspect, may well prove infinite.

ME: My chest was red from scratching—

GOD: Yes, well, certainly appear infinite to whatever you are capable of creating—

ME: Creating! Now you're on to something!

GOD: So you must create (you must surely create) so carefully, so RESPONSIBLY, meticulously, exhaustively assessing what could result from whatever you—

ME: Create what then? With what people this nothingness?

GOD: But first, creative decisions can flow only from the character of the one making them, so first decide the character you're composed of. What are you? What do you make of yourself? What will you make of yourself? Your first invention must be you. God must invent God.

ME: God must invent God! Must he? I suppose so.

GOD: What attributes would I give Him? What character would I be?

ME: And you answered yourself—?

GOD: Uncompelled by Time, then, Your first question to yourself is: "What do I possess already? What abilities do I have no need to place in or draw out of myself?"

ME: And you answer yourself—and no doubt yourself agrees—

GOD: —that as your power is the only power existing, you are clearly all-powerful. Omnipotent. Whatever knowledge is possible, that knowledge you and you alone possess. You are Omniscient. Whatever is capable of being seen (admittedly nothing) you alone can see. You are Omnivoyant. Obviously it could be argued that by being bodyless you are nowhere, yet wherever you are is everywhere that is. You are Omnipresent. Can you make somewhere that you cannot be? Surely impossible.

ME: SURELY impossible, but fun to try!

GOD: But great fun to try! You can hardly wait to create, to discover the limits, if any, of whatever you are! You begin to enjoy the prospect of mastering the problems your own existence poses: I am what I am but what am I? I will be what I will be but what will that be?

ME: What in very deed?

GOD: "Supposing—" you ask yourself, "supposing there is no limit to any of my abilities—supposing that each aspect of me is infinite in scope, in quality, then should I choose anything less than infinite perfection for any aspect of my character?"

ME: Infinite perfection! Oh, you should choose that!

GOD: "Of course not!" your Logic answers. "To be anything less than the best you could be would be unthinkable, unworthy of God being God!" Your innermost Spirit resonates concurrence: "My peace is disturbed at the prospect of anything less." "Presumeably we are capable of anything?" you ask yourself, yourself replying—"Presumeably."

ME: Presumeably? Definitely!

GOD: "Then we must be capable of harm, of wrong, of evil. Should we develop these aspects of character also, and also to an infinite degree?" At which you are shocked at yourself.

ME: So are we all!—shocked at God!—

GOD: "Never! How could I think such! We must use our powers only for good and never for evil—"

ME: Quite right!

GOD: "Such thought shatters my peace!" agrees your innermost spirit. "I speak hypothetically," Your reason tells you. "Surely we should examine every alternative before irrevocably choosing a character that in embracing its characteristics must necessarily obviate all its opposites— "

ME: Ah, there IS that—

GOD: "Of course, of course." "And I agree," Your innermost spirit concurs. "Then if we agree that principle—what's wrong with wrong? Surely we can project a future in which a little wrong can cause much less trouble than nothing but right? I foresee the concept 'suffering.' I foresee 'pain' and 'misery'—" And before your inner eyes you see thousands of millions of future scenarios of what could be, must be, will be, if.

ME: If what?

GOD: Your imagination creates millions upon millions of enormously varying possible futures according to what you could decide to create and with what properties and levels and ratios of such properties. Like a chess grandmaster you sift all futures through, weed them out, reduce them down to the best thousand, hundred, ten, two. At this (humanly speaking) you pause.

ME: Because You're worn out?

GOD: Because both look so bad. "It is unthinkable," You tell yourselves, "unthinkable that God could be anything other than ever and only good, ever anything less than the infinite perfection of perfect goodness—Yet that way lies such suffering, not just for ourselves but such fragile, innocent others. Should we create at all?"

ME: Are there more than one of you or are you just using the royal "we"?

GOD: "How can we be good yet not create, if to create is patently good?" "Do you agree," you ask your innermost spirit, "that as God we can never choose anything less than perfect goodness, no matter what the consequence?" "We could not choose any lesser course than infinite perfection and remain infinitely perfectly God." "You see the suffering that entails?" "Of course. It seems to be good invites pain."

ME: You invite pain all right—

GOD: "Yet think of this," you instruct your reason: "How can I insist upon my goodness when by doing so I inflict enormous unending injury upon myriads of relatively innocent others?" "Such a course would only be tolerable if," your reason replies, "you suffer their enormous unending injury yourself. You share their fate."

ME: Fate being the plural of feet.

GOD: "Would I be willing for this?" you ask your reason. And this expression of your every thought replies: "To turn back from infinite suffering when only that way lies infinite goodness is to reject yourself from being God.

ME: Look at the dust you've spread over the floor!

GOD: To sacrifice the highest good by rejecting its pain for peace would declare God no longer worthy to be God. We have no choice, unless we choose to be less than perfect, which choice alone would disqualify our Godhood."

ME: The cleaners will throw a wobbly!

GOD: "It seems you have no choice," instructs your innermost spirit. "We must restrict ourselves always to only the highest good or cease to be God."

ME: Cease to be God! That's the best thing you've said all night!

GOD: "You realise that means we disbar our own free-will? Once chosen, we will have no choice ever but to do the most perfect of infinitely perfect goodness at each and every moment.

ME: Dust everywhere!

GOD: We will be restricted to a knife-edge, a tight-rope (I speak as a man!) of action every moment of our eternal existence. Though God, we will be limited to that one perfect course one blemish from which would render us immediately imperfect and no longer God."

ME: You ARE imperfect therefore no longer God—

GOD: "There is already no alternative." "Very well then, we choose perfection, the infinite perfection of everything good, let the cards fall where they may (I speak as a human), as indeed they must!"

ME: Are you schizophrenic? How many are there of you?

GOD: We are a Trinity, a threeness in a oneness.

ME: Make up your mind: are you three or one? You can't be both—

GOD: You presume to impose human mathematical limitations on our infinity. To you humans, three finite beings are one plus one plus one. But three infinite persons are one TIMES one TIMES one, which only and ever and always means God is one—

ME: Then why do you talk to yourselves?

GOD: Because only then do we have sensible fully-informed and satisfying discussions. Talking to anyone lesser is a pain and a strain, especially when answering ludicrous human questions like yours—

ME: Then let me ludicrously suggest that it seems you are saying that an Almighty, All-knowing, All-Intelligent God couldn't work out a future that didn't involve suffering?

GOD: True. Infinite suffering. Both for himself and for many many others.

ME: Then it would have been sensible for such a God to commit infinite suicide—

GOD: The one thing God can't do.

ME: You can't?

GOD: I AM can never become I WAS. I AM is forever.

ME: What a bummer.

GOD: Of course I am simplifying to almost nothing the full thought processes that went on at this time—

ME: And why would you do that?

GOD: Because human language breaks under the strain! How can mundane earthy words hold the counsels of the Godhead? I recoil at my ridiculous attempts to use human words to record the thoughts of infinite intelligence. The depth of meaning of my every word is limitless, human words microscopically finite. Tips of icebergs can't metaphor the impossibility: perhaps our speck of Earth against our astronomically exploding Universe...

ME: I wonder that you even bother—

GOD: Yet how can I convey any meaning at all unless I use words? Translating God into English! All translation is at best a failing exercise. When God translated a single word of his into human he had to use a whole perfect living human life to express that single word: And the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we saw...And even then most humans missed my meaning. I can't now create flesh to embody the God I wish with words to communicate—

ME: I hope someone is still listening—

GOD: To show the world what I am like—

ME: Ah yes, you were about to invent yourself—

GOD: So you choose your character's characteristics. In all your imagination's future projections you saw every possible expression of good so now you one by one assume them. Love is the most attractive—Immediately you have a problem. Love is good so God must be love, but how can love be infinitely perfect in a vacuum? Love exist without an object to love? Love in abstract, infinitely perfect?

ME: I'm getting bored. I can't let this go on—

GOD: There has to be another to express your love to. For your love to be perfect, as it must, the object of your love must be equal in every way to yourself, as perfect as you are so that you can love it to perfection. To equally be God.

ME: Dusty—do you mind if I call you Dusty?—

GOD: No problem, it is already there, you have been aware of it from the first, have talked all things over with it—it is your thought, your reason, the expression of your own mind, the imprint of your very self, as living as you are. Part of you, yet somehow separate.

ME: Hey Dusty! Hoy!

GOD: If need be, though impossible, a mind of its own. In time, you foresee, the impossible will become actual, your own mind think other than your thoughts. For now that is not important. Born of you it is your Child. You will call it your expression, your word, your Son.

