Conversations Between God and Satan

By John Janovy, Jr

CONVERSATIONS is clearly satire, humor, and borderline science fiction, although the satire is relatively soft, the humor is somewhat subtle, and the science fiction is completely consistent with what you’d expect from two eternal beings, one of whom is supposed to have created the universe. Instead of dealing with the age-old, and quite frankly rather hackneyed, subject of God and Satan discussing Job, Conversations is a highly modern version that addresses a wide range of subjects. God has taken the form of a young National Merit Scholar male pre-med from Rapid City, South Dakota; Satan has selected the body of a very secular humanist female writer and English major from Omaha. They agree to meet at one of the most serene, gentle, and poetic places available, namely, the Crescent Moon Coffee House. During the course of their two-week “vacation,” they deal with every hot-button issue of the culture wars. Although their conversation is meandering, it does eventually address one of the central questions of our time: Why are people killing one another in the name of God?

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Janovy, Jr
• Release date: Jul 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9780984377855

John Janovy, Jr

About the author:John Janovy, Jr. (PhD, University of Oklahoma, 1965) is the author of seventeen books and over ninety scientific papers and book chapters. These books range from textbooks to science fiction to essays on athletics. He is now retired, but when an active faculty member held the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interest is parasitology. He has been Director of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences, and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists.His teaching experiences include large-enrollment freshman biology courses, Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station, Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Organismic Biology, and numerous honors seminars. He has supervised thirty-two graduate students, and approximately 50 undergraduate researchers, including ten Howard Hughes scholars.His honors include the University of Nebraska Distinguished Teaching Award, University Honors Program Master Lecturer, American Health Magazine book award (for Fields of Friendly Strife), State of Nebraska Pioneer Award, University of Nebraska Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, The Nature Conservancy Hero recognition, Nebraska Library Association Mari Sandoz Award, UNL Library Friend’s Hartley Burr Alexander Award, and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award.

Book preview

CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN GOD AND SATAN

Held during October, 2004, at the Crescent Moon Coffee House in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, Earth, Milky Way

John Janovy, Jr.

Lincoln, NE, USA, Earth, Milky Way

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright © 2009 by John Janovy, Jr. All rights reserved. For information contact the author at [e-mail].

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Cover painting by Wendy Bantam; used by permission.

Designed by John Janovy, Jr.

ISBN 978-0-9843778-5-5

Books by John Janovy, Jr.

Keith County Journal

Back in Keith County

Yellowlegs

Fields of Friendly Strife

On Becoming a Biologist

Vermilion Sea

Dunwoody Pond

Comes the Millennium

Ten Minute Ecologist

Teaching in Eden

Foundations of Parasitology (with L. S. Roberts)

Outwitting College Professors

The Ginkgo

Pieces of the Plains

Tuskers

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for Jill and Brett

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CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN GOD AND SATAN

Held during October, 2004, at the Crescent Moon Coffee House in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, Earth, Milky Way

1. Monday

God and Satan show up on Earth, Milky Way, and meet at The Crescent Moon in a Red State near the geographic center of an enormously powerful nation. Issues are introduced, followed by a short discussion of typos in the Bible, creation and destruction, being made in God’s image, and the question of why people throughout the universe are killing one another in God’s name.

2. Tuesday

Talk centers around what happens in Heaven and Hell, what angels do, the Virgin of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich, chocolate fudge brownies, Biblical typos revisited, plagues, death, and the fundamental nature not only of good and evil but also of Good and Evil. God is a creator; Satan is a fixer; both address stories, the media, and relativity.

3. Wednesday

The conversation concerns mainly good and evil, acts of God, brains vs. bodies, and chocolate brownies. Both provide extended comments on art, especially pictures of nudes, which leads to a discussion of stupidity vs. ignorance, working-class people, the 84th Street Evangelical Family Church, history, ACLU, letters to the editor, James Cantrell, and McCook, Nebraska.

4. Thursday

We hear more about James Cantrell, more about McCook, Nebraska, the media, the Omaha World-Herald, pornography in advertising, prom dresses, advertisements for Cialis, pre-pubescent boys and middle school girls, sex, a painting named Widow’s Walk, voyeurism, beetles, first contact with extra-terrestrials, intelligent life, and sticky high-calorie cinnamon rolls.

5. Friday

Friday is a day for Chocolate Overdose cookies, God’s and Satan’s after-Earth plans for their temporary bodies, and God’s two-week vacation. The conversation also deals with fattening foods, flowers on fingernails, Ultimate Questions, The Magnificent Seven subjects, emergent properties, unexpected consequences, the Ten Commandments, and God’s creative processes.

6. Saturday

God and Satan talk about athletics and why people play, crowds and mobs, tribalism, sex and mistakes, games, winners and losers. We also hear about war as a game, devastating losses, the rise and fall of nations, the Law of Unintended Consequences, followed by goodness and mercy, and God’s plans for going to church.

