Free God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.

attack planes rained down. He died, stripped naked by thieves and scorched by the equatorial sun, near the border town of Kapoeta.
    One small death among thousands, his passing would have gone unnoticed if the feral dogs who fed on his corpse hadn’t suddenly begun speaking a mishmash of Greek and Hebrew, and walking along the surface of the White Nile as if it were made of glass.
    Naturally, the news of God’s death hit the world like a sledgehammer. An initial wave of panic, civil unrest, and general bad behavior swept the globe. Martial law was declared, and the National Guard took up residence in every American city. Suicide among nuns and clergy reached epidemic proportions, as did the looting of stores for comfort foods such as Little Debbie snack cakes. Most, myself included, believed the end was nigh, and for a while we hid in our homes, hunched over and wincing, convinced that at any moment we would explode, or simply blip out of existence.
    And then a strange thing happened: nothing. Gradually we came to realize that the sun still rose in the morning and set at night, the tide still came in and went out on schedule, and we and everyone we knew (for the most part) were still alive and breathing. Talking heads and self-declared experts offered any number of theories, but the gist of it, intuited by most people, was this: God had created the universe and set it spinning, but it would continue chugging along despite the fact that he was no longer around to keep things tidy.
    People emerged from their hiding places and got back to their lives. The National Guard stood down. Laura and I breathed a sigh of relief and resumed planning for the baby’s arrival, compiling lists of names, pricing nursery wallpaper, buying mobiles and jumpers. For a while the only noticeable change was the absolute lack of anything to do on Sundays.
    Then the real trouble began. I saw it in my patients: a spiritual void left in the wake of God’s demise. People everywhere were casting about for something to place their recently orphaned faith in. Agnostics joined the atheists and put their money on science, but they were, as always, hopelessly outnumbered. Many people, including most of the population of Africa, built temples dedicated to the dogs who had feasted on God’s flesh, churches where the hymnals consisted entirely of barks and whines transcribed phonetically onto the page. And here, out of the swamps of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya basin and into this burgeoning chaos came a sort of secular evangelist known as The Child. The Child was just that—a boy of three or so, serene and flawless, with cocoa skin and a vocabulary so rich it seemed he must have swallowed an Oxford English Dictionary. His message, delivered first in town halls and opera houses, and later, as his popularity grew, in arenas and baseball stadiums, was simple: God has abandoned us. The way to salvation is through the child.
    By which he meant, of course, every child.
    And America, already teetering on the verge of child worship, was only too eager to hear him. Soon a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of psychiatry arose: Adults, buffeted by socioeconomic insecurities, with the nuclear canopy still overhead and no God to protect them from it, turned to their children for comfort and guidance.
    As a psychiatrist, I began to see examples of this strange behavior well before it started to make headlines. Ricky Mascis, an out-of-work single father who I treated free of charge, was troubling over which bills to pay, as he didn’t have enough to cover all of them.
    â€œSo it’s really just, you know, you gotta prioritize,” he told me. “Which isn’t too hard at first. Obviously, if it’s between buying a new TV or paying the power bill, you pay the bill. No brainer. But now I’ve got to decide things like, should I buy food this week, or should I put that hundred dollars into fixing the car so I can get out and