I saw a couple interesting memes on Facebook recently. One was a guy saying something to the effect of “Complaining that God is silent when you don’t read your Bible is like complaining you don’t get text messages when you turn off your phone.” The other was a story about some kid who got shot in the eye, and survived, to which a believer added a caption giving God credit for his survival. Both memes were similar, in that they were inspirational, superficial, and rich in implications that betray the fundamental fraud of the Gospel.

Take that first meme. Yes, it’s supposed to motivate Christians to read their Bibles, but it does so by appealing to a well known phenomenon that all believers experience every day: God cannot speak to you unless you, the believer, make an effort to elicit some kind of “message” from him. If you want to “hear” God speak, you have to read stories about God, or talk to people who will encourage you to believe in God, or pray and meditate and fill your mind with thoughts about God, or superstitiously assign God the credit for the mundane or unexpected events in your life. Without some degree of effort on your part, you’re more likely to get text messages from a dead phone than you are to hear from God.

And here’s the thing: if you switch off your phone, and your friends are trying to contact you, they can still contact you because they’re real people. God’s distinctive inability to speak apart from human effort is one of the more obvious signs he’s a fictional character, created and operated by human imagination. And a related sign is the fact that, when believers do read the Bible, the messages they “hear” from God are exactly the sort of messages you’d expect to get from people imagining God speaking to them: forgiving and excusing and maybe even commanding the believer’s mistreatment of others; condemning and threatening whoever the believer does not like; ignorant or mistaken regarding things the believer does not know or guess or believe. The reason it takes human effort to “switch on” the voice of God is because God’s voice, like God himself, is the product of human effort. Your memes are trying to tell you something.

Or take that other story, about the unfortunate kid who got shot in the eye, and lived. That’s got to be proof that God intervenes in real life, right? I mean, sure, it’s an odd sort of intervention. If he’s going to alter the trajectory and velocity of a bullet, wouldn’t it be better to make it miss completely, instead of just slowing it down enough to put the kid in serious pain and probably permanent loss of an eye? And for that matter, aren’t there a whole bunch of people who could also use some helpful divine intervention to keep from being murdered?

But that’s not the real message of this meme. What’s really important here is to notice that it’s better for this kid to have survived, even in severe pain, even with the loss of an eye, than for him to die and “go to heaven.” You could argue that maybe the kid was a sinner, and would have gone to hell, but that’s an afterthought, a rationalization. It wasn’t part of the original meme. As far as the meme was concerned, the kid was an innocent victim, and God chose him for a miraculous intervention so that he would not have to die.

Because here’s the thing: this life is the real life. To die in real life is to die, period. Yes, believers believe in heaven, meaning that they believe it’s really “real.” But it’s more complicated than that, because they also know, for the most part, that it’s not really “real” in the sense that it’s better to die and go there. This life is the real life. Heaven is only real in the story. It’s “real” and you believe it’s real, but the reason you believe so strongly is because you know that the strength of your belief is somehow related to how real it is. If you start to doubt, you risk losing it, and if you ever stop believing in it, it could cease to exist. So you believe in it, and the more people question your belief, the more strongly you exert your belief, to compensate, to protect it. But beliefs aside, you know that it’s better to postpone “going to heaven” as long as possible. You don’t want to admit to yourself that you know heaven is a myth, but it leaks out in your memes. Your memes are trying to tell you something.

When I was a Christian, we didn’t really have the idea of “memes” as we know them today, but these kinds of ideas were floating around, and they bothered me. I believed, and I exerted my belief, in the great “truths” of the Bible. But there were all these other things in the background, in the common experience of all believers, constantly reminding me that Christian “truth” was something different from real-world truth. I guess I thought that made Christian “truth” somehow holier and more spiritual or something, but as a basically honest person, it bothered me.

Believers, your memes are trying to tell you something. They’re trying to tell you things you really already know, and just can’t admit to yourself. This world is the real one. And God is a character in a story you tell yourself.

Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.