If God Exists It Has No Sense of Humour

            On Monday I finished posting my translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Comme un boomerang”. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out because a lot of work went into finding the right rhymes for “rang” and I think I captured the mood and essential meaning of Gainsbourg’s original at the same time.

I spent a lot of the day reading The Guide of the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. I read it three times before I could finally come up with an answer to one of the required questions for Tuesday’s final tutorial.

The only question I think I understood was the second one:  What are some of the negative attributes that we can predicate of God? Why don't these negative attributes introduce plurality into God? 

Here’s what I came up with:

            God, as Maimonides understands it, would have no sense of humour because in order to be amused it would have to be affected by the play of opposites in its own nature. Since his god could not have opposing aspects because that would mean it would have parts, it could not have a sense of humour, because then it would not have unity. If god cannot be amused then god would also not be able to deliberately play a joke and so therefore the popular notion that existence is all a big farce could not be true.

            It feels like I might be coming down with a cold.