7. Sunday

The conversation starts with lentil soup, church, the day of rest, what Sunday really means to God (what rest really means to God), studying on Sunday, football, shopping, diets, prayers, World Peace, technology in the arts, weapons. John of Patmos is described; discussion continues with talk about Revelation, angels, flying, an internal drive to worship, the God Gene, God’s home, quarterbacks as God symbols.

8. Monday

We are introduced to intelligent life as it exists in other solar systems and the lizards on planet Saurus are described, as are female and male people. Satan’s failure on Saurus is revealed, leading to discussion of accomplishing goals without destroying goals, artists and creators, Stone Age people, Mozart and Darwin, evolution, the Sons of God, the boredom of angels, pet angels and pet Heaven, emergent properties, secularism, priests, and the loss of innocence.

9. Tuesday

Tuesday’s conversation is relatively sophisticated; the subjects include evolutionary tradeoffs, intelligence vs. behavior, the Dumbness Quotient, secular humanism, prayer, animal sacrifice, killing in the name of God, acts of God, The Other, God vs. Satan, the planet Xkleeb with its warring factions the Xncvwkrs vs. the Tyrnklnzs, Satan’s plans for visiting Xkleeb the following Thursday, more about killing in the name of God, interbreeding, sex on Xkleeb, moral crises, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

10. Wednesday

God’s demeanor in His various disguises is described; we see God as a responsible citizen, Satan as an unpredictable one. The conversation turns to misery and hatefulness, acting against one’s own self interest, planet Xkleeb and its warring populations, the fundamental nature of Evil, the Theory of Evil, the Kingdom of God, deadly conflict, and a thought experiment.

11. Thursday

God and Satan address the question of what is basically wrong with humans and human-like animals throughout the universe. Their comments include ones about Norman Mailer, evil schemes, possible ways to end the wars on Xkleeb, Umberto Eco and literary criticism, challenges to existence, a universal puzzle: destruction in the name of a Creator, raisons d’etre, body language, typos in the Bible, and Satan’s tattoo.

12. Friday

On their last Friday talk is about the estrangement of God, the possibility of a SuperGod, dangerous Believers, Satan’s tattoo, the Right Hundred Words, five right people saying a Right Hundred Words, the biology of Saurus, the what if game, birth control, the Pope, and Satan’s plans for a vacation on Saurus.

13. Saturday

Saturday is a day for talk about football, although we also hear about God’s travels, the thin veneer of civilization, secular humanism, and The Ultimate Problem. They again consider emergent properties, cookies and rocks, experimental universes, extreme cases and extreme explanations. God plans to attend the Unitarian Church.

14. Sunday

God and Satan have a long discussion of The Ultimate Problem on planet Xkleeb and Satan’s anticipated solution to this Problem. As a result, both address the meaning of life. We also hear about the evolutionary origin of consciousness, the invention of religion, and Satan’s view on carbohydrates. Then the two discuss pride, covetousness, thievery, murder, adultery, abortion, evolution, child abuse, narcotics, the worship of various gods, the end of the world, ending with Satan’s plans to spend Monday on Saurus then travel to Xkleeb on Thursday. The two plan to meet again in two thousand years. God leaves for the edge of the universe; Satan makes a pact with an earthling.

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1. Monday

Satan returned to Earth’s surface on August 26, 1883, in the South Pacific on an island known as Krakatau. When Satan stepped out of Hell up onto the land, half of Krakatau was blown up into the sky where millions of tons of dust and debris blocked out the sun. Satan shrugged then looked around for someone to be her disguise, trying on several nasty people for the next hundred years. Eventually, however, for her meeting with God she chose a struggling young writer in Omaha.

This will be a great disguise, said Satan to nobody in particular. There will always be struggling writers and no one will ever notice them unless they write a letter to the Public Pulse, then they’ll be noticed for about an hour. So this is a great place to hide. By great place Satan meant not only a struggling writer’s body, but also Omaha. Satan thought she would be invisible in Omaha because the liberal media regularly used Omaha as a metaphor for nowhere, in every sense of the word, so nobody would look in Omaha for somebody as important as Satan. But in this case both Satan and the liberal media were wrong. Most people who had to go to Omaha thought they were being sent to Hell, and those who actually lived in Omaha were always on the lookout for Satan and seemed to find her everywhere.

Satan came up out of Hell because God had arrived on Earth a short time earlier and sent a message to Hell asking Satan to coffee. God had studied what happened as a result of Adam and Eve’s original sin, and decided that it was time to meet his alter ego and talk about the meaning of life because something was really screwed up. After all, God knew He wouldn’t mean very much to anyone without Satan, and vice versa, which meant they were sort of bedfellows, but not, of course, literally. So God came down from Heaven on October 25, 1881, in a little place called Malaga, in Spain. His parents named him Pablo Ruiz. ‘Pablo’ goes well with ‘Picasso’, said little Pablo’s father, although he said it in Spanish.

After indulging His creative instincts, which is what God did best and continuously, He spent a few more Earth years in various disguises, looking around for the ideal, central, and most conservative place and disguise to meet the personification of evil who, He knew from past experience, would choose a secular humanist female body for their meeting. So God opted for a National Merit Scholar male pre-med from Rapid City.

