AFTERTHOUGHT
Lo He comes
JOHN WELLS
Did God come from Outer Space? If, as many journalists and progressive thinkers believe, the answer is 'yes', where did He go to next? Will He be Coming Again, in the manner envisaged by biblical prophets of yore, to make a soft landing and to judge both the quick and the dead? These are just a few of the truly fascinating questions posed in a new book published today, entitled God Blasts OA and written by the Reverend Ken Purvis (17),' lead singer of the controversial Mammon of Unrighteousness group, whose act was recently banned from Southwark Cathe- dral
According to the Rev Purvis, God prob- ably landed on the planet in the area of Khatmandu 'during the early years of the prehistoric epoch', bringing with Him the materials necessary to initiate the evolution- ary process. 'He was almost certainly a kind of Space Robinson Crusoe, the sole survivor of a Spaceship Wreck who spotted the desert planet while He was drifting out there someplace and thought He'd land here for a bit until He could mend His module. He called the planet Eden because it wouldn't have had a name then, and I ex- pect He got the idea of a garden from how all the gear He'd brought with Him in the way of amoebas and that started shooting iv, and growing in the terrestrial environ- ment.'
In this interpretation, of course, it seems highly unlikely that God actually created 'the heaven and the earth', but the Rev Purvis does not entirely rule it out. 'As I shall demonstrate, God is very elderly, even if not literally eternal: who knows, the Big Bang could have been caused by His Spaceship blowing up. He could have been drifting about for all the time it took for the rocks to cool down and that before He got here. We just don't know. Research can go so far and no further.' The Rev Purvis has given over three weeks of his life to research for the present book, much of that time devoted to a study of rare early num- bers of Sci-Fi Monthly, Planet of Lust, and WUAAARGH! I!
`Time seems to have passed, and God could have done one of a couple of things.
Either He mended His module and did a burn back to Outer Space, or He liked it so much he fixed Himself up down here and stayed where He was. What's obvious is that He wasn't doing much during the first few million years of evolution. I tend myself to the theory first postulated by H.
Wasserman Associates in an early episode of Tarzan and the Heirs of Uranus, which is that He got lift-off, and went back to where He came from in the first place. This must have been some very groovy way-out planet where they already had Spaceships and the materials like I said for initiating the evolutionary process. In the view of Harry Katz, who holds the world copy- right of Bride of the Martian Vampire, this planet itself would have been got going in the first place by another Spaceman whom he designates as Deutero-God or God the Grandfather, but personally I find that a bit confusing.
'What's important anyway is that God had this very bad hang-up about His Own planet: sometimes He felt it was over- crowded and polluted and over-sophisti- cated, in which case He thought of it as Hell, and sometimes He liked the flush toilets and the modern medicine and the Space Travel, and then He imagined it was Heaven. Whatever He thought He had this great struggle with Himself anyway and finally opted to come back to Earth and settle down. He may have brought a Friend —evidence would seem to suggest that He did—but it was probably only a Module Driver or someone like that because very soon God got bored out of His mind and started looking elsewhere. By this time evolution was all go, and when God saw what He had done He thought it was great. And that's when He had this idea of grab- bing a pair of apes and mutating them in- to human beings so He'd have a bit of company.
'Well, everything was lovely for a bit, and God used to meet them in the Garden, as He called it, in the evenings and talk about this and that. But one night His Friend found out and threw a terrible scene and let off at Adam and Eve with a ray gun—what they called a "flaming sword"—and then bundled God back into His module and did a blast-off. And ever since then, you see, Man has had this great hankering to see God again.' The Rev Pur- vis does not, however, believe that this was God's last appearance on the planet. 'Whether it was Him and His Friend, "the Angel", scrapping over the controls or what we don't know, but throughout the early biblical period God seems to have been hovering about in His module at quite a low altitude and trying to shout for help.
'He made at least one crash-landing, described in the Bible as the burning bush, but every time He tried to get out of the
.nodule. His Friend did another blast-off and that gave you the Pillar of Smoke by Day and the Pillar of Fire by Night. It', fascinating when you think about it' The Rev Purvis does not rule out the possibility of a Second Coming, but thinks it ma% Well be a considerable anti-climax after prophetic descriptions in the Bible. lesu, was certainly in touch with the module by ESP', he says, 'because we know 11 was parked in orbit at the time he wa, born, but he got everything garbled up owing to his being so subjective in his inter- pretations and not knowing about Space. The Rev Purvis himself, however, has re- cently been accused of heresy by Canon E. B. Hemingway (16), drummer of the group, who believes the known universe to be part of the atomic structure of one of God's blood-vessels, and by Father Tim Winnefreth, SJ (12), bass-guitar, who see, life on this planet as a 'broiler-farm' experi- ment conducted from outside time by God who in real life is a sadistic scientist. 'Of course the main weakness in the Rev Purvis's theory as postulated', he told me,
that he's a raving loonie.'
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