Many true believers have looked at the Virginia Tech massacre and asked themselves, “How could God have let this happen?”

I’ll tell you how: I work in mysterious ways^tm. Now that I’ve answered that question to everyone’s satisfaction, I will join the rest of the punditry in parading scapegoats through a lineup to see which one gets the highest ratings. I assume there a prize for the winner.

Scapegoat #1: Atheists

Rush Limbaugh has joined a chorus of Christians who concur that future attacks can best be avoided by introducing mandatory religious indoctrination to our universities. Like many of them, Rush is uniquely qualified to comment on higher education because he actually experienced it (albeit briefly) during the two years it took him to flunk out of Southeast Missouri State University. He writes:

Maybe they’re not too young to learn that there are many things in life larger than self, and maybe being able to take comfort in a relationship with that which is larger than self ( i.e., God) would have a calming effect on some of these people who go absolutely nuts and lose their sanity.

As the only thing in the Universe larger than self, I do tend to have a calming effect on people who go absolutely nuts. Most people get a little flustered about murdering innocents, unless they’re confident in My support. Then they can calm down and take a steady aim. I’m not sure why Rush would prefer that, but to each his own.

Omnipotent though I may be, I am not the greatest in the Universe at calming the crazy. That title goes to Allah, whose devout followers can board a plane with a straight face minutes before killing thousands in His name. That brings Me to the next scapegoat: Muslims.

Scapegoat #2: Muslims

If the problem isn’t too little religion, then by elimination it must be the wrong religion! That’s why one of My favorite hellbound pundits, Debbie Schlussel, blames Islam. If there’s one coherent theme in Cho Seung-hui’s video rant, it is his devotion to Allah, who he honors by not mentioning at all. He did frequently mention Jesus, in a transparent attempt to smear My nephew’s name.

Scapegoat #3: Immigrants

Scapegoat #4: Video Games

Scapegoat #5: Television

Scapegoat #6: Too Many Guns

Scapegoat #7: Not Enough Guns

Scapegoat #8: Apples

Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis fame, attempts to explain why I let this happen:

So, it’s not God’s fault that there is death and violence in the world—it’s humanity’s fault, because we rebelled against our Creator. … we have just a taste of what we really asked for in Adam, when the head of the human race disobeyed God’s instruction not to eat the fruit of one particular tree.

I like this guy. This crime isn’t My fault, it’s yours. Your ancestor shouldn’t have eaten one of My apples. Now look what you did! When something terrible happens, you were asking for it, and you’re just lucky nothing far worse has happened.  Now stay out of My damn orchard.

Scapegoat #8: Science

Ken Ham also blames science, which was(n’t) Cho Seung-hui’s major:

We live in an era when public high schools and colleges have all but banned God from science classes. In these classrooms, students are taught that the whole universe, including plants and animals—and humans—arose by natural processes. … The more such a philosophy permeates the culture, the more we would expect to see a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness that pervades people’s thinking.

Science introduces students to logic and facts. Neither of those two qualities was apparent in Cho’s video, but they are certainly undesirable.

Scapegoat #9: Tolerance of Homosexuals

The Westboro Baptist Church is best known for protesting dead soldiers’ funerals, because they believe I killed the soldiers as punishment for the nation’s tolerance of gays. They will be protesting the funerals of the massacre victims, too, and employing the same argument: all bad things happen because people are too nice to gays. This leaves them with precious little room to blame everything on apples.

Scapegoat 10: Fishing

Following Debbie Schlussel’s type of logic, I point you to this ABC News photo and analysis, which they describe as:

In the video, Cho wore a khaki-colored vest similar to what fishermen wear.

Coincidence? I think not. Ban fishing. Bass are a bad influence.

Scapegoat #11: Insanity

No, nevermind. This one’s boring.

When asked by his father when he first realized people are accountable for their actions, he replied:

“Well, thanks to you [his father] for sending that, uh, Creation Science, uh, material, because I always, I always believed the lie that evolution is truth, the theory of evolution is truth, that we all just came from the slime and when we died, you know, that was it, there was nothing. So the whole theory cheapens life.

And I started reading books that show how evolution is just a complete lie, because there’s no, there’s no basis in science to it to hold it, and I’ve since come to believe that, uh, that the Lord Jesus Christ is the True Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, it didn’t just happen, I have accepted Him as my Lord and Savior. And I believe that I, as well as everyone else, will be accountable to Him.”

