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When God first dictated 20 Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai the only surfaces apt for transcription and FOB delivery were planks of matsoh Moses took along for lunch. Feeling peckish on the way down, the crotchety Levite accidentally munched a month of Sundays of Sunday School instruction. Back up the mountain did he go the next day to a sore wroth God endangering fragile dry land ecology with trumpet blasts and visible plume emissions. 20 Commandments were graven in stone this episode, one painful letter at a time for 40 days, for the all-knowing God had overlooked telling His chosen people about iron. Moses, not being able to lift and lug a couple of hundred pounds of rock, made do with two slabs holding the first 10 commandments outlining the grand plan (with ferrous metallurgy to smite the Hebrews' Bronze Age enemies - pretty much everyone else in the world).
In the interim the common folk grew antsy, portable video games being scarce in Old Testament times. Moses returned to find a gold piñata and no party hat reserved for either him or the Boss. In a fit of pique he smashed the stone tablets and excoriated his management staff, then dragged his weary buns up Mt. Sinai to retrieve two stone tablets holding Commandments 11-20 lest the CEO take notice and downsize Moses' ass. Most of this stuff was fine print - five of the commandments being exhortations to shop in the company store - but it sufficed. A pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night guided the Children of Israel on a 40 year traversal of 250 miles, possibly by way of Japan. They finally arrived in Canaan snubbed of all Middle East oil reserves. God heard about the gold piòata and was not amused.
Fast forward to the late 1990s as the Millennium drifted to its conclusion. Each autumn (Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) God reappeared in Southern California as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. What was the result? He was water bombed by helicopter and fixed-wing aircraft. He was aerially assaulted with huge plops of pink fire retardant while Enviro-whiners screamed "the fragile and endangered ecological niche of the chaparral is burning!" It rendered a deity sore wroth, again. "Take two tablets..." was not the answer.
The One True Church, at least the One True Church incorporated in the Vatican City as opposed to all the other One True Churches, is the Borg Collective of organized religion. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. What commenced as nominally monotheistic blather rapidly escalated to a tripartite God exercising appetites beyond tithing. Churches grew upon razed heathen temples, pagan holidays were expropriated, and a huge and ridiculous phone book of saints and angels was added to the stew. Obtaining any sort of straight answer from this dogmatic compote decorated with enough anile bureaucracy to shock a Roman is utter fantasy, sheer stupidity, or an exercise of faith.
Christianity is the first multi-level marketing religion. Purchasing indulgences, crusading against heathens, burning heretics, inquisitioning Jews, obliterating whole Meso-American civilizations, throwing doctrinal gasoline upon a planetary conflagration of starving babies, churning Northern Ireland, heterosexual celibacy, buggering altar and choir boys, solid gold altars and priestly chamber pots, scarified flesh, cloistered flagellation, ceding broad miles-long blood trails during Easter festivals, and eating of The God Who Eats You aren't worth a single credit toward conferral of your incorporeal credentials. God laid down the Law. If you want to be cleansed and redeemed, sinner, there is only a single path to Him.
When you stand before the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter boots the database of your soul there will not be a monstrous rambling recitation of your entire existence. There is no terabyte multidimensional spreadsheet with the discounted cashflow/return on investment of your spirit, sins versus good deeds, oblations, and remorse. God has had it up to Here with the idiot spawn of Adam and Eve. Heaven is not rocket science or the calculus. Heaven is integer arithmetic.
The traffic signal was invented in 1928. God saw the light and expunged heaven of its unworthy, thereafter setting uniform standards for admission. Nobody before the invention of the yellow traffic light in the early 1950s made it back to His throne. Pagans and heathens without access to traffic lights are automatically eternally damned. The more yellow lights you run, the closer you are to eternal salvation - simple, easy, absolute.
God has not failed you. You have failed god. Synchronize those traffic lights or be damned.
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