In many places around this world, I would be killed just for posting this dumb letter

THIS IS SLIGHTLY weird for me. I don’t believe that you exist, so it’s like writing a letter to Santa, except I’ve never seen you at the mall or on a can of Coca-Cola or falling down drunk on 53th Street during a Santacon pub crawl (fun!). So maybe you’re not like Santa, or maybe you are—in which case, Dear Mr. God, I will be good this year and I’d like $250,000 and a few award-winning articles in a prestigious publication of your choosing, please and thank-you.

I don’t know if you’ve been listening in on the conversations, but a lot of people are talking about you. Not directly about you. More like about people who bring up your name a lot. Some of the talk is about whether or not it’s okay to make fun of the people who claim to believe in you, and who say they will defend your reputation from offence and ridicule and criticism. In fact, some of your keenest followers object to seeing depictions of you at all. A small percentage of them appear to think it’s okay to kill people who do or say things they (you?) deem improper or objectionable, because they are doing it for you.

Now, I know what it’s like to have followers. I’m on Twitter and I have, like, tens of them. (My handle is @waynekspear, btw, if you and the baby Jesus & anyone else want to, you know.) Like you, I don’t expect to be held responsible for the behavior of my followers. Some of them probably have bed-head and can’t even parallel park or order a proper deli sandwich. Odds are that at least one of my social media followers has feet that smell like cheese. I bet some of them don’t floss. My point is that I will be very embarrassed if one of them ever decides to start a feet-cheese anti-flossing religion in my name.

Okay, so that’s the male-bonding portion of this letter. It’s amazing how quickly I sort of eased into it. See how I’m just chillin with you, like you totally exist?

I gather you’re all about the Truth, and the truth as I see it is that I’m tired of all the killing and bigotry and hatred that people commit, for whatever reasons. I’m equally sick and tired of discussions and debates about: whether or not you exist, what it is exactly that you want from us, your rules for our lives, who speaks on your behalf, and which of your many books is the right one to read. I get it. I’ve written more than one book, too, and the answer to the question “Wayne, which of your books is the right one to read?” is, obviously, get all of them. You’re just doing what any author does, which is building a good product funnel. Heck, you invented that.

So, I’m tired. Many of the people who believe in you, most of them in fact, are just fine by me. They live in peace with their neighbors. They live simple decent lives. Some of them smell nice. Then there are the people who are destroying everything. They’ve made it a nightmare to get on an airplane. They’ve made it likely that civil war and mass murder and persecution will flourish for as far into the future as we can imagine. They’ve ruined entire countries like Syria and Iraq and Pakistan, and they aim to ruin more. They hate music and education and science and books and irony and sex and wine and movies and fun and even cartoons. They love death and war and terror. I mean, that’s not funny at all.

The arguments about whether or not they are “really” believers, killing and hating despite your words, or even because of them, bores me. But what really tires me more than anything are the people—the people!—who find all sort of reasons why it’s the fault of the people who got killed. If only they didn’t make fun of religion! If only they didn’t criticize! If only they didn’t stop being all racist and phobic! Seems it’s everyone’s fault except the people who did the actual killing. Man, you people are even less clever than the killers themselves.

Because, in my view, you are a made-up thing—like the idea that there are unicorns and fairies, or that Sarah Palin “writes” books—I’m not doing this to ask or tell you anything. You don’t exist. There is no evidence for you at all, except inside people’s brains and in the books those brains have made. Homo sapien brains and nervous systems make some people pretty certain you are real, and that’s fine. I can’t prove you don’t, and I’m not interested in even trying.

Here’s the reason I wrote this: in many places around this world, I would be killed just for posting this dumb letter. I think that is wrong and stupid and sick, and I hope everyone out there agrees with me. But I know they don’t all agree with me, and the evidence is in every newspaper, every day. So, Houston, we have a problem.

Anyway, I hope I was able to make you laugh. I like to laugh. Some people, not so much. I can be silly. Some people, not so much. I admit I don’t know the truth about a lot of things. Some people, not so much. So I’m going to make fun of the some people, not because I think they will laugh (they won’t) but because I have chosen Team Fun, Laughter, and Life. [Insert fart joke here.]

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