(Scene: A small, smoke filled back room in a little pub in Hackensack, New Jersey, filled with too much talk.)

"To Order! To Order!" Chairman Angersol shouted above the seething sea of chaos that was...the Atheist's Club.

"To hell with ORDER!" spake Will Tu Power Zarathinski.

"Yeah, let's only allow for an instant of synchroneous silence if its number comes up in the Monte Carlo games," seconded Jack Monad.

"Shut up, I said, GOD dammit!"

Everyone did, and stared at Angersol with expressions of malevolence and wonder on their faces.

Angersol continued, "Soooo, there is something to be said for God after all. He's obviously claimed your attention!" (General laughter bumbled around the room, blindly.)

Then Angersol announced, "As we agreed last week, tonight is 'problem of evil' night..."

"And my problem, night after night, is that I can't get enough of it" Mark E. Desade yodled.

"Really, let's get serious, men. We've got a job to do. God is an intolerable brute, and this is his funeral, so let's get to burying him!" Whereupon, Angersol clicked his mug with his neighbors', downed it, and earnestly began "God, you see, cannot be both God and All Powerful, or everything would be all powerfully good. But obviously it's not!"

It's snot! It's snot!" the club repeated seriously for a full half minute till and eruption of suppressed laughter caused beer to suddenly squirt out of a few members nostrils, like they were the models for some obscene Greek fountains.

It was then that a peculiar sound summoned the group's sobriety. It was a loud "PSSSSST." First, everyone thought only to stare at the person seated beside themselves. But the origin of the sound remained elusive. "PSSSST." They stared down the hall leading to their meeting room; a few opened windows and peered out. "PSSST. PSSST, PSSST." It was then that everyone motioned toward Angersol's left hand pocket, for that was where the sound was unmistakably emanating from.

"Uh?" Angersol said, as he slowly reached down into his left hand pocket and withdrew its contents, setting them on the table before the club: a Gideon's New Testament with all the biblical contradictions underlined (by Angersol), a sweaty handerkerchief, and a matchbox. "PSSSSSSSSST," went the matchbook, and everyone stood up in their seats, some standing upon them, to gain a better view. With both hands steadied to keep them from trembling, Angersol opened the matchbox. He looked in and tipped it over. A few matches fell out, nothing more. It was empty. Everyone could see it was empty. Air possessed all the space within that miniscule matchbox. Then the emptiness within that little matchbox... spoke. "You were expecting maybe a pillar of fire? It's me, God. Lord, Creator of the Universe. All Creation, thanking me, breaks bread, drinks wine, and toasts J.C."

"Oh, good joke, Angersol. Where's the micro-speakers?" asked Ripley B. Leavitt Knott.

Angersol didn't reply.

Others pressed him for an explanation.

Angersol stood firm.

The matchbox answered, "Look guys, a few of you were blitzed a moment ago. Now you're sober. Go ahead, walk a few straight lines, touch your noses. I sobered you up, so you could ask questions and hear me reply. This is a golden opportunity I'm granting you boys. You may believe anything you want about who or what's talking to you. That's not the point. I don't need your belief, I'm God. I just want a little of your attention."

At this point Angersol, the matchbox's owner, and presumably the man who knew the most about what the hell was happening, sat calmly down. Everyone could sense hiscerebral caverns filling with blood, swelling to engage the matchbox in intellectual combat. Everyone else politely refrained further comment, allowing the chairman first crack at the attack.

"My dear little deluded matchbox, or whomever is on the receiving end of this micro-circuit, I have a question to which I unhesitatingly demand an answer. It is the question raised this evening, the gravest question of them all, and the one which shall bury you. What about evil, my friend? Whence comes it? And, Why?"

"Evil? Whew. I thought you were going to ask me a toughie, like, how I created something out of 'nothing,' about which I'm sure I'd never be able to explain. Not in understandable terms, anyway.

"Well, 'evil' is sort of like the side of me that likes to take risks. Like Zarathinski's always saying, man's glory is in seeking to overcome himself, to walk the tightrope between himself and the overman. But that's part of my glory too! To seek to outdo, or overdo myself! It was a risk, it was a challenge, but I eventually put so much of myself into my work that I came up with little co-creators. Don't you guys enjoy taking risks? The vigor of mountainclimbing, car racing, fastball pitching, football tackling: conducting experiments. And don't forget all the games you enjoy playing, which purposely involve more risks than real life is apt to contain!