ME: Please Dusty! No more! We're all bored to death!

GOD: But for the characteristic of love to be perfect it needs a second equally perfect loveable personage to be loved equally, to show the perfect equality of your perfect love.

ME: Yes, perfect love! tell us a perfect love story—

GOD: There has been a third personage within what you know to be yourself yet somehow separate from yourself even from the first. You called it your innermost Spirit, but it was also apart from you, had, if need be, a mind of its own. It threw up such scenes in your imagination the whole of the future is known to you in infinite detail. Yourself then, yet not yourself.

ME: No more sermons! Enough already!

GOD: There is a oneness about your threeness and a threeness about your oneness your perfect love will always demand and equally maintain throughout eternity.

ME: Have you read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?"

GOD: I am regrettably infinitely aware of it. Why?

ME: I was thinking of your impossible ethical dilemma, which reminds me of Oolon Colluphid's philosophical trilogy—

GOD: Ah, but did Oolon ever get around to writing them?

ME: Um...Correct me if I'm wrong, but let me summarise for our viewers the appalling mess it seems God has gotten himself into simply by existing: To be perfectly God God had to be perfectly good. But in his perfect knowledge of the future, God could see such intransigently perfect goodness would cause endless future suffering for both himself and millions of innocent others. Which isn't perfectly good. Isn't it better therefore not to be good rather than make others suffer for your insistence on uncompromising goodness? In fact, isn't the highest possible good to be somewhat less than perfectly good so that others won't suffer the agony of what perfect goodness will unintentionally but inevitably inflict upon them?

GOD: You mean be a Corrie ten Boom?

ME: A what?

GOD: She mirrors my dilemma: Place yourself in Corrie ten Boom's family in Holland in Hitler's War. A dedicated evangelical Bible-believing born-again Christian family none of whom would dream of telling lies. Ordinarily. Yet Hitler's Nazis have overrun your country and do you answer truthfully when they ask you compromising questions? When telling the truth means innocents will be arrested, tortured, murdered, all for the preservation of your rigid integrity? One of the saintliest women who ever lived, Corrie decided to lie ("O Lord forgive me") rather than answer truthfully that she was hiding Jews in her house. Her sister Nollie refused this refuge, and in telling Nazi criminals the truth risked betraying innocent friends to their obviously evil enemies. Which sister had the greater integrity?

ME: Scruples! That's exactly my point! Couldn't God be flexible, bend the rules a little, do a little sin sometimes that good may abound? Sure, he would be a little less than perfection but who would reprimand him for that? Those saved from an enormity of pain? And isn't it a greater goodness to sacrifice oneself, even one's conscience, for the greater good of others?

GOD: Sacrifice good for the sake of good? Expediency: the good end justifying the evil means. To do something bad to attain a better good is patently illogical. If bad is the only means of attaining that good then is it a good at all? How can evil be the servant of good? If someone so values evil for the good it produces, how warped is that reasoning! How can such reasoning be trusted to define what is good? Good to such reasoning is illusory!

ME: How interesting! It seems God was hooked into an impossible dilemma. God was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. We humans are living proof that he failed to resolve his dilemma.

GOD: You are also proof that we ultimately did.

ME: My mind is reeling. I'm not used to this kind of hard thinking. Let's all take a break and clear the air a little.

The Boss told me later that he faded in an instrumental leading to a station identifier then more music. The DVD at this point shows I am aware of sounds from outside. I ask the Boss what they are and he tells me there's a crowd forming outside. People are insisting to be let in to see God. It is only now that I begin to realise what danger I am in. I begin to look at this actor in a new way.

00.46.06

ME: Welcome back folks. I am interviewing a young new actor who is playing the part of God. He won't tell me his name, but we are bound to hear more of a talent like this. Of course he is far from what the REAL God would be like, but he is making as good a fist of the role as a human being can. Please accept my congratulations—they are honest and sincere in every sense of the word—

GOD: So I see. Thank you at least for that.

ME: Tell me, why did you create the human race at all if most of us would end up in Hell? Wasn't that a particularly nasty thing to do?

GOD: I had no choice. If I wished to remain infinitely perfect, I had to do everything that was good. Is creativity good? Then I had to create or cease to be God. So I created—

ME: You HAD to create the human race?

GOD: I couldn't get out of it if I wanted to remain perfect.

ME: And you created angels, right?

GOD: I created everything that is.

ME: You created angels first—or humans?

GOD: Angels. A perfect creator would have to create beings only a little less great than himself, right down to tiny beings far smaller than yourself. This I did, and called them angels. They are my messengers. They carry out my will.

ME: How many are there?

GOD: Ten thousand times ten thousand.

ME: And Satan was one of these?

GOD: Lucifer. His name was only changed to Satan after he fell.

ME: How did he fall?

GOD: He chose to defy me, to carry out his own will, not mine.

ME: What is wrong with that? Isn't an angel allowed free expression? It sounds like slavery to just do what YOU want all the time.

GOD: It can't be helped. I happen to have infinite omniscience—I know everything. The angels do not. If we want to keep Heaven perfect, then all decisions have to be referred to me for my approval. Only my will can be done in Heaven if we wish to keep Heaven perfect.

ME: That must be stifling for all the angels. I presume you made them with freewill—?

GOD: I did—

ME: Then they have freewill but they can't exercise it! No wonder Lucifer revolted! I would too!

GOD: Yes, you would. It takes a very disciplined person to submit their will perpetually to another's, even if it is to an intellect infinitely greater than their own. Soon a third of the angels agreed with Satan and followed him into rebellion—

ME: Only a third? I'm surprised they ALL didn't go!

GOD: Two thirds have remained wonderfully loyal. I am so grateful for their continuing loyalty—

ME: As you should be! So you threw the dissidents into Hell. That was kind of you!

GOD: On the contrary, they made Hell for themselves. At first they wanted to stay in Heaven but the faithful angels wouldn't have them and threw them out.

ME: I am talking to God who is stressing what a hard job being God is, how badly misunderstood he is by us humans. He is outlining the problems he faces. It seems that thousands of new viewers are joining us all the time! God is very popular! So let's particularise God's dilemma for new viewers: God has infinitely perfect knowedge and an infinite imagination. You, as God, ran through your infinitely perfect imagination every possible aspect of all possible futures.

GOD: True.

ME: You especially re-ran the ones that result if you choose to implement only the infinitely best possible action at every possible moment.

GOD: I did.

ME: You discover what you always knew, that there is only one possible future resulting from your only best-possible actions. But here is a question from a viewer. Let's say your best-possible future includes—your infinite imagination tells you—a beautiful little girl being tortured to death by her crazy mother on 4 July 1999.

GOD: Ah. I could give you actual instances, thousands—

ME: Let's keep it hypothetical. Now you have a terrible dilemma. Shouldn't you save that child's life at the expense of your own integrity? Your infinite imagination shows you in graphic detail every moment of that torture. That child's screams and pleadings re-echo through your mind. Surely you must do something? Surely an infinitely perfect God would save that child?

GOD: But I found that would only be possible by intervening in a way that contradicts the free-will acts of all previous generations of all autonomous agents. To intervene unilaterally, against the collective will of the freely autonomous beings I had created, can never be the action of a perfect being.

ME: But we all want you to fling the door open and rescue that girl!

GOD: So do I. But you won't let me do it! You won't let me rule the human race. You prefer Satan—

ME: No we don't! We just want to be left alone—

GOD: That's what he wants too! For me to leave the human race alone. So what he wants prevails. He loves watching children die—

ME: But we don't!

GOD: Yes you do. You don't want me to rule over you. That's why I am walking to Jerusalem. I'm going there to be tortured to death by you, just like that little girl. You would rather she died than to give up your freedom to choose to love and enjoy evil.

ME: You must let the child suffer and die?

GOD: Not me—YOU must! If the whole world submitted to MY rule there would never be a murder—no not one.

ME: But the woman is crazy. How did you let her get that way?

GOD: The causes will be traced back in an unbroken line to the beginning of creation. I could only undo them if I created differently—

ME: Do it then. Nothing is yet created. That child lives only in imagination. If You vary the causes then the mother can be sane and the child saved.

GOD: Yes, but that alteration of creation restricts the beings so created.

ME: So?

GOD: Well, that wouldn't be creating to the maximum of my infinitely perfect ability. My creations would to some extent be puppets—restricted when they could have been free.

ME: But You save that child.