This particular kid needed desperately to leave South Dakota, of course, and He knew it, but He was not inclined to go too far from home. With God in His body, this particular pre-med’s family, home, and local church were of paramount importance. So He went to Lincoln, Nebraska, the capital of The Good Life state. After all, He reasoned, it’s named after one of the continent’s heroes, a person who did wonderful things, was victorious in a war, it’s in the middle of everywhere, a pretty neutral place to meet Satan, and a clean-cut pre-med would be the perfect counterpoint to any struggling female writer. God was right, of course.

Thought about sending another kid, said God to Satan when they finally got together at a place called The Crescent Moon Coffee House in Lincoln, Nebraska, North America, Earth, Milky Way, where both God and Satan had ended up in college, but decided to come down here myself this time.

Probably a good idea, replied Satan; they might nail Him to a cross again, although this time it would be, as they say, ‘metaphorically speaking.’ Or they might elect Him President.

Her, said God; I was planning for it to be a Her this time. Then God shrugged, like Satan had done a few Earth years earlier, and as He stirred some sugar substitute into His Fair Trade Sumatran Takengon, He wondered if things would have worked out differently if He’d sent His only begotten daughter the first time. Then He said to Satan, what in the Hell is going on here? By ‘here’ He meant Earth and all of the several million similar planets He’d inadvertently made, thus allowing people to evolve on, throughout the Universe.

God was beginning to think that maybe people were not such a good idea after all because the planets that still had only dinosaurs and trilobites and giant dragonflies seemed to be doing just fine, so that maybe when He got tired of watching velociraptor types chomping down on gentle herbivores, instead of killing them off with a big meteorite, He’d just see if He could evolve them into pigs of various sizes and shapes. I like pigs, He said to Himself, and thought about the pleasure He felt when He was watching strange plants and animals evolve from other strange plants and animals, sort of like He’d created a circus over whose acts He had no control whatsoever.

Birds, said Satan, reading God’s mind and reminding Him of His own operating principles. You can’t make pigs out of velociraptors. You can only make birds.

I forgot, said God; pigs are made out of something else. God loved pigs because they were so honest and successful and, well, predictable. They simply acted like pigs, and even the various wild species He’d watched evolve out of some even-toed ancestor non-pig. All the pigs that had evolved out of their even-toed ancestors on millions of other planets also were great pigs and would probably have done just fine on Earth, even though they came in a variety of styles, sizes, and colors, including purple or iridescent chartreuse, depending on the galaxy. You gotta admit it, said God; pigs are one of my Universe’s best products.

It is amazing, isn’t it, replied Satan; that people act like pigs but pigs never act like people. She was reminding God of why they’d come to The Crescent Moon, namely, to talk about people, not about the good stuff like pigs. The fact that they’d both had to become college students in order to get to The Crescent Moon on this particular day of this particular week wasn’t much of a problem for either of them because they’d both been so many different things since they’d shown up on Earth in the early 1880s and they could both take on any form they wanted to anyway.

Neither God nor Satan paid any attention to time, either, because they were both Eternal and so neither one was particularly picky about the bodies they chose at any one moment. But in general, they tended to act like God or Satan, at least in part, no matter what kind of a body, or what century, they were in and no matter which galaxy they visited.

My big question, said God, back on track, is why they kill one another. They’re doing it all over the place. By all over the place He wasn’t just talking about Iraq and Israel and Houston, He was also talking about the millions of planets in the Universe on which He’d watched people evolve out of apes. And most of all, why they’re doing it in My name.

All over the Universe people were killing one another, claiming that God was on their side. Even in those places where they weren’t actually killing one another, they were claiming that God would be on their side(s) if they did. This situation defied logic, although to be quite honest, God was far more creative than He was logical. Besides, Einstein and Gödel had evolved to fulfill this particular planet’s need for logicians. But the killing was illogical enough to catch God’s attention, and make Him wonder for long periods how it could have happened and why it was happening in so many places.

I’m a little bit jealous, said Satan. Nobody ever kills anybody in my name, at least not very often, and even then not very many, and that’s supposed to be my job. Satan was drinking decaf Fair Trade Peruvian Femenino with a big slug of half-and-half and real, but brown, sugar. Most people would think that if you’re going to drink decaf, then maybe you ought to leave the other stuff out too, for consistency, but Satan really didn’t care what others thought. So she avoided the caffeine, but loaded up on sugar and cream. She also ate lots of sweets and high-carb meals and drank a lot of vodka, but still managed to look like a million dollars in her coed’s body, which, because she was still a struggling writer, she tended to keep covered up in jeans with holes in the knees and faded red sweatshirts that said CYCLONES across the front in big gold letters.

There’s just something about apes that is, you know, relatively noble, God continued; but once they turn into people, then they’re sort of out of control.

I think there’s a typo in the Bible, said Satan. "Remember, right in the beginning, when I’m a snake and there’s this apple tree? I think that when you wrote ‘not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’ that what you really meant was ‘now eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ I mean, if You’re going to let them evolve those big brains, maybe You should let them know what’s good and