h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK, heres the deal.....

2000 years, right? Long time isn't it?

This is supposed to be 2000 years since the birth of the son of God (give or take the odd few days), so are we expecting some big SIGN from HIM?

Are all these floods, fires, volcanoes, earhtquakes and minor irritations at the launderette a sign of impending apocalypse...

OR

...just coincidence.

Way back in oooh, let's see.. I think it was last century... Friedrich Nietzsche proposed that God was dead. Not that he didn't exist, mind you; just that he was dead.

If this is the case then certain questions remain.

1)Who was invited to the funeral? Did Jesus go, for example?
2)If God is dead, then who's running the show now? (And no Bill Gates replies please)
3) One for the existentialists - Given our existence in a godless universe, what do we ultimately have left to believe in? (Might I suggest Frink's Drinks as a suitable starting point for this discussion?) Sorry, I'm an incompetent (and incontinent) linker.
4)What happens to all those God related expressions we have, like "Thank God, Oh my God, God only knows, Goddammit" and the like.

Answers in novelty biro or wax crayon on a small child please (preferably trailing off at the end.)

Vlad

Here in the UK we have a perfect example of someone who thinks he runs everything and that he's all powerfull. Of course I'm speaking about the incompetent (and incontinent) Tony Blair.

But if Blair is God, then surely William Hague must be the Devil. This I refuse to accept. I doubt very much that he has the best tunes.

Also, if God is dead, but he was also both omnipresent and omnipotent before his death, then it follows that God must have committed suicide, or at least been a consenting recipient of euthanasia. Which poses a lot of very interesting questions...

None of which I'm going to ask.

Hi Vlad,

About point 2:
If you were running a 'show' like life is, would you be proud to admit that?
I think God's not dead but just left us a few millions years ago with the words: "Oh, God, did I do this?". OK, he likes to talk to himself. Who else should he talk to? Maybe that's what drove him mad.

Regards,
Bert

To answer the existentialist question we have ourselves to believe in when in a universe with no god.
And when is the second coming? And would we notice it?

If Jesus is the son of God and gave his life for our sins, promising us an eternal life in heaven, (or hell, depending on what you'd done) and God died, wouldn't it then make sense that God went to heaven, where he already was to begin with so there's not much of a difference there now, is there?

Nah, that wouldn't work at all. heaven is being one with God, i.e. being part of God, so if God goes, the whole shooting match goes with him/her/it/them.

Fortunately expressions like "God only knows" would still work, only they'd be even more defeatist - "God only knows, but he's dead, so there's f*** all chance of him revealing the answer in the form of a burning recycling bin"

With God being dead, the revelations prophesy of the Devil having the run of the shop floor for a while would hold out, enter the dark overlord, Tony Blair (I know, I voted for him as well), and his hideous lieutentant Jack "We shall CCTV them on the Beaches..." Straw".

As for who's got the best tunes these days, I'm at a complete loss. Maybe God did have them after all, he just didn't tell any of his people...

But if you believed in God in the first place (which you would have to do to proclaim dead) then you allow the concept of an imortal soul, which then becomes one with God, going to heaven, and if God died God's immortal soul becomes one with God... it's all very Zen and very confusing when I try to make my mind come out on paper. Just scrap it all and assume I don't know what I'm talking about, which I don't

Ah, simple; *he says, not entirely believing himself*; God is the immortal soul, ergo cannot have an immortal soul. Therefore, does not die in the way that we may or may not die, God would merely cease to exist. *poof*

The question then is what happens to The Man Downstairs, part of the immortal soul, irrevocably seperated from the immortal soul (Hell - being parted form God), does he (no need for pronoun, Devil must be male, or we'd never of had the electric guitar) continue to exist without God?

"The devil must be male"
or we'd not have McDonalds either, or Capitalism, or War, or Jeremy Clarkson, (just my opinion)

Did I read that right? The bit about the soul being the bit that is one with God and if God is dead then we must no longer have souls. If that is true then we no longer have anything to fear from the Devil.

Incidentally Tony Blair is not the Devil, and neither is Bill Gates - it's Rupert Murdoch.

Even more incidentally I've been to Patmos, which is where the book of revelations was written. You know, the one that reads like an acid trip. Guess what. Patmos is known for it's magic mushrooms! Is it really wise to attach so much significance to this particular passage of the bible?

Anyway, If God is dead, and even if he isn't, the world he allegedly created is a dead ringer for one that has come into being over a period of several billion years - as the result of a whole series of events that are (largely) explicable and even able to be reproduced in the laboratory. Why not just treat it as what it appears to be without speculating about the existence of unprovable entities such as God (or Murdoch's conscience)

I think it's called Occam's Razor

So what you're saying is that... what are you saying?

Don't start with the Ockham's Razor thing. He keeps cropping up in here. odn't know what it is with him. Anyway, while I fully agree in principle with Ockham, I'm going to argue against you anyway. Okham's razor fails because we still do not have a unified theory to explain even the easy bits of the universe, and the more we discover the less our theories work. At the moment we have relativity for the big bits and the fast bits, Newtonian physics for the normal sized slow bits, Quantum physics for the small bits, and string theory for th very small pan dimensional bits, but they all have breaking points where they stop working. So, we have all these extrememly complicated thories which only a couple of people alive truly understand, pitted against a bearded geezer unaffected by time with the ability to manipulate matter.

Which one's more simple again?

Hang on let me get this right, if God is dead and he helped with the bible, thus making the bible a prequel (after all it is history), and therefore present day is a title in development, who's going to finish it and will there be a sequel. Hey, this appears to run along the same lines as any question to DNA, ergo Douglas Adams is god. Therefore making Arthur, Ford and Dirk his disiples (quick add up regular characters in the books, does it come to twelve), therefore if god is dead, that would explain why someone else wrote Starship Titanic and we have never had the release of 'Salmon of doubt'. Doubt... of course it all makes sense. Someone has killed Douglas Adams and created a collection of web sites to prove he's not dead, thus making TDV the new church of england....

Ahhhhhhhh

Which would make this the Book of Revelations...

No.. its book of relations, after all what could be worse than spending millennium eve with all of your family. The four aunts of the apocolypse, opening the doors of hell to a bunch of nutters who think you're a 24 hour party night club because some nephew is flashing the upstairs lights..

My God (or whatever choatic power maybe in charge)....

ITS ALL STARTING TO MAKE SENSE

Can I be Pestilence? Can I...can I!?!?

Wait! From what I've heard it even holds up in Judiasm, because long ago (anyone see Pi?) the Jewish high priests new the name of God, but only one person at a time could know it. Then it was lost. According to a freind who is taking a Jewish Mysticism course, the only thing we DO know, is the number of letters in the name of God... 42! And DNA pulled this right off the top of his head! Just randomly! Too bad you just proved he's dead, though...

Hrm, however we could just be looking at a hoax. He could be pretending to be dead to see what we would do in the event of his death. Thats why the rumors of Disney doing HHGTTG started. It isn't really going to happen its just to shake up the masses.

AND, the babel fish would allow you to speak in many tongues (or at least understand them). It all makes sense.

Indeed, the babel fish is the perfect descrirtion of speaking in tongues, for it was written, "each man heard them speaking in his own tongue".

If the number of God's name is 42, what counting system are they using? I could say my number is 666, and some numerologist would be bound to come up with a valid reason why. Do you know what they based their counting on?

I wonder if DNA realised he was phophesying (?) his own *just too late* second coming in the Resturant at the End of the Universe?