Dear God, 

It’s been a while since we last spoke. I only write your name with a capital ‘G’ because of the prevalent social construct and you’ll see later in the letter why I’m deciding to give up on it. I’m writing this letter to clear some things up between us. I feel like I owe you and myself an explanation. 

I remember when I first met you as a kid. Mom introduced us at a puja for some festival or the other. She even said that for you, I had to use a special greeting; the whole ‘join your hands and close your eyes thing’. I’d get all excited every time we passed one of your houses (you had so many!) because mom and I would quickly say hi in your special way. Your parties were pretty cool too! I grew up in Mumbai as you know and man, that Chaturthi scene was lit.

Naturally, I was curious about you. I started asking about stuff like where you lived, how you travelled, and why only at such fixed times of the year you’d come to visit. I remember hearing this story about a mountaineer who tried climbing Mt. Kailash (mom said that was your main house) and died trying to scale it. His camera was recovered years later and the film inside was melted to mulch so the only partial image they could recover from it was a flash of light half covering an out-of-focus face. You didn’t want your picture taken. ‘Strange’, I remember thinking. He throws us all these festivals to get together and celebrate but is a recluse himself. I met your other families too, during the parties they threw. They thought you looked different from what I showed them pictures of you because they’d probably met you at some different stage in your life, but we kids understood it was just that. Nobody thought about it so much at that age. 

As I was growing up, I’d been led to believe that you were the answer to all my problems. You led my life to where it was supposed to go, nudged me in the right direction at crossroads, and helped out whenever I need the help. As I grew older though, you helped less and less. People told me that as the dude who was in charge of everything, you were a really busy guy, so you’d let me handle the stuff you thought I could manage on my own. Problem was, by that point I’d gotten completely reliant on you. I had practically handed all my dreams and responsibilities over to you so it was a bit of a nasty shock to be suddenly held accountable again. So naturally, anything that went wrong from that point, I’d blame you, because really, how busy did you have to be to not give me the happiness I wanted? 

I was old enough by this point to start noticing things. All your families/religions didn’t always get along. There hasn’t been a single decade since you first appeared, that nobody has killed another in your many names, somewhere on this world. We humans tend to take things a bit too literally, so wherever any message got lost in translation or was inadequately explained, people fought over what they thought was the correct meaning to derive behind it. Someone at your level of intellect and presence should’ve probably accounted for that right? 

I guess that’s probably when I started to question my beliefs. Historically or mythologically speaking, you had only appeared to a handful of us mortals over all time. Everyone made their distinctions on what you told them and spread the message to the best of their understanding. There is where my issue stands. Maybe it was impossible to change the Word of God in the original form it was given, but really, how hard do you think it was to twist the words of another man? Who is to say, that somewhere down the line a succession of people haven’t mutilated that pure beacon of guiding light, into what it has become today. If I follow it, am I following you, or am I following the fanfiction that the last guy signed off on? It isn’t working out for Ms. Rowling and you probably should’ve known it wouldn’t work out for you.  

I moved onto your policies on damnation. The punishments you supposedly tell your people to deal out when they don’t follow your word or if their souls have been tainted by sins from a previous life. Would a punishment be punishment if I didn’t know what it was for? If yes, then what was really the point? What if I hadn’t heard of you or your message? Would I still be subject to your divine justice? What about a child born in the middle of a war? She can’t comprehend shapes or sounds yet, forget right and wrong. Does she deserve the pain you put her through before she dies or is that simply the justice you had planned for her tainted soul and the sins of her parents? The tidal wave you brought around to punish the degenerate, did you want to drown the hundreds of helpless creatures who did nothing but survive as per your creation, or were they just collateral damage? Did their cries of agony even reach you, or did they echo soundlessly inside your vacant throne room? Were you even there or had we, in our rush to ransom our faith, given you a title and power over a people, who were just as incidental to your existence as you were to ours. A chance concurrence. A cosmic coincidence. 

With that understanding, the possibilities of your existence suddenly blew out of proportion! I could now think of you as this bored guy playing Sims on his computer and we were the simulation you’d created. We could be a B+ grade biology project in an advanced alien civilisation’s science class. Black holes and galaxies could be nuclei and atoms, and we were the building blocks of a universe far beyond our comprehension. I toyed with different religions and their clarity on you until it dawned on me that only you could give me that clarity. You see, with all the possibilities before me you were a choice but never an option. Because religion and the limits of human imagination are at the end of the day, simply a human construct that blow things out of proportion, something our species is historically wont to do. 

All this I thought of from the confines and perspectives my very privileged life when billions around me deserved it more than me. People who had actually gone through all the pain and misery to come out stronger, than me who was mindlessly contemplating life laid out on a cushion. Slowly and carefully, I let go of my faith in your omnipotence. Your hand in human destiny didn’t make sense to me anymore. Either you couldn’t do everything, or you didn’t care enough to do anything. 

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? 

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? 

Then he is malevolent. 

Is he both able and willing? 

Then whence cometh evil? 

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?” 

– Epicurus

So it turns out I’m obviously not the only one with the same mind-set. People have been thinking about these things from before your most popular messenger came around to see us! And he brings about an important point. “Why call him god?”. Our faith in the divine is the only reason your position exists. Remove that and you become one with the Big Nothing. That brings out another parallel that I’m writing this letter to absolutely no one and that it is just a distant shout of my frustration to the infinite void. 

There are a hundred other things that came to my attention while I was busy analysing you and getting into it all would turn a letter into a novel but these few things seemed like the important bits to concentrate on. Despite everything, I am human. Humans always needed a higher purpose to keep our fear of the Great Nothing at bay, which takes your place if you don’t exist. I too am terrified of the unknown, but unlike a lot of my species, I am also a fair bit curious about it, so hearsay isn’t really my thing. Believe me, I’d love for you to exist the way we think you do, and that is why I haven’t absolutely given up on you. But you and only you can convince me of the truth of your existence and the true meaning of all that it entails. Not grand miracles, not messengers, not the masses chanting your name in praise. Just you. 

I look forward to hearing from you. If you do decide to come forward, be sure to bring answers. Till then, this is my final prayer. 

Yours sincerely,

Me.