God has a new address. It's the internet.
God lives in your cellular network on your mobile device, in cloud backup, greeting you on Facebook walls, Instagram stories, Twitter fleets, and in your digital history. God is ever pervasive, it's looking at you while you stare at your mobile phones and God's definitely observing you while you meander between tabs looking to switch to VPN to stream erotic couplings. God is watching over you from its new home, the internet.
Sorry, Nietzsche. It was a tough one, mate.
If someone had told me at age 8 that my desktop screen is where I'd find God, I'd have asked them to fuck right off. Why yes, I used the word "fuck" for the first time at age 8 during a game as a screen name, "fuck off". It wasn't my fault. I was a curious kid, who was big into reading and that was the first time I had encountered the word on a pre-loaded game. The same people responsible for letting me play aggressive, violent game at age 8, became utterly bewildered when they saw me play the game on screen with the said name.
"Do you know what it means?"
Thereby, adding another layer to destroying the past time that sexual intercourse could be, in addition to my school.
Anyway, the internet to me has always been representative of the vices and the excesses. Between these two concentric circles, we exist and consume. We engage with strangers, with lovers, with friends and then with algorithm. We navigate to make this space our own, we curate our choices with clicks and taps and feed data, almost as taxation to make this our own. To buy mileage online, to have our real-estate fixed at likes and dislikes and comments. The internet is our home.
To say caste, colour, creed, sex lines blur here wouldn't be a stretch of the truth. It wouldn't, until God arrived.
God arrived on the backfoot, like a sneaky little puppy who ran away from the pack. Almost too weak to survive by itself. Until it was discovered by a neighbourhood full of good samartians. The way people proliferate puppy pictures, God received the same treatment. On chain emails, through astrology and the divinity related discourse and then through viral forwards. It was unintentional but it happened. It happened because the internet real-estate was cheap and easy to buy. If you had a modem and a desktop and you possessed the wit of an Edenic Serpent, you could rule the internet. God, switched sides, and chose to enter through 0s and 1s. On screens.
We could now view this on the internet. On a screen. Outside of real bodied lives, from edified inside marbled statues to now in your bedroom. From live sculptures and calendar shots to now in your screen. God was truly great and now everywhere.
It wouldn't be incorrect to say, God made the internet great. Much like Trump's doing to the US.
It's been twenty long years since God's first appearance on a desktop on a web page infront of me and this morning as I opened my Instant Messaging app to check on what I'd missed in the last twelve hours, I found a particular image enchanting. It was a photograph of a home-God. An image shot from a home temple on an extended family member's instant story.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't have thought even more than a second about it. But, God. The sneaky creature. Showed up the first thing on my feed and in my thought and I truly thought of his real-estate value, its humble abode. God doesn't exist in live temples that people are fighting to build and killing others for. God is only around on the internet. God is in war cry chants that a religious sect uses to decimate the others; God is in thought when we want to show supremacy, an act of hegemony, when the warriors yell, "we are superior beings" because our God is the greatest God of all times.
God may have occupied the internet and grabbed land out of turn, but can it persist for long?
I was watching a competitive show recently where a losing team candidate made this observation, on how good times and bad times don't often last forever. They may last long but not forever,
I'd like to imagine, like Nietzsche (my near-namesake) that God's time is up. Maybe not today, and maybe not in my lifetime. However, there's only so much left to be taken over and so many of us to kill before those who believe in God or God itself can call it a victory.
