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God then went on to send his only begotten son to one of those conversion camps. “It’s for your own good,” he said with a stern look on his face.

I often hesitate to post strips like the one above out of concern that someone that does not deserve it might be offended, but the idea of God as disappointed (and disinterested UNTIL disappointed) Father was just too funny to pass up. I worry that someone might take the strip as a literal position that I personally hold, as silly as that would be. To be absolutely clear, it’s simply satire based on a particular version of god contained within the collective consciousness of a particular subset of Biblical literalists and bigots, and I hope everyone recognizes that.

Readers have often asked me why God appears to have different personalities from strip to strip, a question I would answer with my own question: “Why does God appear to have different personalities throughout the Bible or from person to person?” and there you’d find your answer. Many people speak about the G-man as if they know the mind of a being that, by their own accounts, is and was and will be the creator of all things. The Bible itself is a confusing mess of stories that show several different kinds of God. There’s your Jealous God, your Disappointed God, your Angry and/or Wrathful God, your Loving God, etc, and it’s all very confusing to the average reader. There is a surprising amount of literature devoted to trying to make sense of all of this, to explaining these differences, these shifts in tone. The reasons, like the God they try to make sense of, vary from person to person, from faith to faith, and from moment to moment.

It seems like an awful lot of mental gymnastics to explain something that is supposedly inexplicable.

I’ve personally found that each version of God is humorous in one way or another and so that’s what I focus on. I’m sure the Wrathful God might find that pretty annoying, but maybe there’s a Hilarious God that would get a laugh out of these jokes. That’s one I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen in the Bible. Imagine trying to rationalize a God that, in early portions of the Bible is sending plagues to destroy entire nations and then, a few pages later, is asking Moses to pull his finger. Good luck with that!

Anyway, I’ve always found the concept of God as father (both to humans and Jesus) to be pretty funny and the idea that he would be disappointed with us over something as intrinsic as our sexuality even funnier. You’ve got this all powerful God that creates us in his own image and gives us our basic functionality, then he spends all this time getting mad that we actually use our sex organs or throwing a fit about some of us liking the same sex or both sexes. It’s like, man, you did this! You made us this way! You can’t get mad!

It’s even funnier to me when you consider how little there is in the Bible that pertains to these particular things, but that’s nothing new. People pick and choose their beliefs all the time and it’s people that really push their interpretations of God.

Fortunately, the tide is definitely turning against that particular version of God, though it does not seem to be going quietly.

At least if God the Father really is disappointed or angry, we can turn to each other, to our brothers and sisters here on earth to find some compassion and acceptance. We’re a pretty big family and sure some of us are pretty awful but a lot of us aren’t so bad and that’s some small comfort.

Sometimes it can mean everything in the world.