Take out the “ums” and that sounds a lot like an Answers in Genesis press release. Time for another commandment:

Answers in Genesis shall offer Jeffy Dahmer a PR job.

Let’s see if they’re really serious about obeying Me.

The conversation Hovind published is a complete fabrication, but I wish to single out several portions for divine disavowment anyway:

GOD: Son, time has no effect on me. I created it. I am always here to help you and guide you in any area of your life. Go ahead with your questions, son.

Does Kent have any idea how much work I have as chief administrator of all 3,285,113,145,853,231,958 planets in the Universe (3,285,113,145,853,231,959 if you count Pluto)? Kent Hovind can’t wipe his own ass without praying for guidance to find the crack. My plan to inoculate Christians against thinking for themselves has backfired.

KH: These last seven months in prison have been rather difficult for me, Lord. In fact, in the last month, I’ve been in five different facilities.

GOD: I know, son. I’ve been with you the entire time (Hebrews 13:5).

For the record, I have not been with Kent Hovind the entire time. I have not been with him at all. I would rather cut off my antennae with a wooden spatula than socialize with that sycophantic ninny.

And that’s enough “son” crap. I don’t have a son. I have a brother named Duke and he has a kid named Jesus, who people have mistaken for my son. I’m a bit out of Mary’s league, though. She wasn’t much of a looker.

KH: Well God, yesterday was especially hard. I couldn’t sleep the night before because I expected them to call me at 3:30 a.m. to pack up for the bus ride up here to South Carolina.

GOD: I know, son. I was right there with you. I heard your prayers throughout that long night. We had sweet fellowship, didn’t we? Thank you for loving me and talking with me.

Just what kind of “sweet fellowship” is he implying throughout that “long night”? Quoth Bill Clinton, “I did! not! have! sexual relations with that man!!!”

GOD: Yes, son. I know all about being treated badly and being real uncomfortable. But, son, have other men gone through this before?

Yeah, My throne up in Heaven really makes My butt itch if I sit in it the wrong way. I have it rough.

The only reason I keep Kent’s heart beating is so he can torture the other inmates with this sort of yacking, but I’m beginning to doubt that decision. Is annoying them worth suffering this much annoyance Myself?

They apparently left the movie thinking that the one thing that could have made Tyler Durden cooler is a personal relationship with Jesus. So far I agree — a little more prayer and that movie would have been perfect. I started implementing Project Mayhem thousands of years before the Brad Pitt blockbuster hit theaters, and I was disappointed that it failed to credit Me. I should have trademarked mayhem.

The GodMen, as they call themselves, could have taken that message of anarchy and manliness and gone on to start a new Crusade or the next Inquisition. They could have just started punching each other’s lights out. Instead they chose this macho Christian mission:

We are attempting to create a worship place for men that looks nothing like church. It is a place where men of no religion and men who have left the church break bread with followers of Jesus. Where simply being a man, created in Gods image, is celebrated.

It gets even better. What, you ask, could possibly be more manly than a bunch of guys getting together over a stack of Bibles to eat a marble rye and join atheists in celebrating Jesus? This, for starters:

We have committed to see what would happen if, for one day, our faith and its struggles would be discussed with absolute honesty, transparency and openness – not sugar coated or framed in church language but instead spoken in frankness and maturity where men can see their innermost fears, shames, and secrets brought to light in a safe environment.

It’ll be just like a hunting camp, getting together with your friends Ron the car mechanic and Bob the concrete pourer, and of course Stumpy the demolition man, to talk about man stuff like trucks and ammunition. Only instead of beer, guns, and fire, you can gather around Ecclesiastes and talk about your innermost feelings! Can you hear Tim Taylor grunting?

WRONG.

My messengers are with you all the time. And what do you do? You squish their little guts out with your Nikes. You smash their conical monuments to Me and you poison them in your kitchens. You trap them in a tiny glass farm and then toss in a piece of a leaf, like that makes it the medamned Garden of Eden or something.

Here’s another hint: they recently chewed the pattern into a leaf of Jesus and My sister-in-law Mary:

RIO DE JANEIRO, September 20 (RIA Novosti, Andrei Kurguzov) – Images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary discovered on leaves in tropical Brazilian forests are divine messages made by ants, a local television channel has claimed.