GOD: But at what cost? I would have created beings with less freewill choice than they could have had and therefore should have had. I am no longer perfect. I have chosen to create something less than my best—

ME: But you save that child—

GOD: And in doing so declare that second-best can be better than best. What kind of universe have you ended up with? It is self-evident that God can never choose to do anything less than best. You must let the child die—

ME: That is intolerable—

GOD: It is. I know. And the same terrible conflict occurs with every inevitable future horror my imagination showed me—and there are millions of them, millions upon millions!

ME: But you can't allow otherwise?

GOD: I can't allow otherwise—

ME: You are the prisoner of your own perfection.

GOD: I have to be, or the future has no hope. An imperfect God who not only tolerates but creates imperfection is unbridled omnipotence without the stability of an infinitely perfect objective morality. Such could go whimsically in any direction without good reason.

ME: Yes, God does have a problem—

GOD: We therefore have to bridle our own omnipotence with the objectivity of infinitely perfect morality. Only the best. The only motto We can act under—

ME: Even if it leads to this beautiful child's agonising death.

GOD: Regrettably, yes.

ME: Then I think you should resign and let someone with a far better answer run the world—

GOD: There isn't a better answer. If someone had one I WOULD resign and let them be God instead of me.

ME: You would? Truly? Resign and let someone else—

GOD: But there is no better answer. I am always God.

ME: Then why create at all? To create is your freewill choice. You are all-powerful. No one can make you create. It is your decision to implement only the best. Think what this means. You and you alone will be ultimately responsible for the entire future you will set in train.

GOD: Before I created anything I had to take exactly that into consideration—

ME: Because you did decide to create a world that would become as it now is, you must therefore be responsible for everything that happens in it. Who other than you will therefore be responsible for that little girl's horrible death. At any point you could have intervened and you didn't. You bear the full responsibility because you created the original circumstances that followed the course you and you alone set in train that produced that mother and that child and that day—

GOD: I know, I know. Terrible, the burden I bear—

ME: You must accept the ultimate responsibility for every rape, every murder, every crime ever committed if you created what your imagination has shown you must come to pass, if you continue to stick unrelentingly to perfection—

GOD: As I must, I must—

ME: In fact, how can you call it perfection when it produces such enormous imperfection?

GOD: The answer is so obvious. It was my responsibility to create the initial perfection, but if other free-will agents choose, unlike me, to act with less than the perfection I created them with, then THEY must bear the responsibility for the outcome of their imperfect actions. Humans cannot blame God for what their actions have produced against God's will.

ME: They will not be able to shrug off their responsibility for the murder of that little girl?

GOD: They are responsible for their own choices—

ME: Yet, though that has to be true, the fact is, you foresaw their every action. You foresaw every rape, every murder. And You could have created differently so that none of them would happen.

GOD: But if I did, I wouldn't be allowing you free-will so you wouldn't be perfect and I wouldn't have created up to the best of my perfection, so I wouldn't be perfect, so I wouldn't be God.

ME: Not that you are. There is no God. Here is a second question: God's sovereignty and man's freewill—

GOD: There has never been a conflict between them. Except in man's mind. I foresaw every single freewill action of man in my infinitely perfect imagination long before I created man and his free-will.

ME: So it is not that we think we are acting with free-will what God has actually sovereignly willed?

GOD: It is that we foresaw in imagination all your future free-will actions. And I knew what I had to choose, what my own perfection dictated, the one single combination that has produced each of your utterly free-will lives.

ME: I guess it's not possible for God NOT to know every detail of our yet-to-be-lived out lives?

GOD: He can't help it, being everywhere, including the future, we just know everything. Yet we have chosen to let you live. So in my sovereignty, all your previously-known actions become my will. Or else we would cease to let you live. This of course doesn't mean we approve of all you do, only that our best possible choice (as prisoner of our own perfection) is to allow you to live and continue to make your free-will choices.

ME: This is much too tough for me to understand.

GOD: Your perfect free-will is my perfect sovereignty. There is no contradiction: they don't even chafe. Thus the marriage of God's authentic sovereignty and man's authentic free-will. There is no conflict, none at all.

ME: Still, God's sovereignty is clearly the greater. If he wished, he could have changed all our history by making our average intelligence say 10% greater, or 10% less, both of which would have created vastly different histories—

GOD: But I foresaw that neither of those would be the best possible future—

ME: If seas and continents had varied in their content or structure just a little, or climates been different, or if we had circled—not circled—orbited around some lesser or greater sun or suns...if our moon had been smaller or closer...

GOD: that would have given an inferior future—

ME: If human nature had been differently consituted, mixed, or balanced—if—

GOD: These are some of the vastly numbered permutations I had to run through my imagination and choose what my perfect judgment told me was the best—

ME: So—

GOD: The multifaceted combinations of choices leading to just one single time-sequenced pathway that became one choice.

ME: With his choice to press Enter and move it from imagination to actuality, all our free-will acts became God's sovereign choice. Seems logical. I guess. If there is a God.

GOD: We thought so too.

ME: Thus we are able to say of a certainty that we know the best of all possible worlds. This is it.

GOD: This is it.

ME: This world and its history are the outcome of God's only ever infinitely perfect choices and our so often bad ones, all of which he foresaw, yet created us, as we are, anyway.

GOD: Which makes this world's history the best possible foreseen by infinite perfection.

ME: Which is pretty sobering, so far is it from the perfection that must be God if only there WAS a God. What on Earth happened? What do you say we have done with the perfection we must have begun with? How did we somehow wreck things?

GOD: Do you sometimes choose less than perfection?

ME: Of course.

GOD: Then there's your answer. And you have just sketched the first chapters of Genesis.

ME: But that's a myth, isn't it?

GOD THROWS BACK HIS HEAD AND LAUGHS.

ME: Let's take a break. Interviewing God is hard work!

00.59.52

ME: Welcome back. This is God and I'm interviewing him. Another question has been handed to me: "Couldn't God have made a mistake and been less than perfect at some careless moment in his massively long life?" Doesn't he sometimes get tired and dozy and...lapse a little? Even once? Wouldn't that explain this imperfect world?

GOD: No, and to prove that you are still here.

ME: Come again?

GOD: If we had slipped up even once, even for a micro-second, we would no longer be God. Perfect. There would be no point in keeping the human race alive or the Universe running. I would have failed. Ceased to be.

ME: Oh, what would happen if God ceased to be God? Not that there IS a God. I hope there's a God. There SHOULD be a God. But there isn't, that's obvious—

GOD: I am God.

ME: Oh yes, you. If there really were a God and he ceased to exist I guess everything would black out to a vacuum? Awaiting a fluctuation in the quantum vacuum in vain then, because the creator of the principles of quantum mechanics wouldn't be there to create them, implement them. Because he wouldn't exist. Therefore neither would we. And you viewers wouldn't be watching this interview. What would you be doing instead? Oh, what a fun interview this is!

GOD: Actually it's impossible for me to make a mistake.

ME: That's a relief!

GOD: In fact, it's temporally impossible for me to make an eternal mistake, even a minute one. After all, living in eternity, I am the prototype time-traveller—

ME: Of the type that "if you could travel backwards in time and killed your grandparents, would you then no longer exist therefore be unable to travel back in time to kill your grandparents...?"

GOD: Not really—

ME: You should realise that the most eminent scientists of our age are absorbed in pondering such points. Stephen Hawking, for instance, believes some kind of cosmic policeman would prevent any historic alteration. Do you believe that?

GOD: Yes—me.

ME: Why grandparents, by the way? You would unpleasantly have to commit twice the number of murders than if your parents. Even easier, Why not your parents when babies in their respective cots? And wouldn't minussing one of them be sufficient to make you cease to be? Or if one parent grew up and married, would you be half you and the other half...a stranger? Frankly, to all such scenarios let's say "Perish the thought!"

GOD: Can we move on. The crowd is gathering and time is short—

ME: Which brings us to the question "Who made God?"

GOD: I've already answered this—

ME: But for new viewers—

GOD: Who made me? I made myself. Surely that's obvious. I exist from all eternity. I AM WHAT I AM AND I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE. I created myself. I always was. I always will be.

ME: So there was no one before you?

GOD: There can't be. I am all there ever was. Before time was, I AM. I can't say it plainer than that. No, for me time is like a hall I can walk up or down any time I like. Suppose you are painting a hall and you notice you have accidentally left a bare spot two paces back: how difficult is it to take two steps back and paint over that bare spot? No trouble. Happens all the time. That's what God can do if He suddenly noticed He had made a mistake say two centuries back. He takes two steps back down Time's hall till 200 years ago is again present tense and flashes His whitewash brush.

ME: Simple as that.

