I have a God with whom I have a deep and personal relationship. The many-armed space-squid who is my God flows through this universe, devouring life, munching through whole cultures, civilisations, small planets, believing utterly in the survival of the mightiest, which is He. He hates life, hates it with a cold and infinite passion, with a hunger both literal and metaphorical. His great arms sweep the cosmos, seeking out prey, not with just with malice but with the great, essential hunger of the divine. He will eat us all, all the worlds, all the life, all the cacophonous rubble of existence, until only the silence of the worlds’ end remains, the haunting melody of absence which He will delight in, the song of the universe’s beginning played again.

I call my God a ‘He’ though really, that’s maybe inaccurate. Really, He’s a non-Hobbesian construct of Darwinian metaversal world-structure manifesting in our ontological paradigm in a Platonically-informed zoomorphic atom-frame and gender isn’t really a factor. But still for argument’s sake, we’ll go with ‘He’. He, this many-tentacled space-dwelling kraken, doesn’t like you very much, and I’m fine with that. He doesn’t like people much at all, with our noise and our clutter; He definitely doesn’t like me. That’s fine. We don’t need our Gods to like us, so long as they do what we need them to do.

Not many people follow my God, though his essence will be familiar to readers of Lovecraft or China Mieville These fictional gods are precursors to my divine master in much the same that Adonis or Mithras are considered foundational precursors to the reality of Jesus, as mythological expressions of Jupiter made way for the Catholic God. Read these books and you will begin to see a tenth of a shadow of my God’s power and majesty.

Our society is largely only familiar with a singular, anthropomorphic form of godhood, though historically animal representation was equally prevalent. Given that the dominant, even exclusive form of philosophical world-view has stemmed from a monotheistic, hierarchical patriarchy many of the cultural and social systems that are in place today are not surprising. Social adherence to the rubrics and procedures enacted by generations of unmarried, old, straight, white men makes sense given that this is the preferred form of the mainstream divinity. In many ways, it is arguable that the great cosmological kraken would do little or nothing to overtly change these power-structures. Work with what is in place; it’s a strategy that the existing Churches used to great advantage during their own rises.

In truth, the male, bearing his penis before him like a miniature tentacle, is probably the closest symbolically to the form of the Many-Armed Void-Swimmer. While He gropes through the darkness Space and Time, in search of nourishment, can we not say it is not unlike the flapping japery of the man-bits? In this way it is should be most obvious that the male personage is best equipped to be representative of the Will of my Celestial Cephalopod. This is not sexist, or deliberate exclusion, but rather the fullest expression of divine logic. It is simply the sincerely held ethos that the Space-Kraken has delivered onto me. We are not responsible for it. Understand, the Many-Armed Space-Squid God hates men, would devour me and any other man wholesale in an instant as He slides uncaring through the depths of the cosmos, but that does not diminish the reality that the penis is the closest biological symbol of His greatness.

Of course, in light of the religious and subsequent social realities pervading many nations, this may not even be an issue for most potential recruits. Living in Ireland, a Western and supposedly civilised and compassionate society, the influence of patriarchal indoctrination is perfectly evident. Despite multiple warning following the death of Savita Halappanavar, the Irish Government pushed ahead with legislation which was in no way fit for purpose and largely continued to pander to the concerns of traditional religious powers and the patriarchal inclinations of a particular segment of the dominant political party’s voters. This legislation came into force in January and it has taken only eight months for it to result in the abuse, dehumanisation and torture of a vulnerable, asylum-seeking, teenage rape-victim. Despite the public furore, and UN condemnation of the medieval attitude of the Government’s attitude in general, our representatives refuse to continence requests for a referendum which would allow the public the opportunity to change the constitutional laws enforcing the draconian Catholic ideology that actively deny women the right to define and regulate their own bodies.

Of course, women are not the only people denied autonomy over their own existence. Like many other nations, Official Ireland has a dismal attitude towards the LGBTI community. For instance, there are little or no protections for non-traditionally-oriented teachers in schools administered by religious institutions, which equates to the vast majority of schools in this country. Any teacher may be dismissed from their position if their personal sexual orientation contravenes the ethos of the school. Given that there is a surplus of teachers, this pressure becomes significantly heightened, since schools can easy replace teachers, particularly those serving on long-term contracts, for a fraction the wage. Despite considerable media attention, and public outrage, the Department of Education, and Government in general, seem disinclined to legislate for protections which might contravene the right of the religious to persecute. Quite recently, the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI), in response to complaints, ruled that LGBTI people had no right to discuss their lived reality or future aspirations without a bigot present to denounce them. Given the impending referendum on Marriage Equality, it is read by many as a chilling, heavy-handed reminder by Officialdom that they have no entitlements or rights until they are specifically afforded by legal disposition. Explicitly, the rights of LGBTI people are still “an issue that was of current public debate and Controversy” in the words of the BAI, and thus, the experience and desires of those people must be subject to rebuttal and dissent at all times.

