The holy Ghost on occasion sounds embarrassed that the Father, when angry, behaves so badly – which would elevate my opinion of the Ghost except that the Bible always takes the line that Yahveh is an holy and inscrutable Father who can do as He pleases without asking children like you or me for their moral approval. The Old Testament is a bloody book, recording the massacre of more than one million civilians whom the Lord killed on a whim, or who were killed at His command during impulsive fits of divine wrath – and countless thousands more whom your heavenly Father slew in plagues, storms, earthquakes, and famine, most often for an honest mistake made by someone in their government, as with King David and his census or, worse, when some tinpot Bronze Age king paid his respects to the wrong divinity.

Although the name Yahveh, means "Jealous," the Lord has said He dislikes being made jealous or angry (Exod. 34:14). It does not thrill Him to hurt people. And He can still be incredibly patient, for days on end. In fact, the Lord never used to be irascible at all, prior to Creation. But there is just something about Earth people (Jewish people in particular) that sets Him off. And when He feels jealous, which is most of the time, your heavenly Father freely admits, in the Scriptures, to having performed "evil" deeds (in Hebrew, ra, applied dozens of times to God's behavior; and elsewhere in Scripture, to arson, cannibalism, fratricide, incest, infanticide, matricide, patricide, sister-rape, slander, theft, treachery, adultery, homosexuality, murder, and tree-worship. God's "evil" has lately been euphemised, in the New Age New International Version, in order to sell more Bibles, under the less unpleasant word, "trouble"; thereby to conform with modern, extrabiblical English; as, say, in the phrase, "Almighty God in the 1930s and early 40s permitted German Jews to suffer ra (a little bit of trouble).

The Lord uses His "evil" (ra) to keep all men, but especially the Jews, on their toes: "Thus says Yahveh, the God of Israel: "Look to it! I shall bring such evil ... that whosoever hears of it, both his ears shall tingle!" (2 Kings 21:12, KJV). If your own ears tingled when you first learned about what the Christian Serbs did to the Muslims in Croatia, or what the Lutherans did to the Jews in Hitler's Germany, or what David did to the Ammonites in Palestine; or if you felt even the slightest little tingle when you heard about what the Americans did to Iraqi Muslims at Abu Ghraib; then you may thank the Lord for the sensation, because He played a role in each one of those capers.

Here is how the Lord justifies His bad behavior: if I hurt My own creatures, that does not make Me a "bad" person, but only "mischievous." As it is written: "He that deviseth to do evil shall be called a mischievous person" (Proverbs 24:8, KJV).

I'm not making any of this up. Sometimes I wish people would read the Word of God.

Well, no matter: my good intentions won't score me points, come the Rapture and Judgment Day. The Lord has reviewed the record of my transgressions, and He has already pronounced my sentence: Immediately after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, God the Father will make the Earth's Christians to trample me under their feet (Rom. 16:20). The Christians will be raptured up through the clouds into Heaven. Yahveh will then bind me and gag me, and drop me down a bottomless pit, into which I shall fall, nonstop, for one thousand years before finally coming out at the other end. After which, I shall be allowed to roam free for "a brief period," and then be "cast into the lake of fire and brimstone," where I "shall be tormented day and night, for ever and ever" (Rev. 20:7-10) – and won't that make your heavenly Father happy!

Well, I may joke about what lies ahead for me, and for most of you as well, but don't think I don't worry about it. Now and then I find myself wishing that I had just kept singing those damned compliments to Yahveh without rebelling.

Hey, not to change the subject, but would you like to know my all-time favourite classic movie? Cool Hand Luke.

If they ever make a movie called Cool Hand Lucifer, I want Strother Martin to play God.

Well, I won't be making any Hollywood films. My only remaining ambition, before Judgment Day, the bottomless pit, and the lake of fire, is to finish my book. I don't have much time.

– L.