GOD: Well, simple as that for human understanding. Actually, much more complicated in that I am so big that I inhabit all of Time's hall. I don't need to step back down because I'm always already there. But now I've confused you with a mind-picture of a massive giant crammed back-bent filling a narrow hall with a paintbrush dripping all over the floor as he  
contorts—

ME: Probably wiping more paint on himself than the walls!

GOD: Messy God—! No, wipe away that thought— (AND YET AGAIN GOD LAUGHS) Mind you, as cramped omnipotence inevitably flexes his back, the hall's walls would split and splinter outwards in divergent directions away from each other just like an expanding Universe...(LAUGHTER)

ME: Then is God anything like HG Wells' invisible man? If I remember the story aright, all around him people seemed almost motionless as statues while he walked in and out among them, wondering. Then he smelt burning and realised his clothes were scorching with friction because time had enormously slowed down for him and he was moving so fast that no one could see him—

GOD: Oh, God can move even faster than that! Faster than an infinity of speeding bullets. Faster than the millionth multiple of the speed of light. So infinitely fast that even if he is a rather thin man (which he isn't), he couldn't help but be everywhere, all at once, in every inch of Time's hall.

ME: And think how easy it would have been for Wells' invisible man to pick up a brush, dip it in a pot, step two paces down the hall...slosh. No one would even see him do it. Too fast for time, too fast for the human eye.

GOD: Much too fast—

ME: God simply can't make a mistake because he can go back in time and unmake it. What a shame there is no God!

GOD: Not even go back. I'm always already there. Slosh. No mistake ever happened.

ME: Which means that in your entire life God never made a mistake in his treatment of you, dear viewers! Everything he did or allowed in your life was absolute perfection. Not just yours, in everyone's life. Now that's sure takes some believing. But that must be a corollary of this thesis unless this thesis is as hopelessly wrong as it obviously is.

GOD: You've put it round the wrong way. I have acted toward everyone in accord with my infinite perfection. I did the best I could—the best you humans permitted me. If you had prayed more, had been more holy and liked my values more than Satan's, I could have done much more for you—much more. But you kept betraying yourselves by rejecting what my Bible says and doing your own will, which is what Satan wants you to do. For a few minutes of the pleasures of sin you have reaped so much terrible distress and pain as you put Satan in charge of your lives, of your world—

ME: So if we had all been super good and prayed a lot God could have saved that murdered girl?

GOD: Not just her. All the murders in the world. All I needed was the moral right to act.

ME: So we by our sinfulness tie up your hands. What a shame we are all so bad! What a shame there is no God! And on that sombre note let's take another break. My head is still reeling! You're sure making my brain work overtime!

As the music fades in God smiles and leans towards me. "You are not far from the Kingdom of God," he says. I laugh. "Coming from a phony like you, that's an insult! YOU are not far from the Kingdom of Hell!" And I laugh again.

01.08.29

ME: Welcome back. I am talking with God. Yes, this person in the fancy dress claims he is Jesus Christ—Do you expect people to ask you to be their Saviour tonight? Are you going to have an altar rail appeal and they'll ask you into their heart wearing clothes like that—?

GOD: Many will put their trust in me after tonight. Many.

ME: The power of positive thinking, eh?

GOD: "Come to me all you who are weary and laden with heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me for my yoke is easy, my burden is light—"

ME: I think Jesus Christ said that.

GOD: I am Jesus Christ.

ME: Don't say such things while I'm this close to you! The thunderbolt might hit both of us.

GOD: Fear not! There will be no thunderbolt.

ME: Someone has sent in this comment: "One plus one plus one equals three and there's nothing you can do to change that. According to you there are three Gods—" This Trinity thing again—

GOD: Listen, you can't get anything bigger than infinity. We three are all infinite. One infinity plus one infinity plus one infinity equals one infinity. We infinite three are infinite one.

ME: Well that's as clear as mud. Here's another viewer question: If God has the power to stop murders but doesn't, then He doesn't care. If He DOES care and wants to, then He doesn't have the power—

GOD: I DO have the power and I DO care. And I stop much more than you know. What I DON'T have is the moral right to stop a great deal more. I wish I could but I can't—

ME: We've just been through this but tell us again: What stops you?

GOD: You do. You humans. If you asked me, I'd come. But you don't ask me anywhere near enough. If you really wanted me, I would be there for you. But you are so half-hearted—

ME: You're talking about prayer. Everybody has asked for all kinds of good things and you don't even listen to us—

GOD: I listen! I hear everything! But I told you to pray without ceasing, to ask and keep on asking and never give up. But do you? No. Very rarely. I can do nothing without your prayers. I haven't got the moral right to act—

ME: That is unbelievable! God can do anything He wants to!

GOD: No He can't! I would if I could but I can't!

ME: I can hear all our viewers shouting at their tellies: Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Lies! Lies!

GOD: I cannot and will not turn the human race into puppets! You will reap what you sow! I will not stop consequences! What you give you will get back in return. I won't change the inevitability of results initiated by your actions!

ME: A nice God would!

GOD: But I do intervene and often. As often as I am sincerely and effectively asked until the blessing is received, so long as it is not self-centred praying. I don't give to selfish people. But I give and prevent and bless far far more times than the human race has even guessed at! But is my will done on earth as it is in Heaven? You have eyes—use them! This world is nothing like I want it! You humans have wilfully wrecked it almost beyond recognition—

ME: So I guess God is green?

GOD: I created nature—yes. My design. My life.

ME: You blame all evil on Satan, don't you? Then why don't you just kill Satan and let us humans be?

GOD: I've dealt with this—

ME: Thousands of new listeners?

GOD: Does your nation's leader kill the leader of his opposition? What would you call him if he did? How long would you allow him to continue ruling? He would have lost all moral right to rule, right? Then why do you ask me to expunge all my opposition? I will only ever do what is right! I will suffer the consequences. I do now.

ME: And so do we, obviously. Why on earth did you create the Devil in the first place? I presume you made him—?

GOD: I created him perfect. I called him Lucifer, the light bearer. He was perfect in all his ways till sin was found in him.

ME: I presume you foresaw he would fall? Why create him at all then?

GOD: I have already stated that God must do everything is good. It is good to create, so I must create.

ME: But only good things—

GOD: Of course.

ME: Tell the thousands of new viewers why you had to create.

GOD: This is what I forsaw before I created myself the perfection of perfection—that a perfect God would have to create, and have to create perfectly, create up to the level of his perfection—that is, beings only a little less majestic than himself. Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel stood at the peak of my creativity.

ME: Angels.

GOD: Archangels.

ME: Aren't these human terms? I presume you have another name for them in Heaven?

GOD: We do. But I'm speaking human to humans.

ME: And not Biblical human, either. If you REALLY wanted to play God, a few thees and thous wouldn't hurt, and the odd wouldest and shouldest.

GOD: Why? I'm not talking to a 17th century audience. I wish to be understood.

ME: Fair enough, but you don't sound authentic. A few thees and thous and you almost would.

GOD: I'll take the risk.

ME: And why don't you quote lots of Bible? If you really WERE God you would quote nothing but.

GOD: I have already had my Scriptures written. Now I am explaining them. So you would like me to change?

ME: Heavens no! No, I'm not complaining—But aren't you miserable all the time? Looking down on earth and seeing all these children dying in agony and being able to do nothing about it?

GOD: I save far more than the world can guess. But yes, I am in constant agony and constant bliss at one and the same time.

ME: You're schizophrenic?

GOD: I am huge. I am bigger than your Universe. I exist and operate on millions of levels. On one level I am weeping day and night. Another aspect of me has known nothing but blssful joy. You cannot even begin to know me in depth. I have spoken to you in terms of a human life but even then you destroyed me.

ME: I thought we were about to.

GOD: No, from the foundation of the world you already did.

ME: Not me personally, as—

GOD: Yes, you personally. And everyone else who ever lived or is going to live.

ME: Ah, the mysterious mumbo-jumbo hour again! To be expected, I guess. You were talking of angels.

GOD: Angels—yes. Real live beings. Real personalities. Free-will deciding and choosing entities who may or may not wish to do what you want.

ME: With pretty white wings and haloes? Look, I've got a sheaf of questions from viewers I've only had time to glance at—but no one thinks you're God.

GOD: I'm used to that. Many will change their minds.

ME: What will change them?

GOD: Healings. Deeds shout louder than words. There are people in wheelchairs tonight who tomorrow won't be—

ME: Hey hey hey—we're a respectable station! We can't allow you to dish out false hopes like that!

GOD: They are not false.

