Where is God?

Indifferent, disgusted, dead, or non existent?

So now as I’m leavin’

I’m weary as Hell

The confusion I’m feelin’

Ain’t no tongue can tell

The words fill my head

And fall to the floor

That if God’s on our side

He’ll stop the next war

Bob Dylan, With God on Our Side

Disclaimer: I was not raised in a religious home.

Admittedly, I’m one of those guys that’s not religious until I think something terrible might happen, then you may catch me praying. I’ve even picked up a bible and one night in the grip of anxiety induced insomnia, I even slept with a bible. Few people know how they will react when they are convinced they are dying.

While everyone is taking sides in the Israel/Palestine conflict, I have a bigger question. I want to know where the fuck God is? I want to know whose side God is on. This never ending conflict is literally happening in the holiest piece of real estate there is! This is the land of all 3 great Abrahamic religions, Christianity, which is based on Judaism, and Islam, supposedly God’s final revelation.

Yet, the slaughter in southern Israel on October 7 was the most unholy barbarism I’ve witnessed in my entire life. Hey God, these creatures were screaming your name as they tortured entire unarmed families in the most heinous of ways. If you exist, where were you? Are you a cruel God that approved, are you indifferent to human suffering, did you move on from us, or are you dead?

Currently, in response to the massacre of 1,400 of its citizens, an enraged Israel is conducting a war against Hamas and obviously practicing collective punishment as well. Thousands of Palestinian children are dead, or dying, under mounds of rubble. If there were ever a time for God to step in, one would think it would be in this holiest of lands, but like the Universe itself, there is only silence.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously claimed that “God is dead”, probably one of the most misquoted quotes of all time. It was never meant to be taken literally. To put it very simply, the old mustache meant that religion no longer had control over every aspect of people’s lives. Humanity, in his estimation, was moving on in a more rational sense.

Religious Jews and Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, indeed, the entire Arab and Muslim world, are not reading Nietzsche. Nor are Evangelicals, who cynically support Israel because they believe it is important for fulfilling end-times prophecy.

If God does exist, I think God may have thrown in the towel, just finally walked away in disgust. He probably took off sometime during the Crusades, absolutely exhausted with us.

If I was God, I would simply reveal myself to all parties and either pick a side, or demand that everyone stop committing atrocities in my name. Stepping in and making it clear that we are all God’s children would stop a great deal of death and destruction.

I’ve only felt this strongly about the existence of God once before. The Holocaust. That crime against humanity was so egregious, that I don’t see how any Jew survived the camps with his or her faith in God intact.

As Isabel Kershner, a correspondent for The New York Times in Jerusalem, recounts in her fantastic 2023 book, The Land of Hope and Fear:

Zissel Bram was fifteen when the war broke out. During the roundup, she and her brother were selected to be sent out to a work camp. She saw her mother and sister being led off after a rabbi persuaded them to leave their hiding place, saying they would be killed if they were found but that God would look after them if they came out. Dorka (Zissel braum) never saw them, or her father, again. They were murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp.

If I survived the camps, after the NAZIS, God would have been next on my shit list. Where the FUCK were you Yahweh? Then I may have said to myself, with a broken heart, what God?

I’ve always wished that I had a strong faith in GOD. I’ve envied those people my entire life, assuming they felt a level of comfort I was never afforded.

Still, I was never a real atheist. I’ve always been more of a Pascal’s wager type of guy, and my admission in the opening of this piece supports that.

Just for shits and giggles, let’s take the view that there is no God. Let’s call it the light-switch option. Once you take that last breath, that’s it, no heaven, no paradise, no 72 virgins. The light switches off and you’re returned to the state you inhabited (or didn’t) before you were born. Would it really be so bad? Or would it simply be the absence of anxiety, existential angst, and endless WARS OVER LAND AND GOD?!

Peace.

Just peace.