First let me thank you in advance for considering my request, even if you do not decide that it is worthwhile.

You and we have a problem. When you made us in your image, you were obviously unaware of some of the problems that would result. While there was just you, then many things could not happen that do indeed happen now, and that cause you and us great distress. So my request is that you consider the possibility of self-improvement, especially in certain areas. I believe that if you give my request enough thought, you will see the value of my suggestion.

And I know that you are indeed receptive to our input into your decision-making, as when Moses helped you to deal with your anger toward your people such that you gave up the idea of just killing them all when out of quite justifiable fear they didn't want to go along with your plan.

So here is the problem. We look up to you. You are our model for identification. You are whom we look to for guidance as to how to become better people. You are whom we look to as our ideal. And yet, along with your obviously good personality characteristics, you have some characteristics that are, shall we say, not optimal for what is required for the good life for us humans.

And again, let me emphasize that you have wonderful traits, such as the wish to understand and the wish to be generous and the wish to be loving and non-discriminatory. So let us not forget all the good that is a part of you.

But let us also look at what might be considered somewhat non-optimal. Really, I believe we could put these non-optimal traits under two overlapping headings, namely, narcissism and hostile intolerance.

First, regarding narcissism, I am referring to your need to be admired and to have everything centered around you. Now I can understand some of this as your dealing with loneliness, but I would suggest that this need actually may turn many people off and thus have the opposite effect from what you really want. See, when one of us humans seems to be this way, others avoid that person. We tend to admire those who don't need admiration and who primarily devote themselves to making the world a better place for everyone, not just for themselves.

We remember you describing yourself as an angry and jealous god, and I think that is a good insight, which in turn is a good start in the project of self-improvement. That is how we try to improve ourselves. As you probably know, insight is an important part of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, our most technically oriented efforts at self-improvement.

You are like a parent for us. We, as parents, recognize that our children can't always be just thinking about us, and that a proper goal for us in our child rearing is that of helping our children to get even further in life than we have gotten. So we help our children to get prepared for life by getting beyond their devotion to us, to the point where they can think for themselves and even challenge us regarding the beliefs we have. Indeed, we have seen ourselves gradually improve as one generation goes beyond the previous one toward more optimal ways of being, such as the giving up of racism. Yes, it is hard for us parents to see our children becoming better than we are, but many of us also are increasingly recognizing the good in it and therefore welcoming it despite the discomfort.

Unfortunately, some parents, for whom it is of primary importance that their children be absolutely obedient, tend to become highly punitive and coercive, producing enormous self-esteem problems in their children at best and even extremely dangerous and destructive, chronic-anger-driven tendencies at worst. And indeed parents who have their lives centered around the need for their children's devotion may act in such a way as to make it impossible for those children to go beyond the parent-child relationship into mutually respectful intimate peer relationships, this problem sometimes being referred to as difficulty "leaving the nest." We have to be able to "let our children go."

I might note that I fully understand that when there was just you, you could not have known how non-optimal some of your traits were. Now, with the experience of us humans, made in your image, trying to live together, it is much easier to see the benefits of bringing about changes in some of these naturally occurring traits. So, hopefully, as you see us overcome our non-optimal tendencies, this can be a source of inspiration and incentive for your doing the same.

But let me move on to the second set of non-optimal traits, overlapping, as I said, with the first, namely, hostile intolerance.

The intolerance seems to be that of having a difference between ourselves and you with respect to values and beliefs. And the hostility is quite impressive.

Now to be sure I may be wrong in my understanding regarding what you do not tolerate, but I am just going according to what I have heard repeatedly from those that are most confident that they know. My understanding is that you require absolute belief regarding your existence, without any scientific evidence and even in the face of evidence to the contrary should there be such. And there are those who are trying hard to live up to this expectation, even to the extent of keeping themselves and their children uneducated about science (that has given us such valuable information and ability to make things better), simply because the explanatory models that science has arrived at do not include reference to you.