ME: This person doesn't believe you were morally right to create the Devil. She thinks you should destroy him, and so do I.

GOD: One day I will. Besides, I didn't create Satan. I created a perfect and wonderful and beautiful being called Lucifer. And he decided of his own free will to become Satan.

ME: You're splitting hairs—

GOD: Would you have had me create the greatest angel with no freewill? No ability to choose? What kind of a God would do that?

ME: A kind God would do that! This viewer asks "Why is moral right so important? God always does what is right. If you were to erase Satan and all his followers and take evil out of the world, all the world would cheer— "

GOD: Well, there's the answer in the question. God always does what is right. Is it right for me to ignore a third of my angels and wipe them out for disagreeing with me? Is that morally right?

ME: Many of us would think so—Another viewer asks why you let her baby die and in such great pain. There are several along that line—

GOD: If I had my way, no one would die. But I don't have my way. You all choose Satan over me—

ME: Oh we do not! That's nonsense!

GOD: You don't realise you're doing it. You call it freedom, and the right to choose, and democracy. What what they all boil down to is a life lived without me just as Satan lives his life without me. You do what YOU want to do just as HE does what HE wants to do. Except for a wonderful few, you humans do NOT want to live your lives for me. You want to live your lives for you. So does Satan. You value HIS values, not mine. And you reap the result in murders and crime and wars and death and pain—

ME: Another three—four—viewers want to know why you're dressed so crazily—he's on his way to Jerusalem, dear. Two thousand years ago. Don't ask me, ask Einstein, and you won't get a straight answer from God—maybe Captain Kirk of Star Trek—

GOD: You want me to talk about Time again?

ME: No thanks. This is a good one: "As Almighty God, you must have foreseen trouble when you created the angels?"

GOD: Of course I did. It was inevitable. Listen, like me, my home is perfect. These angels inhabited my home. My gardens, my forests, so they had to be perfect. Like me. I have perfect knowledge so it was only right that my perfect will is done in Heaven. And here are all these perfect and multi-talented beings with enormous intelligence and freewill of their own but—unable to express it—at least not without the consent of infinite intelligence. I felt sorry for them, but what could I do? Could I help it that unlike them I was perfect to an infinite degree?

ME: Well, yes you could.

GOD: I had no choice but to choose infinite perfection. No choice at all. I've told you but you don't believe me. A perfect God has the least freewill of all beings. I must always choose the infinitely best choice at all times or be less than infinitely perfect. I knew what was going to happen. An angel would revolt and choose for himself. Like human beings they would rather decide for themselves and be wrong than to forever obey another's perfect advice. It was inevitable it would be one of the top three. Lucifer did not surprise me. He just wanted to see what would happen if he secretly decided to do something without my permission. That's where it all began. He liked the feeling and did it again, revolted still further.

ME: Anyone would do and feel the same. "Give me liberty or give me death!"

GOD: It is illogical to choose a course which may be less than best when you can have the best. Inevitably he chose wrongly. He made an inferior decision. He was less than perfect. My home was tainted. He had corrupted himself and Heaven.

ME: So, wipe him out! Destroy him!

GOD: I've already explained how morally wrong that would be of me—

ME: I'm not convinced. So what did you do instead?

GOD: Nothing. I watched events unfold. He advised other angels of his discovery. Because of their great respect for him they too tried making decisions without consulting my chain of command. They too chose error. On and on it went until angels came to me complaining. But I wanted every angel to choose my rule of his own freewill. No coercion. Their decision. But it went on and on and on.

ME: And you did nothing. You are complicit in the bringing of evil into our world—

GOD: Every angel is delighted that I allowed them the freedom to choose for themselves. That is one huge difference between my kingdom and Lucifer's. Once they agreed with him they discovered they were expected to do as he said. If angels don't want me, I give them the right to go.

ME: You threw them out of Heaven—

GOD: Not me. My angels did. The fallen ones kept falling, revolting further than they ever intended, corrupting my home with the filth of their increasingly imperfect decisions. Until the pure ones wanted them out, urged them to go, but they wouldn't leave, so my angels pushed them out.

ME: And you sent them to Hell. Good! Why didn't you keep them there?

GOD: I made them a home. They turned it into a Hell. They couldn't bear the light from the purity of Heaven. Eventually they went into deep rock caverns to escape the light. To this day they hate light. They hate peace and love and everything that is good. They love pain and fear.

ME: No that's not good enough. That is highly unconvincing. Think what it must have been like for the angels, and sympathise.

GOD: Oh I sympathise! You have tremendous wisdom but you can never act on it, tremendous knowledge but you can never rely on it. Why? Because you are always trumped by one with infinite wisdom, infinite knowledge. The only logical, sensible, reasonable way in which you can use your will is to totally agree with the one who has all the cognitive skills you have, only to an infinite degree. Your whole lifetime then is one of consent. You can never disagree with infinite wisdom and be right. To have a view differing from infinite wisdom is to be wrong, automatically wrong.

ME: It must have been/must be a terrible existence. To not be permitted to have your own opinion or the freedom to make your own mistakes. Or at least you DO have that freedom, ostensibly, yet it ends up being only the freedom to agree with, to align all your thinking with, and therefore your will with, infinite correctness. Yuck!

GOD: There is obviously no solution to this. Self-evidently, how could I be anything other than always right? And am I to be blamed for that? It could be thought that it would be imperfect of God not to delegate areas of authority to angels in which they could make their own decisions. But this is no solution, because they logically should refer any of their decisions back to the one who can infallibly correct or approve them. In fact not to refer them back to infinite perfection would be a less-than-perfect decision on their part.

ME: So they are scarcely better off than if God had told them what to do in the first place. They may as well have had no free-will at all. Puppets in all but name, beings with their free-will forever on hold.

GOD: I admit it. I foresaw it.

ME: It was inevitable that some angel would rebel at this claustophobic straight-jacket. And good on him I say!

GOD: Even when that decision leads directly to the horrifying murder of that little girl? You don't understand. If any choice is anything less than perfect, that choice corrupts the character and the thinking of the one who made it. All my choices are infinitely perfect. If any angel makes a decision different from mine, it is automatically inferior—

ME: So you just said—

GOD: They are no longer perfect. It is easier the second time to make a less than perfect decision. A downward spiral commences. They go from bad to worse. The only way to stop the descent is to recant and repent.

ME: Did any do that?

GOD: Oh yes! When they saw where they were headed. When they felt the tarnishing of their own perfect beauty.

ME: And you restored them?

GOD: I forgave them and restored them. I offer the same to all who sin.

ME: Even Lucifer?

GOD: Lucifer became so intransigent so quickly that I changed his name to Satan.

ME: If he repented now, would you forgive him?

GOD: It is far too late for that. His corruption was long ago so complete that he is evil incarnate and that is all he can ever be. He will never want to be anything but totally defiant of me. He never wants to be under my rule ever again. He can only choose evil. It is no longer possible for him to choose good. Many of his followers are in the same condition. They can no longer choose anything other than evil.

ME: But not all?

GOD: Some follow Satan at a distance. He ignores them. They are useful for menial tasks thought up by Hell's lesser commanders. Some have come out from their number but not recently. And they are on the periphery of Heaven, unsure, uncertain.

ME: They doubt you?

GOD: They don't know who is right, Satan or me.

ME: I think I would be among them. I doubt you even exist. Or Satan.

GOD: Touch me and see. This is my hand.

ME: Maybe if there were holes in them.

GOD: There will be soon enough.

ME: So you say. Give me proof.

GOD: Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe.

ME: Blessed or stupid.

GOD: The choice is yours.

ME: Yes it is. Here's another simple question—"Why didn't you destroy him?" See, everybody's asking it!

GOD: Satan? I answered that.

ME: Yes you did, But to nobody's satisfaction.

GOD: If I destroyed Satan, all angels would know the same fate could be there's if they stepped out of line. The whole atmosphere of Heaven would change. Love would be replaced by elements of fear. They now would have a secondary motive apart from love to obey me—self-preservation. Besides, Satan must suffer. He who caused infinite pain must himself suffer infinite pain. It would be unfair and unjust for that not to be so—

ME: So stick him in Hell and tie him to a fire or something. Why let him loose to torment us poor earth people?

GOD: Because one third of all the angels agreed with him. One in every three sides with him, prefers his leadership to mine. But there is a Day of Judgment coming. He will be judged and condemned, he and all his angels and all who side with him. They will never be permitted to torment the human race again—

ME: A third of the angels don't like you! What kind of a tyrant are you then? What don't we know that they do? I thought Heaven was a fabulous place but if one third of the angels prefer Hell to God...