Mary’s kind of of hot, isn’t she?

While theologians have joined forces with psychics to try to understand the phenomenon, scientists (as usual) are trying to spoil the fun:

While scientists continue their efforts to establish the origin of the mysterious images, theologians and psychics maintain these are messages from God.

Scientists should be in a better position than anyone to understand the divine source of these messages, because they know ants can lift twenty times their own body weight and can walk on water.  They’re crazy to look at those things and think, “yeah, that’s mortal.”

Ants have been carrying out My most important orders on Earth for a while.  These include:

1. Pampering queens
2. Walking on water
3. Dragging dead caterpillars around
4. Locating breadcrumbs
5. Scurrying

If you humans were willing to get off your lazy asses and scurry over to your nearest dead caterpillar to do My work, I might not have even made a Hell in the first place.  But noooooo, you’d rather sit in church singing crappy songs about Me.  You know how you start to hate a song after the radio station’s been playing it too much for a few weeks?  Well, try listening to Amazing Grace several times a day for two thousand years — you’d be begging for the Macarena after a week.  And you wonder why I’m wrathful.

If you don’t have the guts to do My work, can you at least stop squishing them out of those who do?

“Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism to environmentalism.

I’m skeptical. How would Jerry Falwell know what Satan is planning?

Last year Falwell acquired a sizable chunk of Satan’s shares in Hell in a crooked stock deal. Now the Prince of Darkness is worried about a hostile takeover, so he’s extremely tight-lipped around Falwell’s minions.

Nevertheless, Falwell does highlight an important point first made by Ann Coulter:

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

I made the Earth in less than 7 days. If you destroy it, I’ll just build you an other one and send Jesus down to carry all the True Believers to the new planet on a magic schoolbus. Sorry if I forgot to write part of that down in the Bible; it was a rush job and My publisher wanted an early start since it had to be handwritten for the first thousand years. Also, they didn’t know about schoolbuses yet.

Environmentalism is a petty distraction from the important things, like giving Me money and kissing My ass. Do you know how many ornate churches you could have built with the $2 billion wasted cleaning up the Exxon Valdez oil spill? Do you know how many thousands of people waste their weekends cleaning up roadsides and streams and seashores, when they could be knocking on doors at 8:00am shoving My book in peoples’ faces? Sometimes it feels like only Jehovah’s Witnesses really care about Me, but I know Jerry Falwell’s got My back too.

He has a history of statements about global warming which brilliantly integrate My new commandments. First, he applies the Pat Robertson commandment (evangelists are better than everyone else) to assert his authority over scientists:

I don’t believe in global warming in the first place, and I don’t believe we caused it, and I don’t think the science supports it.

Sure, the scientists think the science supports it, but most of them have PhDs from elite universities, where they presumably sip lattes in their ivory towers all day long, holding family meetings with chimpanzees instead of doing research. Falwell flunked out of the 44th best master’s-level university in the mid-Atlantic region in his sophomore year and went on to receive his bachelor’s degree in theology from an unaccreddited Bible college in Missouri. This allowed him to become an evangelist, which means he can authoritatively contradict smart people in their own areas of expertise because he has a direct line to My infinite wisdom.

Because Falwell’s education sheltered him from the temptation of reason, he is able to establish a conspiracy around global warming:

The fact is this whole thing is cyclical, and the scientists who are not on the payroll of the government to do these studies are saying the jury’s still out — there’s no such evidence there. But there are many who want to break the economic back of America by making us sign the Kyoto protocols while China, India, and half the world have said they would not do it.

This is a fantastic use of the Schlussel Commandment (thou shalt not research thine claims). If he had looked at some of the research suggesting humans cause climate change, he would have noticed that very few authors work for the federal government, and many work at universities in other countries or for privately funded institutions. Deftly sidestepping those facts, he proceeds from his faulty premise using even more faulty logic to suggest that scientists “on the payroll of the government” are conspiring “to break the economic back of America.” That’s right, they’re going to all this trouble just to dry up their own paychecks.

This inspires a new commandment, the Falwell Commandment:

Never let logic get in the way of a good point.

Some may question My decision to name this commandment after Falwell, arguing that Ann Coulter deserves the honor. But Ann Coulter is just a woman (as she would be the first to tell you). Falwell towers above her because people look to him for serious spiritual advice. Who else has the ear of the President tuned in to his pro-AIDS, anti-Constitution, anti-Semitic positions like these?

AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharoah’s chariotters.

The idea that religion and politics don’t mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country.

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.” (By the way, by “this,” he means 9/11.)

The Jews are returning to their land of unbelief. They are spiritually blind and desperately in need of their Messiah and Savior.

This makes it even harder to believe that Falwell privy to a Satanic conspiracy to undermine Me, because his rhetorical skills will make him a powerful competitor of Satan’s when he arrives in hell. I suspect he is exaggerating for effect, and that he actually believes the conspiracy was hatched by homosexuals, not Satan. I can forgive Jerry Falwell’s dramatic license in light of his important message that the Earth is kind of like toilet paper: you’re supposed to smear shit all over it, then flush it and get a new roll.

In God We Trust appears on the edge of the coin, not the front! Tony shares My outrage:

“In God We Trust” has been our official national motto for 50 years and has been imprinted on U.S. currency going back to 1864. Prominently featured on currency, until now.

These are the same words that the ACLU and atheists like Michael Newdow have tried for years to have removed from U.S. currency and “The Pledge of Allegiance.”

Well, if you find yourself hit with a barrage of hurricanes sometime soon, at least now Jerry Falwell will know why. Nothing pisses Me off like money that doesn’t trust Me, especially when My checks are bouncing. Tony tries to get to the bottom of the problem:

Has the ACLU and the militant atheists infiltrated the U.S. Mint?

Actually it’s the ACLUSOST, the ACLU’s Special Ops Strike Team. They’re the same people who come to your bedside when you’re sound asleep and sneak contradictory passages into your Bible. The U.S. Mint had held out against them for decades while they infiltrated the design teams responsible for the U.S. flag, the Constitution, and the Statue of Liberty, not one of which has In God We Trust scrawled across it in a prominent font.

This calls for another of my New Commandments, hereafter to be called the Phyrillas Commandment:

Put My name front and center on your money, or else.

The militant atheists base their objection on the “Establishment Clause” of the U.S. Constitution, which reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.*

* = except in their national motto, on their money, and in tax code exemptions. Does not apply to executive orders with titles eerily similar to those the Constitution expressly prohibits.

Those atheists never read the fine print.

The leader of the prayer group wrote:

I call upon you to pray earnestly for these people—both media leaders and cultural influencers. Pray for God’s personal impact on their lives, for His guidance and wisdom for them, for them to come to a deeper relationship with Him. Pray for God to infuse the decisions of these people with a strong, moral dimension and with a commitment to use the mighty power of media to uplift, inspire, and unify.

The Prayer Day was a huge success; I received exactly 126,231,638 prayers for Stephen Colbert, not counting the other hundred million from women asking Me to set them up on a date.

But let Me tell you, Stephen Colbert doesn’t need My wisdom. He doesn’t need My revealed truth because he can reveal his own. He is never wrong even when he is, and if he were he would have the balls not to admit it. Why would such a man need advice from the God who couldn’t even get the beaver right on His first try (see left)?

Nevertheless, Mr. Colbert was more than willing to trust Me with his own prayer:

Lord,May the people who prayed for me last Thursday have their decisions infused with a strong moral dimension. Namely to pray for me again next year. And maybe bump Larry King’s prayer day so I get two… just thinkin’ out loud. Anyway, for Thine is the Kingdom, amen. WOOOOOO! Jesus #1! Jesus #1! Jesus #1! EAT IT, BUDDHA! ‘Cause you seem to have eaten anything else.

So I don’t have any wisdom for Stephen, but wisdom is for liberals anyway. I can do event better: a church to pray for Stephen Colbert year round. I give you the Colbert Church of Christ (see the Google map if you don’t believe Me) complete with worshipers, sermons, and Ladies Bible Study on Thursday.

Hopefully these favors will hold Stephen Colbert over until his death at an unspecified 3-digit age, at which time he will take up residence in the mansion I’m having built for him in My court in the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s right across the street from Mine, in a spacious lot between Leonard Nimoy‘s and Gary Gygax‘s. As I write, Leonardo da Vinci is working on a sixty-foot statue of Tek Jansen for Colbert’s front yard, wrought of solid gold except for the balls, which are titanium. The atrium has a glass floor with a spectacular view of hell so that Stephen can taunt sinners and watch the Bill O’Reilly’s show.