God of the Ants

When I was a child I had an ant farm, one of those plastic frames with clear sides filled with sand. You could watch the ants digging and doing their ant thing. I diligently fed them sugar and water. I watched them build their tunnels, never interfering with their daily goings on. They had the ant version of Free Will and manna from heaven.

Had these ants possessed reasoning ability, they would have probably worshipped me as their source of life, their God. Certainly my benevolence and omnipotence would be evident. I was the life giver.

What these ants were totally unaware of is that this same god that gave them sustenance was also a wrathful god. I used to bait wild ant hills with sugar, wait for the colony to swarm, then encircle and crisscross the mass of wild ants with highly flammable model airplane glue and set it on fire. There was no escape. There were never any survivors. It was utter ant genocide. Not even the virgin female ant was taken captive. Clearly if these ants could think it would have been perceived as the act of an angry vengeful god wreaking divine punishment for some inexplicable ant sin.

Eventually I became bored with the ant farm. They were flushed down the toilet, or dispersed into exile in the wilderness, I can't recall which. I guess it was the ant version of the Diaspora, The Great Flood, or maybe the Rapture.

So, was I a good benevolent god, or a punishing wrathful god? I guess to these two disparate groups of ants I was both. I could giveith and taketh away. I worked in strange and mysterious ways. My “Plan” for them was not for them to know, it was something only I could understand.

Theists are much like ants. They credit their unseen imaginary God for their lives, their daily bread, and their fortune. They accept His wrath for their sins in the form of disease, and disasters. They both praise its benevolence and fear its potential for anger and punishment. That they can do this is the result of having evolved a sophisticated nervous system and an imagination far beyond those of primitive insects. But, to the ant’s credit they would if they could, at least have been worshipping an observable carbon based life form.

Advantage: Ants.