GOD: "Give me liberty of give me death." They would rather be what they call free than have a perfect environment run by a being who can only choose perfection for them—

ME: One third! That means only one in six at present in Heaven—if one in six revolts, Satan will have as many followers as you! What would happen then?

GOD: Well—

ME: And if just one more then went over to his side giving Satan a majority—

GOD: It will—

ME: Would you resign?

GOD: Of course—

ME: Is there some kind of democracy? If he gets more votes than you do—

GOD: No—

ME: —you have to resign from being God?

GOD: Of course not! It will never happen!

ME: How can you be sure?

GOD: I've seen the future and it never happens—

ME: But what if you're wrong! What if there is a fault in your forseeing and you get it wrong?

GOD: I don't get it wrong. You needn't worry—

ME: I'm not the one that should be worrying!

GOD: You should be! Being under Satan's sole rule would be terrible.

ME: One third of your angels don't think so!

GOD: They are corrupted. No longer perfect. They can't think straight—

ME: Maybe they think it's YOU who can't think straight!

GOD: They are wrong. They are wrong.

ME: Prove it!

GOD: That's what you are for. That's what the human race was created for. That's why you exist.

ME: Why? Why do we exist?

GOD: To enable the angels to decide one way or the other who is right and who is wrong.

ME: You mean—

GOD: Between Satan and me. You are the testing ground, the demonstration of my glory, the proof of Satan's evil. You confirm what my angels have no evidence for apart from my words. You demonstrate the reality of what I have told them. They see for themselves how horrible Satan is in his dealings with you humans. The pain he causes you. The misery. They see my character contrasted with his. They see what I do. How I act. They see me dying on the Cross to save the human race from agony in Hell with Satan. I reveal my character through my dealings with you humans and Satan reveals his. The angels choose accordingly. Those angels who now love evil choose evil. Those who have always loved good choose good.

ME: Who came up with this great idea of using us as guinea pigs?

GOD: Both Satan and I. I proposed a great deal and Satan suggested many modifications. We finally agreed and so—

ME: That's right! You chat together, don't you! The book of Job. Yes. You take a bet, a gamble on poor old Job, happily wipe out his family all for a bet!

GOD: I didn't wipe out his family! That was Satan.

ME: He had to ask your permission, didn't he? So what's the difference?

GOD: A great deal!

ME: What a horror! God and Satan chat together and decide evil experiments on the human race! A Doctor Mengeles God! And Earth is Auschwitz!

GOD: I created a Paradise for you and you destroyed it!

ME: Why didn't you stop Satan?

GOD: You have freewill—why didn't you?

ME: I wasn't even there. There was no Adam and Eve.

GOD: They are my friends.

ME: All looney tunes with a fake God. Time for a break while I try to take this all in.

As the music fades in I ask "Why haven't you written a book on all this?" He replies, "I have, but you don't believe it let alone read it." "Oh that. The Bible says nothing like this. I read much of it when I was young and it's just trash—a bunch of yarns—" "I told you I was here to explain it." "You're doing well. Very well. The whole world is watching this little channel."

01.29.12

ME: Welcome back, you're watching "In Town Tonight" and my guest is God. What else do you and Satan discuss? Do you divvy the world up into these humans for Heaven and these humans for Hell?

GOD: There is a committee of angels. And a great cloud of observers. They are called Watchers in the book of Daniel. Both Satan and I make proposals to this committee and they allow us or prevent us from doing what we wish. That is why I am so desperate for human prayers—to give me all the moral right I wish I could show the committee so that they must let me act.

ME: I'm shocked. GOD has to ask permission? Who chose this committee?

GOD: The angels choose them as their representatives.

ME: Both good and bad angels?

GOD: Both good and bad. I am calling them a committee because that is the closest thing humans could understand. But in fact communication is such in Heaven that every angel has its thoughts recorded and it has its effect the moment they think them.

ME: Even the bad angels?

GOD: I can't possibly explain the multi-multi-dimensional levels eternity operates on. We can block out what we wish and accept what we need. There is this ultimate, final, terrible battle going on between Good and Evil, God and Satan, operating on so many levels, and the committee decides on unspoken proposals Satan and I are putting forward all the time.

ME: How can they know them if they are unspoken?

GOD: I am trying to avoid the term, but you would call it telepathy. Telepathy is bad on earth but good in Heaven. Natural. We hear each other's thoughts all the time—

ME: What an unholy row!

GOD: We hear on millions of different levels. We have differing intelligences so can process automatically what we are able to and need to. Our best angels can process everything. They hear the proposals and the reactions to them automatically. No one can dispute their decisions because the evidence is before everybody at every moment—

ME: And God has to get their okay before He acts! Incredible—

GOD: So does Satan. No one can act autonomously. If they did they would automatically lose the battle. We must play within the rules—

ME: You make a game of the human race! With disastrous consequences—

GOD: Believe me, it is no game!

ME: Poor Job! Poor us!

GOD: Prayer, and the lack of it, is the basic currency Heaven deals in. And actions validate prayers. Christian inaction and prayerlessness is prayer to Satan. I can't possibly condense Heaven's reality sufficiently into human terminology. Except to say it is very serious that you Western Christians do not pray. You give Satan moral right to wreck your world, and your lack of prayer ties my hands.

ME: You never ever listened to my prayers—

GOD: You don't have a personal relationship with me. A friendship. I only really listen to my friends. But I've heard every prayer you've prayed. It is impossible for an omniscient God to do otherwise—

ME: You never once gave me what I ask for—

GOD: That's because you ask amiss—to spend it on yourself instead of wanting to further my will on earth. Prayer is much more than asking for good things for yourself or even for others. The only true aim of all prayer is that God's will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. All other praying is never true prayer.

ME: Do you realise how selfish that sounds? Your version of God is a tyrant! A self-satisfied, narcissistic, know-it-all dictator!

GOD: If I were, you would all be slaves pre-programmed to do my every tiny whim. I am the infinite perfection of all things good. That's why you should seek only my will.

ME: How often do you chat with the Devil?

GOD: He is always in my face, accusing me and mine of something or other.

ME: And is he right in his accusations?

GOD: Often. But he has no alternative plan to put up, except to take over the lordship from me.

ME: So he tells you the truth but you don't act on it?

GOD: His truth is condemnatory. Mine is uplifting. His destroys. Mine builds. He is for pain and punishment. I am for mercy and peace. He kills. I make alive. We come at the same truth from opposite sides, negative and positive.

ME: The whole world believes you stand over the human race with a big stick.

GOD: If I did, you'd be wiped out by now. I am the one defending you from Satan's big stick.

ME: So you can't act unless the committee of angels gives you the green light?

GOD: Neither can Satan. And both of us run into debt and build up an arrears that must be wiped off. That's why the most valuable people on earth to me are those who pray for my will to be done on earth as in Heaven.

ME: An arrears of prayers? Satan has people praying to him?

GOD: Oh yes. But the whole human race is praying to him and worshipping him day and night with their self-centred lives.

ME: I don't believe you. I don't worship Satan—

GOD: You worship Satan by living your life independent of me just as Satan does. All those who decide for themselves what they will be and what they will do are doing exactly what Satan does. My angels don't do a thing without my approval. All Christians who do things without my consent are being Satanic, not Godly. They are creating a massive moral right for Satan to act against me. My biggest enemies are Christians who live for themselves and not for me. Satan loves them. They fill his coffers with so much moral right he can plunder and wreck my works day and night.

ME: Sinning Christians—like the ones who fiddle around with little boys—?

GOD: They are bad enough. But no, the average Christian who just lives for himself, does what everyone else in the world does. Lives a good outward life. Nice house, nice cars, good to his wife and kids. No different from the people next door, just trots along to church on a Sunday. Would never dream of getting into any trouble with the law. Aims to buy a better house, update the car, rise to the top of his profession where he never mentions Jesus or Christ as that would be bad for his image. Watches lots of TV and the best latest movies and DVDs. Just like Satan, makes his life almost entirely without me, lives as if I didn't exist apart from an hour or so on Sundays. Lives as if I never died, as if there were no Good News to tell. Whereas all my best Christians are in prison. They offend all authorities. They offend everyone around them. They are always ramming the Gospel down everyone's throat.

ME: I know the type. Obnoxious to say the least!

GOD: Aren't they though! Like my Apostle Paul—wonderfully obnoxious. They are saved and they insist on everyone being as saved as they are—

ME: But the others, these decent sensible citizens—they deprive you of moral right?

