Is God Just the Most Interesting Character Ever Written?

I don’t know what or who God is. But I do know this—there’s something. A presence, a rhythm, an energy in the universe that’s hard to name but impossible to ignore. Sometimes it’s a whisper in silence. Sometimes it’s the way a moment hits you with weight you can’t explain. Sometimes, it feels like love. Other times, like nothing at all. I’m not sure if this force cares about me—or anyone else. It might not. It might just be.

When I think about the Christian God, I don’t just see a deity—I see a character. One of the most fascinating ever conceived. According to the story, this God creates everything: time, matter, planets, consciousness. He makes a paradise. A flawless garden. No death. No pain. No chaos. And then he plants a tree in the middle—the tree of knowledge of good and evil—and says, “Don’t eat from it.”

That’s the moment that keeps me up at night.

The rule wasn’t “don’t kill” or “don’t lie.” It was “don’t know.” As if awareness itself was the one boundary not to be crossed. And yet, the capacity to question, to want, to wonder—that had already been baked into the design. Why make beings curious and then forbid curiosity?

Of course, the rule was broken. Whether by rebellion or by design, that first act of defiance sealed our fate. God cursed humanity. Pain in childbirth. Toiling for food. Expulsion from the garden. Mortality. Suffering. A seemingly eternal sentence passed down not just to the guilty, but to every generation after.

This is the God who supposedly loves us. Who is omnipotent and omnipresent. Who knows everything, sees everything, is everything—and yet stands back as the world groans beneath the weight of war, disease, injustice, and loneliness. He doesn’t hate us, but he doesn’t exactly intervene either. He’s the absent parent with eyes everywhere.

And maybe that’s what makes him so compelling. If I were God, I wouldn’t create problems for myself. But maybe that’s the whole point—maybe he wanted the problems. Maybe a perfect world was too quiet. Maybe he created consciousness and free will because he wanted the story. The drama. The possibility of pain and therefore the possibility of beauty.

Because without suffering, could we even recognize joy? Without death, would life mean anything? That’s the paradox—our freedom feels like a setup, but maybe it’s the only path to anything real.

Still, something about it doesn’t sit right.

Because if this is freedom, it often feels fake. Like we’ve been placed in a maze and told to run, while the one who built the walls watches from above. Our self-awareness is both gift and curse—a mirror that shows us everything and yet hides the point of it all. And so we chase meaning. We chase peace. We chase each other.

And maybe that’s why this life, with all its suffering and beauty, is so unbearable and so irresistible at the same time. We’re trying to solve a puzzle with no picture on the box.

So I sit with the questions:

• Why were we given the hunger to know if it would destroy us?

• Why are we punished for reaching toward the divine?

• Why create at all?

I don’t claim to have answers. I’m not even sure answers exist. But the questions—those sacred, aching questions—are proof that something in us is still reaching for the garden. Or maybe for the God who planted the tree in the first place.

Whatever this is—life, consciousness, being—it’s complicated. Beautiful. Frustrating. And endlessly mysterious.

And God? Whether myth, metaphor, or mystery—he remains the most fascinating character I’ve ever known.

Later,

DD