Given the explicit social support for marriage equality, and the rights of LGBTI people in general, that has being growing in every poll undertaken in the national media for the last several years and now stands at a potential 86%, and that the upcoming Marriage Equality Referendum was triggered by the recommendations of the Constitutional Convention, a non-partisan citizen body, and that all major political parties have agreed to support it, it seems that the BAI might recognise that the issue is not actually quite as socially divisive as it has been for previous generations. Rather, they are bowing to the minority objections of a small group of fundamentalist religious people who are entitled to an unequal share of the discourse because of their traditional ethos.

That is just the kind of disproportionate clout my Many-Tentacled Space-Squid Lord desires. Not because He needs it, but given His divinity, He does feel a certain inclination to be adored and blindly worshipped; that His Will, whatever that should be, be followed with rigorous, uncritical irrationality. This Squid-God of mine, He doesn’t care about many of the details which the current Christian Sky-Tyrant obsesses over. Indeed, the preoccupation with controlling the wombs and fiddly bits of the lesser-beings seems an odd neurosis to my Squid-God. My God, He just doesn’t care what consenting adults get up to in their own time with their own bodies. We’re all basically just miniscule quasi-intelligent self-propelled meatbags to Him (although the penis-baring members of the species are still obviously the physically closest to his resplendent form). He’s going to eat the whole of reality eventually; He doesn’t really care what you do with it beforehand, as long as there is a certain amount of adoring and cowering before Him thrown in for good measure. In fact, He would rather, as He is Merciful, that people of all genders, orientations and denominations had the briefest moments of joy before His Holy Maw descends upon the world in hunger and rage. It amuses Him too, that we might know some flicker of happiness before we go screaming into the eternal night of the metaverse’s ending, just that we might more keenly feel its loss.

He is a cruel God, and He hates you, all your noise and clutter.  It is only the silence He loves, and the hum at the beginning of reality. As much as the Christian God hates you, my Squid-Lord hates you more. Of course, that seems to be a selling point, considering the number of people who stick with the God-thing despite his vacillation between obvious disinterest and blatant cruelty. Honestly, from the outside it looks like a relationship built on unhealthy dependency with a flavour of sadomasochism. And really, if it is hatred and fear that drive your religious choices, I can assure you, the Space-Kraken is an infinitely better choice. Think this through, which is more terrifying; an old man living in the sky, spouting off about sin and who gets to live in his house when they die, or a massive, angry, all-devouring Kraken who swims in space and is going to eat the multiverse? The Eternal Cephalopod hates everything about you, but He hates the monstrously degrading and unfair power systems which pervade your reality too; mostly He just hates the noise you make and the space you take up, and this He will solve sooner rather than later. He, however, is still deeply uninterested in controlling your body prior to divine ingestion, or determining who you are entitled to spend the brief span of days you have remaining with.

I will admit it is a tremendously beneficial deal. You get all of the hatred and loathing of the Catholic God, if you need that sort of thing, you get impending Ragnarok and annihilation, and it all comes without the shame-fixation, mono-mythic power hierarchies and legally-enforced control of the bodies of an inordinate percentage of the population. Why wouldn’t you sign up? Who wants, or needs, a God that might love you if you can negotiate a litany of chaotic, contradictory rubrics which deliberately foster bigotry and exclusion? I don’t need a God who likes me, so long as He provides the requisites of civilised existence. In exchange for our devotion, the Glorious Squid-From-Above is offering all I honestly want in a God; freedom from the dictates of the entrenched bigotry of patriarchal social domination. Isn’t that worth believing in?

The only real question I have is, exactly how many straight, white dudes do I have to get to sign up, and how much cash do we need, before I can start imposing my Squid-God’s ethos all over everyone’s lives? How many straight, white men are required in the club before we can start making rules for the other genders, the other orientations, before we can set out access to healthcare options, the right to equal treatment under the law, who can partake of social and community structures like marriage or family, or has the simple right to speak of their aspirations, their lives, their reality?

How many of us have to believe in the right to self-determination, wrapped up in ethos of my glorious Many-Tentacled Space-Squid God, before the country is allowed to have that?

The Church of the Divine Space-Dwelling Kraken is now accepting both members and donations.