Playing God

If I were God, here’s what I’d do. I’d set up a world as a training ground, to raise the lovely souls I’d made. To perfect them; because, giving them free will, I know they will have to learn and make their own mistakes.

But being a lovely God, of course, I would not leave my children without guidance. Not dictation, of course, but rules somewhere in plain sight, readily available.

Some sort of conscience would be a good idea, for sure. An inner compass that did point north. And I would ensure that reason, if not too obviously, followed carefully blazed a path to me. But more than that. I would leave a book of instructions and an organization to maintain it. This book and organization would have to be fairly obvious to all, not hidden.

So, without messing with mankind’s ability to make their own organizations, I would still, behind the scenes, make sure the correct organization was, if perhaps just barely, the world’s largest religious grouping and the world’s largest religious body. I would also ensure that no other organization or book that purported to be my truth was entirely without it; that at least they would by their own inner structure ultimately point to it.

Without interfering more than strictly necessary with the ability of humans to make their own decisions, I would protect the reliability of the core of this book and organization to ensure that it continued to be available. More, I would have the book point in some not too subtle way to the organization, and the organization to point to the book, and the conscience and reason point to the organization, and both book and organization to point to conscience and reason, so that they would tend to be mutually reinforcing.

One obvious clue of my intent would be to make my chosen vessel, eventually, the world’s oldest continuously-operating organization. This would be a valuable clue that it bore my protection. And I would advise people in my book to look for just this, to look to the test of time, to the eventual fruits, and to something built as if on a rock.

I would launch my message, my book and my organization, from the point at which the world’s trade routes meet; I would design the world to have such a point to begin with, and concentrate my messages there. The joining point of Asia, Europe, and Africa, the three largest contiguous land masses. That would put it in the southern Levant—Palestine, to be precise. The Mediterranean to spread it into Europe; the Nile to spread it into Africa; and the Tigris, Euphrates and Persian Gulf to spread it into Asia; not to mention the northern silk routes over the desert beginning from this point. This way it would be reasonably accessible to all the people of at least the old world at the earliest possible date.

At first, the trade routes not having developed, I would give my full and true message to one nation: the nation at this point. The moment the trade routes have expanded to the point that any such message could be truly international and intercultural, not identified purely with one particular nation or people, I would give a new, universal revelation. That would be about in the first century AD. Although not all nations could yet hear it, it would be complete for them when the time came. But I would also make sure that the first group that eventually came in contact with the remaining small isolated populations—those in America, Australia, and the remote islands of the Pacific—would be those who had the most correct message.

And that, among other reasons, is why I am a Catholic.