Divine Domain

Like anything, it had all started out as a bit of a laugh.

The idea was admittedly conceived over a heady mix of Young's Real Ale and cheap Ouzo, the latter having been brought back from a last-minute holiday to Greece four years ago. The bottle had festered, like a forgotten weapon of mass destruction in the cupboard under the stairs. Whenever Joe and his student chums went on a "Bender", which was pretty much almost every week, the Ouzo was threatened to be decanted as the ultimate weapon of alcoholic suicide.

The threat was carried out at 3.33 am on the last day of exams. Joe, a believer in the ritual significance of numbers, chose the time deliberately, as it was half the number of the Beast. What it lacked mathematically, it more than made up for in potency.

As is common in such undertakings, the discussion topics of the assembled collection of inebriated students revolved around sex, money (or lack of), politics, Big Brother, drugs, who was screwing who, and of course religion.

Religious discussion, even without the impetus of alcohol, is a volatile subject at the most mild-mannered of times, but fuelled by the fury and hate of a vengeful bottle of Greek oil- tanker cleaner, it blossomed in to a dawn-chorus debate of vehement proportions.

The central tenets to the theme were,

"If there is a God, where is s(he) ? Why does s(he) allow suffering in the world ? Why do good people die, yet evil people seem to live forever ? Why don't the evil people get punished ? "

To cut a long story short, the answers were unresolved. Amongst the assembled would-be graduates were some 40 years of experience in all manners of life and education, yet even the pool of their collective reasoning could not answer such fundamentally important questions. They were outraged, they were flummoxed. Students were renowned (amongst their own kind) for knowing the answers to all the world's social and economic problems. (Which is why they are content to flip hamburgers after graduation, having achieved a state of intellectual nirvana with nothing left to ponder upon).

Joe, a political and media studies graduate modelled himself on the 1960's definition of the "angry young man". He had carefully updated his image somewhat. Gone were the beatnik clothes of the original epoch, replaced by the designer-beatnik clothes of the modern generation. In contrast to the badly cut hair of the former savant of agitation, was a "David Beckham Special". Joe never really liked smoking, but affected the habit in social situations to add an air of danger. He always admired the way in which a smoker, when asked a deep or profound question, would take a long and meaningful drag on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes as he did so, exhaling a long, slow cloud of grey, wistful smoke before giving a thoughtful reply. Joe surmised that smoking gave you time to think.

Joe made a statement about religion that evening, which in hindsight sounds just as ludicrous now as it did then.

"If God really does exist, let's call his bluff and invite him down to Earth."

Mandy, a 20-something student berated Joe for assuming that God was a gendered entity. She was the she who put the "s" in s(he) earlier in the evening.

Joe was serious, even if the Ouzo wasn' t.

"Why don't we ask God to come down and prove he exists ? To take responsibility for the f****d up world he makes us live in ?", said Joe.

Mandy asked Joe how he was going to achieve inviting a fictional entity to the planet Earth.