The sixth stupid way to think about God is GOD THE GARBAGEMAN. The authors begin their description of this way in this manner: City of Heaven, Department of Sanitation, God speaking. How may I help you?

Two mortal sins for immediate pickup? One can of cardinal sins, one carton of venial? And an assortment of lust, greed and sloth bundled and ready to go? Of course I can handle it. Just leave them on the side of the house. I’ll be there Tuesday to take them away.

We’ve all got them. Stored up in the basement of our souls. Cluttering up our spirits. All that junk. All that gunk. Filthy, dirty, nasty, mean little sins.

But we don’t have to carry them around, thank God. Not when we have a dumpster for a deity. God the Garbageman at your service. Or if you wish to sound more reverent, God the Sanitation Engineer.

You have a sin? God will cart it off to the great incinerator in the sky! Get out your trash bags!

You’ve sinned again? Oops! Well, have no fear. God will come back and come back and keep coming back to make sure your spirit stays neat and tidy. All you have to do is ‘fess up and keep ‘fessing up. Because this god is a bottomless pit. There’s no limit to the refuse he can hold.

God the Garbageman is neither a dedicated civil servant nor a god. His job is simply to help mankind in what often seems like its most avid pursuit: escaping responsibility.

We’ve taken the marvelous concept of a forgiving God and distorted it completely. This is not the God who is beyond pagan acts of retribution. This is not the God who respects us so much He made us morally responsible. This is certainly not the God who guarantees us freedom of conscience even if we err.

God the Garbageman is a vehicle for an endless obsessive-compulsive ritual that would make Lady     Macbeth seem pure. A kind of bulimia of the soul. Sin binging and sin vomiting.

But God the Garbageman only makes things worse for everyone. By making forgiveness so   convenient, he allows us to take our own behavior for granted. We become so morally lazy we cease to grow as spiritual beings.

And we’ll never grow until we stop depending on someone else to dispose of our garbage for us – until we chuck God the Garbageman in the can and forget him.

Think about this. When we don’t take responsibility for our own behavior and expect God to always forgive us, we never grow because we always feel we have an escape from displeasing Him. That’s not mature Christianity