Dear Odin,

My friend, I hope this letter finds you well.  I’m writing to avail myself of your knowledge of the Playing God term project, we all know you aced the final assessment and I’m having major problems.  I would appreciate any advice as I’m not altogether sure where I’ve gone wrong.  

I gave my creation free will but they don’t appear to understand it.  I completed the “Creating Beings In Thine Own Image” portion of the practical but went further than skin and bone, subservient existence.  I wanted to make certain they could control their destiny, that they had no need to look to me.  I thought it important that they be self sufficient, their existence remains finite but they were supposed to embrace the opportunities offered by autonomy.  My son is meant to be assisting me but I haven’t heard from him in two millennia.  His experience with my project was not a favourable one.  An unmitigated disaster if I’m being honest.  

Things have gotten a little better in the last few thousand years, at least they don’t sacrifice their children to me anymore.  Or threaten to, I told you in our previous correspondence of that ****** Abraham and his son Isaac?  What was the man thinking?  He honestly believed he was in some sort of communion with me.  If I had designed my project in any way that allowed me to interfere I would have made it abundantly clear that this man needed help.  The terrible thing is, they lauded the episode as some kind of miracle that I stopped him in time and provided a ram instead (one just happened upon the scene).  More than likely he didn’t fancy the stoning.  He gave me a real headache, that Abraham character.

It’s this thing of miracles that’s the lingering issue.  I’ve tried ignoring them.  I used to listen occasionally, Moses had my ear for while, I didn’t mind him, entertaining sort.  I never act on anything though, never have.  That’s the point of what I wanted to achieve with autonomy.  I infected them with this ‘humanity’ virus early on and it seemed hypothetically possible that Playing God could be more of a social experiment (I called it 'the study of humanities', which I thought rather neat).  However, the miracle thing just won’t go away.  They queue up in droves, even now, begging me to feed starving children, heal fatal injuries, protect them against natural disasters.  They even plead for forgiveness when natural disasters occur, they think it’s some sort of retribution, I mean, it’s just weather.  It happened like that with the flood, I didn’t cause it and I didn’t tell Noah to build a boat.  He was just a clever bloke with a bit of initiative.

Anyway, the real problem is this, because I gave them free will, but they don’t quite grasp that I cannot fix their problems and all that, (don’t even get me started on this idea that they’ll all live happily ever after if they do perish, a real obstacle in managing their own destiny) they have become frighteningly progressive.  They have mastered technology without realising the environmental fallout, harnessed the power of the atom and are increasingly in danger of self annihilation.  If they go and blow themselves up, apart from half the sphere praising me for doing a job that the other half implored me not to do (and vice versa) I will fail this term again and have to start over.  I can’t be held back another term, I’m still struggling after the dinosaur debacle.

Please help!

Yours ever faithfully,

The Alpha.