We are a more spiritual people than you might think. Recent surveys show that more than 90% of Americans believe in the existence of God or some other universal spirit.

But what is God like? We may never be able to answer that question, at least in this life, because just like Duke, the Bush Baked Beans Dog, He’s not talking.

In art, God has always been depicted as a man. In all the old movies, you ordinarily didn’t see Him, but that resonant, God-like, action-movie-trailer voice was unmistakably male. This makes sense when you think about it, because no woman could have gone this long without talking.

Certainly, if you asked the average person, “Who would you prefer to portray God in a movie: Oprah Winfrey or Dr. Phil?” most people would answer, “Dr. Phil, but with a full head of hair,” because most people would have a hard time accepting a bald God.

In a 2003 Harris Poll:

1. •84% of Americans said they believed in a hereafter, although 57% feared that aging baby boomers would put a tremendous strain on hereafter’s infrastructure.
   

2. •63% expected to go to heaven but were in no rush to make reservations.
   

3. •1% expected to go to hell, which demonstrates that only 1 out of 100 people are capable of objectively judging themselves.
   

4. •6% expected to go to purgatory, 11% “somewhere else,” and 18% “didn’t know.”
   

Purgatory, as you might recall, was sort of a halfway house where souls could be held for indefinite periods of time, like a spiritual Guantanamo Bay. As a result of tremendous pressure from the international religious community, Pope John Paul II closed purgatory down in 2004.

The beliefs expressed in recent opinion polls should come as no surprise. Since the dawn of creation, man has been searching … at first searching for nothing more than fleas and other insects in the fur of other members of his immediate ape-like family. But as man evolved, he began to realize that there had to be more to human existence than just avoiding being eaten by dinosaurs.

Of course, primitive man was right, for dinosaurs had disappeared millions of years before the first man appeared on Earth, so dinosaurs were really nothing to worry about. But this didn’t stop some cavemen, as a practical joke, from depicting, in prehistoric cave paintings, early man hunting and killing Tyrannosaurus rex with a spear.

This may have seemed like a harmless joke at the time, but it threw off early archaeologists for centuries. Even up until the early sixties, cavemen were still being depicted in science fiction movies as living during the time of the dinosaurs.

At night, primitive man would gaze into the heavens, mesmerized by the vastness of the universe, and ask himself: “Why am I here? I mean, as opposed to being over there?”

Gradually, early man developed a system of beliefs and soon promulgated these beliefs into a code of conduct, which became the very first deed restrictions, which were enforced by the first homeowners associations, which were the predecessors of our present-day churches and religions.

Organized religion has brought us such things as the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, organized child molestation, and Jihad. But this is not to say that organized religion is all bad. For instance, if not for religion, we wouldn’t have a pope, or even a popemobile!

Besides, most people are better off spending an hour in church every Sunday morning, even if they do miss the whole point of the sermon. (Even a career criminal is less likely to commit a crime during an hour of church worship, unless, of course, you don’t keep a close eye on him and he takes off with the collection plate.)

Does God have a sense of humor? Absolutely; otherwise, He would not have created city councils. But incredibly, there are no recorded accounts of God laughing, and there are no jokes in the Bible, except for a few times when God gives detailed instructions on how to build something using cubits, or warns the people of Israel to gird their loins.

Perhaps God’s humor is on such a higher level that we mortals, trapped in our simple-minded psyches, are incapable of understanding any of it, so God doesn’t even bother. When you consider hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, the Big Guy has to be the greatest slapstick comedian ever. (Most people think that distinction belongs to the Three Stooges, but remember – there were three of them.)

Perhaps God is so funny that He has, in fact, become the world’s toughest humor critic, unmercifully critiquing all of our feeble jokes, like an all-knowing, all-powerful Simon Cowell:

1. •If I were that bad, I’d be God-awful.
   

2. •If stupid were funny, then you’d be the next Jerry Seinfield.
   

3. •Boring, indulgent, monotonous … If I had a synonym finder, I could go on and on.
   

4. •Years ago, I would have thought that routine was funny. Of course, years ago, I thought making farting noises with my armpits was funny.
   

The only way we’ll know for sure what God is truly like is to die, but so far, no one has lived to tell about it. Oh, there have been some who have come close to death and then come back. This phenomenon we call near-death experience most often occurs when someone is trapped in an elevator with the entire cast of The View.

So where does God fit into all this? God, it could be said, is the Great Delegator, even more so than Ronald Reagan. He gave explicit guidelines and instructions to his disciples and then said, “Handle it!”

And just as President Reagan sometimes fell asleep during Cabinet meetings, it may be that God Himself has nodded off for a couple of minutes, and boy, when He wakes up, is He going to be mad!