Is This the Best God Could Do?

Is This the Best God Could Do? was born of a crisis of faith of the most cruel kind, the loss of my mother who lingered on the brink death for five weeks, and that is where the book begins. I was living the American dream, a happy wife and mother, and by most measures, charmed, and then she died, suffering terribly in spite of my ardent prayers. Like many in this position, I felt that God had let me down, but in the aftermath of my mourning, and the disquiet that subsequently overcame me, I began to realize that it was the Abrahamic version of God which had largely contributed to my idea of reality, and this was where my fears originated. This same fear has been successfully translated by the three monotheistic faiths, which to this day, insist we are ‘small’ when in actual fact, we are really quite ‘big’ beings — and then the World Trade Center collapsed — whereby it also dawned on me that the end of the world might well be upon us because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by the zealot believers in the Abrahamic religions, fear carried to an illogical extreme. This epiphany made me angry and my anger is what animated my book. Although the topic is deadly serious, I debunk the warped monotheism of the “Big Three” with humor and wit as well as reasonable, albeit edgy, argument. What follows the section in which I recount the loss of my mother is part dialogue with that big guy (picture Groucho Marx as interlocutor: “Hi, God of Christianity, Sarah here. I can appreciate your dilemma, I really can. But the next time one of your angels gets out of hand, please try to take care of the problem instead of making it one of ours…”), part personal history, and part reasoned deconstruction.