Most of my last few articles have been either essentially academic treatments of religion or politics, or they have been current events. But I, like most college students, do (somehow) eventually grow tired of engaging with the most complicated philosophical and metaphysical claims ever advanced by thinking primates, and so sometimes we have nothing better to do but sit back and creatively manipulate our subjective ontologies with a healthful dose of Hitch-juice. However, because I (as a good humanist) am acutely aware of and concerned by the tragedy and crude hilarity that often follows alcohol wherever it goes, I have devised a new drinking game that will (hopefully) leave you and your friends very, very sober.

So, next time it’s a Friday night, a slow Wednesday, a weekend, or any weekday whose name ends in ‘Y,’ break out the God drinking game and don’t worry about bringing your own flask. Here are the rules:

• Every time a preternatural superintelligence who was born in flesh of a virgin, murdered on a cross after brutal torture by the men he died loving, and miraculously risen from the dead as a sacrifice for your sins finds a better way of proving his endless love to the world than by appearing on a piece of burned toast, take a drink (only after close inspection to make sure Jesus isn’t watching from within the glass).
• Every time a principled violation of the laws of physics is vigorously proven to exhaust all competing and also all possible natural explanations, you might as well just drink yourself stupid because all rational descriptions of the universe relating effects with causes just got thrown out the window anyway.
• Every time a broad, controlled, double-blind medical experiment proves that people of certain religious persuasions are completely immune to all known chemical toxins, sit down with your Christian friends and all take shots from a gallon jug of gasoline. Last one living is the most faithful.
• Is God incapable of missing the cup, or does God simply choose not to miss the cup in every instance? Either way, drink it, because God can just transgress a shut-out on your ass whenever he thinks he could have.
• But isn’t the real question “should you crack a Natty because God loves the harsh, salty taste of Natty, or does God love the harsh, salty taste of Natty because you should crack it?”
• Every time any of your religious friends decides to bypass a lively public debate and go straight to a peer-reviewed scientific journal with his or her rigorous proof of the existence of God, ask them to lend you some of their Nobel Prize money to buy a keg. If you are an atheist, you will need the entire keg.
• The next time you encounter a Holocaust survivor, take several drinks of liquid courage before you tell him or her that the Holocaust was not an instance of true moral evil because it gave the Jews the chance to act bravely before being butchered by a ruthless dictatorship. Believe me, without either several drinks or tenure at Oxford, this will seem like a profoundly stupid thing to do.
• Tell your friend that, for any fine alcoholic beverage “P” that can actually obtain, God could always design a beverage “P+1″ that is sweeter and more refreshing, and a beverage “P+1+1″ and a beverage “P+1+1…+1,” therefore it is logically impossible for an omnipotent God to actually obtain a perfectly fine beverage (since any such beverage P could always be sweetened to a beverage P+1), therefore the property of omnipotence cannot ever be actualized (or even described) and is therefore absurd, and that therefore “an omnipotent being exists” is an absurd statement. If they resolve this problem, reward them with a beverage “P!” and watch their liver explode.
• If God wants the beer to stay fresh and is willing but unable to keep it cold, take a shot. If God wants to beer to stay fresh and is able but not willing to keep it cold, take a shot. If God both wants the beer to stay fresh and is also able to do so, then why the hell are you taking shots in the first place?
• Suppose you are walking through the New Hampshire Liquor Store and you happen upon a watch nestled between the rows upon rows of alcohol. If you conclude that the watch happened to fall into place by chance, you really need stop drinking. If you conclude that God, despite his omnipotent omnibenevolence, would design something so complex as a watch and then give it to the kind of person who would take off their watch in the New Hampshire Liquor Store and just leave it somewhere, you should probably take up drinking.
• If you are still able to believe, despite all the ruthlessly materialistic conclusions of neuroscience, that your conscious experience is more than a mere epiphenomenon of the physical components of your brain and is instead its own, separate entity with a distinct ontological reality, take fifteen more shots and then try to convince yourself that Cartesian dualism is viable.
• Remember, alcoholism “is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to drunken things, that is to say, things set apart and drawn all over with sharpies when they pass out at a party.” Do not ever, ever convert.

This article is not to be misconstrued as encouraging, promoting, or condoning process theology among minors.