Upon my death, if I am indeed to stand at the Pearly Gates and seek entrance to Heaven, and if I am required to give account at the judgment seat for the totality of my life, I’ve decided to arrive prepared. I’m compiling a list of honest, simple, legitimate questions for God. He has questions. I have questions.

• If you made Eve from Adam’s rib, why do men and women still have 12 pairs of ribs each?

• Why did you allow a single act in the Garden of Eden to contaminate (and create a sin nature) in billions who weren’t even born yet? That’s like allowing a single droplet of poison to ruin Lake Superior.

• And why create the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to begin with? To place it within arms’ reach seems like a tease.

• If Adam and Eve were parents to Cain, Abel and Seth, where did the earth’s population come from? Four men. One woman. And any “relations” would have been incest. (Sex with mom? Eww.)

• Why does the Old Testament require such elaborate (and often brutal) rituals of sacrifice to be made in your honor? After all, those who must be affirmed at all times are usually quite insecure. I had a boss like that once.

• What’s the deal with slicing off men’s foreskins? Wouldn’t it have been easier to create man WITHOUT a foreskin in the first place? At least reduce the amount of nerve endings down there.

• Why did you create billions of other galaxies? If man is indeed your most cherished companion, why the seemingly infinite cosmos filled with planetary bodies that can support no life? Decoration? False starts?

• Why was your earthly messenger, Jesus, sent to primitive Palestine in a time before proper historical records could be kept…written about by human authors (some anonymous) decades afterward in what would become dead languages? (Wouldn’t a video camera have helped clear things up?)

• Lord…please…explain the dinosaurs. I didn’t see “Brontosaurus” in the book of Genesis.

• If you’re omniscient, and you see the future, why did you proceed with a plan of creation that you knew would require the drowning of the earth’s entire population (except for Noah and his family)? You knew you’d have to kill everyone, and you proceeded anyway? There was no Plan B?

• Speaking of the Great Flood: How did Noah and his relatives build a stadium-sized boat housing tens of thousands of animals? Where’d they get polar bears, caribou, anacondas and hairless cats in the Middle East? How’d they manage food and waste for all of them in a single craft with only one window for 5 months? (You sure you didn’t also spare some servant labor from the rains to help out? Union workers? Somebody? These folks were 600 years old!)

• If the Jews are your Chosen People, how could you have allowed the Holocaust? Earthly parents often sacrifice their own lives for the protection of one child. You refused to intervene as six million were shot, stabbed, experimented upon, cremated alive and gassed. And it appears you didn’t even appear at the moment of their liberation. (Thank goodness for the Allied soldiers.)

• Isn’t Hell a disproportionately sadistic punishment for those who don’t believe in you? Causing the unsaved to burn, writhe, scream and wail in agony without end? Doesn’t that make your methods of torture worse than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hussein, Kim Il Sung, etc? Sure, you give man a “choice.” But the choice between cooking alive and NOT cooking alive isn’t much of a choice at all, is it? I’m just sayin’.

• When we go to Heaven, we’ll continually worship you? Forever? Isn’t that going to get old? Do you really require that much worship? Can we get some time off to barbecue and play golf?

• Why wasn’t Jonah killed by drowning or by the digestive juices of the Big Fish (whale)?

• When a hospital patient survives, the family thanks you. When the patient dies, the family often sues the doctors. Shouldn’t they sue you?

• When football teams pray for victory in their respective locker rooms, don’t their prayers cancel each other out?

• What’s up with the Old Testament / New Testament thing? And what about those bible books that were never canonized? Who decides this stuff?

• 30,000 people starve to death every day. Just bringing that to your attention…in case you hadn’t noticed. (Perhaps a reenactment of the “loaves and fishes” thing would be appropriate.)

• Explain the whole “communion” thing. Eat your flesh? Drink your blood? It’s all very Bram Stoker. Are vegetarians exempt?

• If you made everything…who made you? (And why do Christians act like this is a stupid question?)

• Men have nipples. I’m just curious.

I have more questions, but there's a group of evangelicals at my door handing out religious tracts. Should I ask them about the nipple thing?

-Ed