Sarat's Pad, Home of PANTHER (just call me Schroedinger's otter)

There is of course the delicious classic story from Belloc's The Path to Rome

Once, before we humans became the good and self-respecting people we are, the Padre Eterno was sitting in heaven with St Michael beside him, and He watched the abyss from His great throne, and saw shining in the void one far point of light amid some seventeen million others,
and He said:

'What is that?'

And St Michael answered:

'That is the Earth,' for he felt some pride in it.

'The Earth?' said the Padre Eterno, a little puzzled . . . 'The Earth? ...?... I do not remember very exactly . . .'

'Why,' answered St Michael, with as much reverence as his annoyance could command, 'surely you must recollect the Earth and all the pother there was in heaven when it was first suggested to create it, and all about Lucifer--'

'Ah!' said the Padre Eterno, thinking twice, 'yes. It is attached to Sirius, and--'

'No, no,' said St Michael, quite visibly put out. 'It is the Earth. The Earth which has that changing moon and the thing called the sea.'

'Of course, of course,' answered the Padre Eterno quickly, 'I said Sirius by a slip of the tongue. Dear me! So that is the Earth! Well, well! It is years ago now ... Michael, what are those little things swarming up and down all over it?'

'Those,' said St Michael, 'are Men.'

'Men?' said the Padre Eterno, 'Men ... I know the word as well as any one, but somehow the connexion escapes me. Men ...' and He mused.

St Michael, with perfect self-restraint, said a few things a trifle staccato, defining Man, his dual destiny, his hope of heaven, and all the great business in which he himself had fought hard. But from a fine military tradition, he said nothing of his actions, nor even of his shrine in Normandy, of which he is naturally extremely proud: and well he may be. What a hill!

'I really beg your pardon,' said the Padre Eterno, when he saw the importance attached to these little creatures. 'I am sure they are worthy of the very fullest attention, and' (he added, for he was sorry to have offended) 'how sensible they seem, Michael! There they go, buying and selling, and sailing, driving, and wiving, and riding, and dancing, and singing, and the rest of it; indeed, they are most practical, business-like, and satisfactory little beings. But I notice
one odd thing. Here and there are some not doing as the rest, or attending to their business, but throwing themselves into all manner of attitudes, making the most extraordinary sounds, and clothing themselves in the quaintest of garments. What is the meaning of that?'

'Sire!' cried St Michael, in a voice that shook the architraves of heaven, 'they are worshipping You!'

'Oh! they are worshipping _me!_ Well, that is the most sensible thing I have heard of them yet, and I altogether commend them. _Continuez,'_ said the Padre Eterno, _'continuez!'_

And since then all has been well with the world; at least where _Us continuent._

There are for the moment at least two things.

1. Is the fixation God knows or cares what we do, what we wear, what we say, perhaps not part of human self-obsession, 'I' as the centre of the universe/multiverse? We have if we are sane to consider ourselves very very small cogs in a very very large wheel.  Of the omnipotence attributed to God it may be said that, keen to punish us though he is in some biographies, it would appear that he can only do it after we're dead, which suggests a limitation of power; the central question too rarely addressed to the lunatics insistent God wants certain people dead is well, why doesn't God kill them?  Omniscience might perhaps be regarded as able to know what's going down rather than having it in the forefront of its mind.  The humility they twitter about might perhaps be actually manifest by considering the human race akin to a painless spot on the underside of your foot which you only notice when doing a bit of footcare.

2.  Not a sparrow falls to earth.  In what sense might that be true, if not that everything is in some sense part of God?  Could death be said in some sense to hurt - that is not the right word - to cause God sensation, cause it an awareness of change? 

3. Of course is that Blair, his ape-woman and their masters in Rome represent a thinly disguised - in my case not disguised at all - return to the Dark Ages wherein any knowledge causing distress to ignorant and vicious peasants is deemed evil and its possessor to be punished.