Wordy Thursday - 'A Monstrous Organ of Generation'

Following on from DuMaurier's lengthy outburst last week re the fear-filled tenets of traditional Christian teaching, here is Guy De Maupassant's almost contemporary and astonishing vision of the nature of God, which closes with a pithy and cynical observation on the human condition. It comes from his Useless Beauty, written in 1890 (the translation is by Gerald Hopkins).

Do you know what I think God is like? I see him in the form of a monstrous organ of generation concealed from us, sowing innumerable worlds in space, as a single fish lays innumerable eggs in the sea. He creates because it is His raison d'etre. But He has no idea what He is doing. He is just stupidly prolific, perfectly unaware of the combinations which his scattered seed will produce.

Human thought is but one happy accident of His fecundity, a local, a casual accident, not intended, and fated to vanish with the disappearance of this earth, and to begin again, perhaps here or elsewhere, similar or different, in the new combinations produced by new beginnings. To that little accident of intelligence we owe our unhappiness...