When I was a kid, I thought about God about as often as I thought about my prostate. In my early adolescent, agnostic days, God was a “cover all bases” option when I was puking my guts out and certain that I was going to die. He was sort of a distant on-call doctor.

At sixteen, in the midst of the dark dreary emotional wasteland of dysfunctional family relationships, I saw The Light^TM and began wearing Mormon-colored glasses. Then I rode the utterly unthrilling roller coaster of faith and doubt for the next couple of years (no way to get my money back), but when I connected with God, he was like an affectionate uncle–kind of a jolly Santa figure who showed up unexpectedly on the doorstep, left a present, a hug and some sincere compliments.

Like all good Mormon boys, I left for my mission at nineteen. Our missionary code took its inspiration from a mashup of 1950s American Puritan ethics and the Rule of St. Benedict.  I had a straight-arrow reputation and still had a hard time keeping all the rules.  This gave me plenty to feel guilty about, and I mentally flagellated myself for every imagined violation.  God made the rules and kept the whip and hairshirt handy.  And he was always around.

Fortunately, there’s nothing like missionary service to destroy a young Mormon convert’s budding idealism.  Seeds of cynicism firmly planted, I returned to college and the real world.  God was like a workalcoholic dad who traveled a lot.  First there were a occasional conferences and overnight trips.  In time, he had apartments and mistresses in every continent, and was gone for weeks at a time.  When he was around, he was drunk and angry or too involved to pay any attention.

This emotional deadbeat dad wasn’t working for me, so I started hanging out with Science God.  Science God was cool because he didn’t believe in that fundy shit that workaholic dad subscribed to.  And it was OK that he wasn’t around so much, because he was out there doing important stuff, like sparking off Big Bangs throughout the multiverse, and seeding planets with organic material.

Science God went away after a while.  He existed only in the gaps, and the gaps were getting fewer and fewer because I kept shoveling them with more science.  I went through some God as metaphor phases, but God made one last but short-lived comeback before expiring forever.

This vision of God was inspired by the World War II era philosopher-activist-mystic Simone Weil.  My version began with her suffering god and took him further.  This was a god, who in creating the world, relinquished all control over and most contact with it, and sat in pained silence while men raped women, women strangled their starving children, and children gleefully shot and killed other children.  He did this not because he didn’t care, but because although he cared, he could do nothing.  This was the fading, impotent God, the God in hell, the God who was nailed to the cross millenia ago and who was still writhing upon it.

Then this God, too, gasped his last breath, in silence.  He had no need to ask why he was forsaken, because there was no one to forsake him.  I didn’t mourn his passing.