"If I was to remove all the challenge, risk and responsibility from your lives, you would be driven crazy by irresponsibility. Like if I changed all knives to rubber as soon as an assassin flung one. Or reversed the law of gravity just because an individual was about to take a fall? Or made flying fists sail harmlessly through the body of each person being socked? And while we're on the subject of fantasies, how about if I supplied you with endless food, drink, all gourmet, and magnified your sexual enjoyment one hundred fold? Would you like that too? Or would you become omnibored? Untalking, irresponsible slaves to perpetual pleasure? By the way, I tried such a plan out once with the angels, and not everyone found such a 'Utopia' to their liking. So, guys, why not admit I'm right? Captain Kirk, going someplace boldly, and risking all, even just in movies, is more appealing. I know it, and you know it."

"Yes, but what about the crucifixion?" Mark E. Desade gloated aloud, "Why not admit that you're into S & M. You love it!"

"I'm no masochist, Desade. I shared the cosmos' pain that it might be fully born and alive. For the price of responsibility and self knowledge happens to be pain. This is not to say that all pain will automatically bring one to a greater self knowledge, as you imply. It won't. However, the cosmos is still such a part of me that I like with its painful growth as a whole, from Jesus' suffering on the cross to the pain of every sparrow that falls."

"Yet the sparrow still falls!" Mark Twayne shouted, standing on a chair in the rear of the room.

"Yes, it does, Mark, and you'll understand more about why, after you've fallen. Till then, this is a purposely risky cosmos."

Mark, exulting in his precarious perch began to hop up and down upon his seat, "O.K., so this cosmos isn't hell, but we're not living in heaven either."

"I never said you were, Mark. For all you know a comet could collide with this planet and wipe out life at any time. That would not be the most satisfying way to end our friendly evening together, but you must admit, death is not a dull moment. Likewise, one reason life is thrilling is that it ends in unexpected ways."

Mark lost his balance and landed on the table before him nose first. He wanted to say "God dammit!" but was so caught up in the unexpected nature of the fall itself that he calmly and quizzically accepted the whole thing, even the pain.

"But what about pain?" Angersol demanded. "Do we really need it in every case? You seemed to say 'no' to that question a little while ago. Obviously a deformed infant suffers to no purpose. Yet you are the ultimate creator of such suffering! That is, if you are the 'God' to whom I am speaking."

"I agree with you, Angersol, that was the hardest part of deciding to create this cosmos. But, if I'd created an easy, irresponsible one, would you have given a damn about each other or any 'infant' at all? You'd be mute slaves of irresponsibility with no need to responsibly interract, since I'd be taking care of everything for you.

"Please keep in mind that I'm not a Pantheist. I do not teach that the world ought to be full of horrors, since so it is. That view is often embraced by tender-hearted people to spare themselves the distress of admitting that anything is horrible after all."

"Rather, I struggled within myself over whether or not to create this cosmos, and decided that it would be irresponsible of me to create a lesser one. Therefore, I risked putting my all into it.

"All I ask in return is that you fight with me, my little co-creators. For in learning how to overcome is a lesson greater than the pain, and greater than the evil implied in all the risks. If you do not try to see beyond the evil but succumb to it, then you lose your humanity, disgrace yourselves, and I die an evil ogre in your eyes. But whenever you overcome evil and pain, you shine brightly in the eyes of both man and God."

"Yes, but what real risk did you take? That's something you haven't made completely clear." Angersol inquired.

"I live in and through you, as long as you never accept the 'necessity' of evil, as long as you continue to ask what the 'problem' of evil is. For I live in the asking, the highest desire for good that is found in your heart."

A mighty wind blew the matchbox shut, and with the sound of a match being struck, tiny flames began dancing upon the heads of all those present.

"Remember , I am not far. In me you live, move, and have your being, and... vis versa."

The next day, Ripley B. Leavitt Knott examined the six-sided paper object in his laboratory with the aid of all the scientific instruments at his disposal. After a few hours he grew discouraged and decided to slice the box up into pieces only several microns thick, and gaze at them beneath an electron microscope. After a few weeks he totalled the exact number of atoms which had previously composed the empty box. But his thorough examination left no final remains of anything for which he'd been searching.

THE END

Previous... Is God Necessary?

Continued... Atoms and Materialism