Beer and Wine
Beer and wine have both been cited as evidence that God loves us and wants us to be happy. I asked God if it’s true. He said that of course he wants us to be happy, after all we’re part of the universe and in many ways God is the universe and so if we’re happy then part of the universe is happy and so at least part of God is happy. Or something like that. I may have been a little drunk at the time, so my memory’s a little fuzzy.
And when I sobered up, I realized that God’s answer may or may not have had anything to do with alcohol as evidence. His answer seemed to address the part about wanting us to be happy without really addressing whether or not alcohol was specifically evidence of that. So we talked again. God told me that it was an issue of our senses, that our senses were the real evidence that he wants us to be happy, so anything that brought joy to our senses could be considered as evidence that he wants us to be happy.
But what about pain then? What about bad smells? What about ugly piles of garbage, or screeching traffic or the taste of earwax? That is, what about all the bad things that our senses, well, sense?
He just handed me the old saw about how can you tell the good without having the bad to provide a contrast. I scoffed. Then he went on and suggested that maybe there was a whole range of sensation that we’re actually shielded from, maybe in a spectrum that goes from a bad of one to a good of a hundred, maybe our human senses only really measure from about fifty to about ninety. To go below fifty, we’d have to be in Hell. To go above ninety, we’d have to be in Heaven.
I was amazed to hear such specific numbers coming from the usually so amorphous Supreme Being and I told him as much. Not to worry, he countered, the numbers were just a thought experiment. In fact the whole thing was just a thought experiment and might not even be true at all. But when it comes down to it, isn’t the whole universe just a thought experiment by God? So where does that leave us?
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