There is still time, they say, for me to CRY MIGHTILY UNTO THE LORD, though I won’t be making use of the opportunity, ultimately because I would hate to ’spend eternity’ singing the praises of a deranged and tyrannical God. A God who create the infinite expanse of Cosmos merely to terrorize one unfortunate hominid species into ‘loving’ Him – through, if all else has fails, one last threat of five months of global torture.

Fear of God may indeed be the beginning of wisdom, but fear of senseless brutality is the beginning, rather, of servile derangement. Any God whose aim is to cultivate such illness deserves the (so to speak) undying enmity of his creation. While this enmity may prove both mortal and impotent, we might take consolation in knowing that Heaven will be chock full of frightened, superstitious, sycophants. It’s nice to know that however great the disparity of power between God and his creations, not even He can escape reaping what he sows.

Herein, to my mind, lies a lesson of real value: if even God is subject to the limits of cultivation, then certainly so are all of us, high and low.

So I believe in Judgment Day and feel the usual ambivalence of terror and longing at the prospect. The subtle moral arc of the Universe is not a smooth transition but a punctuating disequilibrium. As with any complex, recursively interconnected, system, apparent stability belies an inherent capacity for sudden, catastrophic, change. ‘Injustice’ – which is something other than violation of the letters of law – is exactly that sort of action that accumulates the energy of such change; just as, for example, the patterns of derivative fraud pushed the economic system inevitably toward collapse.

The Lord God shall not be mocked, the Books say; but this has nothing to do with some divine obsession with cultic titles and the socio-sexual mores of a particular people. It’s just a simple fact that we are all – Torturer in Chief included – subject to the laws of genesis. We shall reap as we sow, regardless of who we are or what lies we flatter ourselves with.

So, one way or another, Judgment Day is coming – as indeed it arrives every day in a million different forms. But rather than CRYING MIGHTILY UNTO THE LORD for a berth on his salvational spaceship, I choose to honor the words of the Preacher at Arrakeen, who described the apocalyptic imperative roughly as follows:

The Fremen must return to their original genius at forming human communities.