gods and monsters

Bender: You know, I was God once.
God: Yes, I saw. You were doing well until everyone died.

It's a curious thing. Godfellas (probably my favourite episode of Futurama) makes some interesting comments about the nature of God and religion. It takes alot of what many episodes of The Simpsons say about organised religion, especially Christianity, and expands on it, deals with it on a grander scale and without truly reaching conclusion.

For those who haven't seen it, Bender gets accidently launched into space from a torpedo tube, at such speeds that Fry and Leela can't retrieve him. An very small asteroid crashes into him and a microscopic civilisation crawls off it, sets up on his stomach and begin worshipping him as God. Along the way, he manages to kill off most of his followers, through various errors in judgement. Another civilisation springs up on his arse and become atheists, because he doesn't respond to their prayers, and the two factions end up in a religious war and completely wipe out both societies, each dropping atomic bombs on the other.

And then he meets God. I mean, an infinite, omniscient, omnipotent being in the immediate form of a galaxy.

Meanwhile, Fry refuses to give up on him and he and Leela travel to India to meet up with some monks who are using a giant satellite dish in an effort to find God. Locking the monks in the laundry and taking over the dish, the pair start hunting for Bender. God hears them and so flings Bender back to Earth.

So we have discussions of both the nature of God and of how people react to God, to religion. There's Bender as an active God, who directly answers prayer, gets involved in the lives of his followers and who, in the process, nearly wipes out his followers as they become overly reliant on him, asking him to immediately solve all their problems. There's the atheists on Bender's arse, people who refuse to believe in God because they don't see evidence that proves his existence. There's the monks, people who actively search for God and continue to search despite the lack of evidence. There's Fry, who hopes and hopes, despite overwhelming odds. There's the conflict - often violent conflict - that arises between people who have opposing views of God.

And then there is God itself.

The most interesting thing in the episode is some of the conversation between God and Bender.

God: Bender, being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you. And if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch, like a safecracker or a pickpocket.
Bender: Or a guy who burns down a bar for the insurance money.
God: Yes, if he makes it look like an electrical thing. If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

Because of this, when God returns Bender to Earth, Bender returns convinced that God doesn't do anything to help people and so insists on freeing the trapped monks. And it cuts back to God who says, again, "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

Which is the point. Like God says in Bruce Almighty: "Parting a soup is not a miracle, Bruce. It's a magic trick. A single mom who's working two jobs, and still finds time to take her son to soccer practice, that's a miracle. A teenager who says "no" to drugs and "yes" to an education, that's a miracle. People want me to do everything for them. What they don't realize is they have the power. You want to see a miracle, son? Be the miracle."