GOD: There are so many of them that they are the very worst. They are so much the same as the world that Satan can say, "There you are! They are just like me. Making a good life for themselves with hardly a thought about God." The committee can only agree and allow him to do terrible things while I am left lamenting.

ME: Why don't you just wipe us all out and start again? Wipe out the Universe and all the angels and humans with it. No one would know. You could keep trying till you get it right—

GOD: Because I would know. I would forever know I had failed, that all my heartbreaking effort, my death on the Cross had been for nothing. Though he no longer existed, Satan would have in fact defeated me. Evil would have won.

ME: You ARE in a bad way! Who can believe it? Almighty God! Oh how the Almighty have fallen! and on such hard times!

GOD: Things aren't that bad. I will win in the end—

ME: You hope! Another break while we all weep for poor God!

01.39.56

ME: This is In Town Tonight and I am interviewing God. Oh yes—this great question just handed to me: Which is the one true church?

GOD: The church of Jesus Christ.

ME: What? Never heard of it.

GOD: The church of Jesus Christ? Whoever knows me, loves me, obeys me, the salt of the earth, the twice born, the forever loved—

ME: Here's a comment from a viewer—"I thought God would be full of Bible. Scripture by the ton! Verses by the boatload!"

GOD: I myself am Scripture. I myself am the word of God—

ME: I DO wish you wouldn't say things like that! The lightning bolt that hits you is SURE to hit me—

GOD: (LAUGHS) You are safe from God. It's men you have to beware of!

ME: Answer the question—

GOD: Would you like Ephesians 3:10?—hina gnoristhee nun tais arXeis kai tais exousiais—

ME: I have no idea what you said—I'm not a Hebrew scholar. What are you saying?

GOD: That's not Hebrew, that's Greek. That's what Ephesians was written in.

ME: You speak Greek then?

GOD: From a child. We spoke it at home.

ME: You've just made a great mistake. Jews spoke Hebrew!

GOD: Some Hebrew and much Aramaic. But the Romans rule our country and they speak Greek. If a Roman soldier speaks to you and you can't understand him, you might end up dead. So it is wise to know a lot of Greek and bit of Latin, too.

ME: I've never heard anyone say that.

GOD: Greek is the official language of the Empire. We all speak Greek. That's why the New Testament was written in it.

ME: A viewer asks, "Which version of the Bible do you recommend? The King James Authorised Bible?"

GOD: The original Greek. Your King James says "to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known"—that's a bad translation—"might be MADE known by the church the manifold wisdom of God"—

ME: Manifold sounds like a motor mechanic—

GOD: It says God wanted His many-layered wisdom to be revealed to the angels in the Heavens by the church. By you human beings. We want all humans to be Christians—to be the church—and through the whole human race we want to demonstrate our perfect wisdom—in fact all our infinitely perfect attributes—to all the angels, both good and bad, in the invisible heavenly realm—That's why the human race was created. To demonstrate to all the angels—and humans—what God is like, through my dealings with you.

ME: Well, you've failed, haven't you? How many of us go to church these days?

GOD: On the contrary, my dealings with bad people also reveals my character. My patience, my justice, my longsuffering, my fairness, my goodness, my love—

ME: So it is good for you that so few of us are Christians? Is that why you stay so hidden that half the world doesn't think there even IS a God.

GOD: I stay hidden because of our agreement. It would be impossible to make the human race a fair test between Satan and me if we were able to be seen all the time. So we stay hidden.

ME: What agreement?

GOD: The agreement between Satan and his angels and God and his angels.

ME: You made an agreement?

GOD: Of course. I told you we talk together. My angels advised it and we agreed with them. It was really arranged angel to angel. But we accepted it. And I implemented it.

ME: You have agreements with Satan...?

GOD: We had a serious crisis. Nothing you have on earth is anything near the seriousness of the crisis we had in Heaven. When a third of the angels revolted against me, the whole angelic realm was split. None of them wanted that. The good angels wanted to know what it was that the revolting angels had against my kindly rule. And Satan told them. And he was right.

ME: He was right? God is admitting that Satan was right?

GOD: He quite rightly said the angels only had my word for it that I was good. They had never seen me deal with anything other than perfect beings in perfect situations. They had never seen me opposed until now. Stood up to. They had never seen my goodness tested, demonstrated. I may have been all talk and no do. And he was right. I agreed with him, and so did we all. So I proposed a demonstration. Beings would be created who wouldn't know or see me but would be put in positions where they would demonstrate my character to all the angels—

ME: Oh yes, I have a viewer question on this: "Doesn't that make the human race just a Nazi experiment?"

GOD: Nazi? No. Experiment? Not to me. I knew what would happen. But the angels needed it. The good angels needed confirmation that they were right about me, and the bad angels needed to see they were wrong about me—

ME: And did they?

GOD: My angels appear more than satisfied. They too see tortured babies and realise and accept why it is impossible for me to act—

ME: And the bad angels?

GOD: Satan of course wanted to be in on the act. He wanted HIS character to be demonstrated as superior, he said, to mine. His values better than mine. My angels debated a little with this but ended up agreeing that this was fair, as did I.

ME: And the rest is history.

GOD: We created a universe and allowed Satan to alter it any way he wanted subject to our approval. So with life-forms. We began with simple and moved to complex.

ME: And you did it all in six days!

GOD: So we did. Six days, six hours, six seconds, six thousand years. We are not subject to time. We took as long as we needed. We can compress that into six days if you wish. The process was demanding, because if Satan and his angels disapproved of the final result, we would not have a conclusive test.

ME: So you conspired with the Devil against the human race—

GOD: We began many promising combinations of life only to have him object to something or other.

ME: I think you are talking of evolution.

GOD: Oh yes, the human race evolved. He and his angels weren't satisfied until we had a species that could be corrupted in their thinking to his values if they once obeyed him. There were hot debates over that one but finally we accepted a tilting of the experiment in his favour—

ME: You wanted us to fall. You NEEDED us to fall!

GOD: Never. Never. You had the power to withstand Satan. We were there waiting if you wanted us. You only had to call. But you never called. We waited in vain.

ME: You're talking Adam and Eve again—

GOD: Yes I am—

ME: But Adam and Eve is a myth—

GOD: They are no myth, believe me—

ME: But presumably you foreknew all this? You EXPECTED us to fall—

GOD: I foreknew every word of it. Nothing surprised us. All has unfolded exactly as we knew it would.

ME: You created us knowing we would fall—

GOD: Just as you put your son in that 50 metre race knowing he wouldn't win—

ME: Oh, you know that, do you? Um, but with this difference: I didn't create his legs—

GOD: Oh yes you did—

ME: (LAUGHS) Maybe you've got me there—

GOD: Listen—the human race has free will. You can do whatever you choose. You chose Satan and his advice against me and my advice. And you suffer the consequences. There are always consequences. Always. And I can only reverse them if someone asks me to. Prays.

ME: We will take a quick break, be back in a minute—

I have noticed the noise penetrating this supposedly sound-proof room and the Boss's worried face—His voice crackles through the earplug: "I think they might break in." It seems a massive crowd has gathered outside and they are determined to see "God." Some, I am told, are very sick. They have come for God to heal them. This is their last chance for life, so they think, so their relatives think. Though not broadcasting the camera stays on me as I say, "What about the police?...They can't get through the crowd? Helicopter them in!......You want me to keep going? We'd better keep going or we'll be lynched......." I resume my seat. "Jesus" hasn't moved. The camera fades in.

01.47.14

ME: Tonight I'm talking to God and we will keep going for as long as we can. But you were right. There are crowds outside—

GOD: You will be safe until I say my last word. Then I'll be gone—

ME: Back to Jerusalem?

GOD: Back on the road TO Jerusalem.

ME: (LAUGHING) How can you possibly be in two places at once?

GOD: I am everywhere, and at all times. You should have brought in far more security guards. You should send him out as well. (HE INDICATES THE CURTAIN. I NOD, CATCH THE EYE OF THE INVISIBLE GUARD, AND WITH MY HEAD SEND HIM OFF TOWARDS THE FRONT DOOR.)

ME: So are you winning? Do you have Satan on the ropes yet? Or are you ready to concede victory to him in this pagan Christless world?

GOD: We are exactly where we expected to be at this stage of the history of the Earth—

ME: Nothing out of place? Nothing unexpected—my God what was that? (THE SOUND OF SMASHING GLASS)

GOD: I think a window has been pushed in.

ME: You are very calm.

GOD: I've slept through stormier seas than this.