You know it is part of our creativity that we can imagine things far beyond what is possible for us. Thus, we arrive at ideas of "perfection." And because we can imagine and worship gods that are embodiments of various kinds of perfection, we have a history of having many different kinds of gods (and goddesses). But my understanding is that you have firmly stated that we are to worship no other gods than you. I simply cannot understand why you have that intolerance. It is like asking a child to admire no other parent other than oneself, no matter what that other parent might be like. This is part of the hostile intolerance that overlaps with narcissism, I think.

And you seem to be intolerant of those things about us that are part of our nature. Yes, there is much about our nature that needs to be changed to that which is more optimal, but an understanding parent is one who helps the child to bring about such change through benevolent and skilled interaction with the child, like that of an encouraging "coach." Unfortunately, just as we look at your intolerance of deviation from your wishes and see what we understand as your threat of extreme punishment for "disobedience," so do some of us engage in more and more punishment of our children for "disobedience," causing the above-mentioned low self esteem and hatred toward authority and the world in general, sometimes with quite tragic results. We are beginning to recognize that telling our children how naturally bad they are, and making them feel guilty by telling them how much we have sacrificed for them, is not the best way to promote their good self esteem and quality of life and their ability to be of benefit to others.

And your hostility, as I said, is quite impressive. It goes way beyond what we humans could ever do to each other, although we have tried.

You may notice that we humans increasingly are valuing those among us who advocate a benevolent, loving, and tolerant approach to our differences. We are increasingly valuing nonviolence. We even are experimenting with the idea of world government as an alternative to endless war. And we are perhaps, just a little bit, beginning to question the whole idea of punishment and revenge.

So you can imagine that it makes such efforts on our part difficult when you have advocated and engaged in torture, stoning to death, war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We are not helped to become more understanding when we have been instructed to kill our children if they become disrespectful and/or to kill individuals who happen to be born with sexual tendencies opposite to their gender. And punishing someone's progeny out of revenge for disobedience is something that most of us now feel is unreasonable. And how does it look to us for you to have the stated plan to torture some of us for all eternity, simply because we could not bring ourselves to believe things that our lifetime of experience has made it impossible to believe.

You know, your son seemed to be advocating benevolence, tolerance, and inclusiveness. Of course whatever he was advocating is a little hard to distinguish from the beliefs of the others of that time, because all we have is a mixture of his message and their faulty understanding of it, during a time when people automatically assumed that hostility, avoidance, conflict, revenge, punishment, torture, war, and genocide were necessary components of life. But he seemed to feel that we were not meeting our full potential regarding how we can treat each other and how we can have a better life together, and some of us indeed are advocating a non-hostile, non-vengeful, non-punitive way of life. So it would really be great if you could let us know that you also have changed in this direction. It would give us encouragement and incentive, and would allow us to feel proud to be your creation.

Maybe you are really different from the way we understand you to be. Maybe we are just uneducated. Maybe we have a lot to learn. And maybe you simply have no way of clueing us in that you have already changed, and/or that you have never been the way we have imagined you to be.

So my request that you work on changing aspects of your personality may be a result of total misunderstanding on my part. If so, I hope and assume that you will take my request for what it is, an effort to make the world a better place, for everyone, now and in the future. And by everyone, I mean to include You.

With all due respect,

Bill Van Fleet

MY MESSAGE TO JESUS ON HIS FACEBOOK WALL

Jesus,

It is sad to have to report that as hard as you tried to convey to others your six commandments to make the world a better place, what you said got filtered through the way we naturally think, such that even those presumably following your way think nothing about going against those commandments. I am appreciative of all you did for us, and intend to do my part to carry on your work. I call the current version of your work "Humanianity."

Your six commandments shine through our religious literature, but one really has to read between the lines. I believe I am right in stating those commandments as follows:

Be non-hostile.

Be non-vengeful.

Be non-punitive.

Be generous.

Be rational.

Be understanding.