Heaven, December 29 – An embarrassed Almighty told reporters today that He had failed to receive the vast majority of people’s petitions over the last several millennia, as the filtering software He had installed ages ago on His incoming messages had diverted almost all of them to the junk mail folder.
God called a press conference Monday morning to inform His creatures of the glitch, which explained why so many people had their prayers go unanswered throughout human history. The Lord stressed that the default settings on the filter might explain, but cannot excuse, what amounts to divine ignoring of millions of pleas and supplications throughout the ages.
“Upon discovering this problem I immediately altered the filter settings to allow almost all prayers in, but that cannot undo the eons of petitioning that received no response,” acknowledged YHWH. “I have now embarked on an effort to address each plea one by one, even if those who issued them have long since passed from temporal existence.” The backlog of prayers from people still living in the corporeal realm will be given priority, said God, since by and large those requests pertain to matters of corporeal, and therefore time-sensitive, importance.
Given that the overwhelming majority of unanswered prayers originated with people who perished sometime over the period since modern humanity emerged tens of thousands of years ago, the bulk of the project’s effort will then focus on finding ways to answer requests in the Afterlife such that those who submitted those requests gain whatever satisfaction possible in retrospect.
For example, said the archangel Gabriel, who is managing the project, souls who begged in vain to be spared from famine might be assigned to reincarnation as earthworms, which seldom lack for food. Victims of medieval pillage, who often found themselves impaled by marauding fighters, might enter a new existence as pin cushions, in which the repeated stabbings would be experienced as a fulfillment of purpose.
The initiative, called the Outstanding Overdue Prayer Service (OOPS), is expected to take no more than three hundred years to run its course. Gabriel explained that the limits of the finite, temporal realm dictated a gradual treatment of the outstanding prayers, though some denizens of the Afterlife would prefer an instantaneous resolution of the problem.
The angel emphasized that not all prayers would be answered favorably. “Let’s face it – some folks just had it coming.”
As a follow up, said Gabriel, God is likely to start looking into the rest of the junk mail folder, especially the messages offering penis enlargement and loads of easy money from deposed Nigerian princes.
Next thing you know the North Koreans will hack Heaven.