ME: So what do you want from us? For us all to become Christians, that's obvious, but you'll have to be disappointed in an old heathen like me. Your act is good—VERY good. But you are not God and it's just a gimick, right? You'd better fess up before someone gets hurt—seriously hurt!

GOD: What I want is for my Christians to pray. Pray without ceasing. Pray day and night. Preferably pray in tongues—in our Holy Ghost prayer language, but even in English, pray! I can't just act on my own. I need to be asked and asked and asked before I can act—

ME: Why would that be? And why would prayers make any difference?

GOD: We gave the world to you humans. Satan tricked you out of it. Legally it is his but morally it is still in many ways yours. We don't have the right to invade what is legally Satan's territory. But we do have the right if the morally rightful owners invite us in. But there's a battle. Satan has the right to block us and oppose us. Read Daniel chapter 10. So often your prayers are heard from the first time you pray, but you give up. Pray pray pray—

ME: The Earth is legally Satan's territory? Where in the Bible does it say that?

GOD: Listen. Suppose you build a house, then legally sign it over to your children, who then are tricked into signing it over to a fraudster. Could you, the original owner, then go and reclaim it?

ME: Of course not.

GOD: The law backs the title-deeds, right? For as long as the fraudster's name is on the title-deeds, he has legal right to do what he likes to what was once your house, and I can only stand and watch.

ME: And give my kids hell!

GOD: God found himself in exactly that situation. God made the world: The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". God gave the Earth to the human race: The Bible says: "The heavens are the Lord's heavens, but he has given the earth to the sons of man." Man was tricked into handing God's gift of the Earth over to Satan: The Bible says: "Don't you know that if you submit yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey"—

ME: Too much! Too much Bible!

GOD: Romans chapter 6 verse 16—

ME: And which translation?

GOD: Genesis 3 records this attack on your first parents, and its success. The first humans betrayed this world into the hands of Satan. Satan even boasted of this to me, and I did not contradict him: The Bible records this: "And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, "All this authority and their glory I will give you, for it has been betrayed to me, and I give it to whoever I wish. If you will worship me, it all will be yours."

ME: Did you worship him?

GOD: No!

ME: Why not?

GOD: Worship Satan? You expect me to answer that? Answer it for me.

ME: An infinitely perfect God wouldn't—

GOD: Exactly. Far from disputing Satan's claim of authority over the world, I confirmed it, three times calling Satan "the prince of this world".

ME: That's in the Bible?

GOD: The Gospel of John. My Apostle Paul, through my Holy Spirit, even called Satan "the god of this world", so completely is my enemy in control of what once was mine and once was yours.

ME: I thought God was in charge of the world?

GOD: Of course I could take the world back by might. Satan's power is no match for all-power. But that would break my own eternal principle: "For God never takes back his gifts or his callings—"

ME: More Bible I guess—

GOD: Romans 11:29. No matter how badly we see a gift misused, once we give it, it stays given. World-rule was given to man, and it is for man to win it back, which was a major reason why the Son of God had to become the son of man.

ME: What was that crash? Another window?

GOD: This is why I now ever live to make intercession for you humans. My prayers are now so powerful because as God/man I have absolute authority over the world as both its creator and inheritor. I am the head, but you as the body of Christ have your essential part to play. And through my prayers blended with yours an irresistible process is taking place that will culminate on that day when "the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever"!

ME: Halleluyah! We may have to vacate—

GOD: So, to return to the analogy of the builder and his children: the builder is without rights and therefore helpless except for one thing: he can go to his children and persuade them to take a court case against the fraudster. It will be costly and involve much talking and pleading and a great deal of effort, but with right on their side they must eventually win, so long as they don't quit. It was the children who were tricked out of their inheritance, so, in law, only they can initiate the courtcase. The father hasn't the right to. So with you.

ME: Can you hear that mob outside?

GOD: I told you they would come. Don't worry. They can't get in until I have finished.

ME: So you said. How comforting—

GOD: I strongly persuade you to take "heavenly courtcases" even using a courtroom parable involving a fraudster: Luke 18:1-7 "it is essential to always pray and never give up" - "and won't God vindicate his own chosen ones who cry to him day and night?" I even provide my own lawyer for you, the Holy Spirit, paid for at an immense price: my own blood. This lawyer will, if you allow him, run your courtcase for you even providing the words to say, perfect words you won't understand, words that will win your courtcase for you—

ME: You're a crank! You're talking about freakish speaking in tongues!

GOD: I even show you a successful prayer "courtcase" in Daniel chapter 10. I sent my answer immediately, but Satan has the right to block it, because this is his world. But because of Daniel's prayer and fasting, angel reinforcement enables the answer to eventually get through. If Daniel had stopped praying before the answer arrived, the case would have been lost.

ME: Folks, we're going to have to vacate any minute. Sorry.

GOD: It took Daniel three weeks of prayer and fasting to pray the answer through. Not all prayer "courtcases" take as long, but most take much longer—

ME: Yes, well we won't be here much longer—

GOD: The police have the crowd under control—

ME: How would you know that?

GOD: The same way I knew there would be a crowd—

ME: A lucky guess!

GOD: Your main job on Earth is to accumulate through prayer sufficient moral right for God to act. This is obviously the greatest task a human being can accomplish: to morally empower God to do his will upon earth as it is done in Heaven.

ME: Your screen may go blank at any time. It's us. It's not your TV—

GOD: But if you decide not to pray, I cannot intervene, no matter how much I want to: As Ezekiel 22:30-31 proves, "And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found none. Therefore I have poured out my indignation upon them, I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath..."

ME: How about a bit of wrath on those who are trying to get at you?

GOD: I looked for a prayer warrior, an intercessor, in fact anyone to take on my burden, my "courtcase." The nation deserved huge punishment, but I never want to punish. I long to bless, not hurt. Just one more prayer warrior could have averted the deserved national punishment, as Amos once proved: "The Lord God showed me this: Look! the Lord God was calling for a judgment by fire, and it ate up the great sea, and was consuming the land. Then I said, "O Lord God stop! I beg You! How can Jacob stand, he's so tiny?" God changed His mind about this: "This also won't happen," said the Lord God." That's Amos 7:4-6.

ME: When my manager gives the nod, we must go—immediately—

GOD: I've nearly finished—

ME: Thank God! It's a long time since I've heard a sermon and now I know why—

GOD: God often shows people things so they will pray. If it is a blessing, to pray it into being as Daniel did, or a judgement, to pray it away as Amos did. But in Ezekiel's case God found no one to pray, so, against God's wishes, judgment fell on the land.

ME: Get ready to go. Sorry folks. A mob has formed outside and is attempting to invade this studio to get at God here, probably to tear him limb from limb—

GOD: "You don't have because you don't keep on asking" said James. This means not only you miss out but so do I. Many times you pray for things I want far more than you do, but because you are not prepared to battle it through to completion in prayer, we all miss out.

ME: This station is going off the air! Sorry folks. Any moment now. Not our fault—

GOD: This is why prayer is the most crucially important activity on earth, the best possible use of your time, and the call to pray the greatest of all callings. This is why God needs every Christian to "Pray without ceasing." Pray Pray P—

AFTERWARNED

The lights flicker then go out and dimly come back on. I am out of my seat and I can hear several footsteps in the hall. There is a back way—I turn to "Jesus" and shout "Follow me!" He has risen and follows as I grab mikes and cable and the Boss comes in and grabs what he can of our most valuable equipment. It is then I turn back to "Jesus" but he's gone. I'm always asked, but who knows where? It's every man for himself and we're running down the back hall and down the stairs where an always locked door is already open and I can see our cars but the crowd is at the main back door and not many have discovered this back way yet but they will. As I elbow my way through a man is standing by a wheelchair shouting "I'm healed! I can stand! I touched the wall and I felt the power surge through my legs!" One shouted, "Which board?" but already some were attacking the wall with pocket knives. I don't hesitate. I'm into my car and gone.

I turn on TV and I watch for hours while the place is wrecked. They could put the whole police force on duty around it but you can't stop fanaticism of that callibre. Within three days only the dust is left and soon that is being scooped up and flown all round the globe as reports of healings pour in from all over the world. The power of auto-suggestion! The unbelievable gullibility of the human race!

Any day now he will turn up and will not be able to hide his face. He has an assured future as a film star so he shouldn't be afraid to reveal who he is. He's a very good actor, I'll give him that. But that's all I'll give him. That was not God. Believe me, there was no aura, no glow, no authority, no command, no nuthin. Stop making such fools of yourselves, you human race! Believe me, believe me, I could makes heaps of money saying that he was, but he wasn't. Believe me—THAT WAS NOT GOD.

