Eighteenth-century deists believed there was a God but, tellingly, they frequently preferred synonyms for him — "Almighty Being" or "Divine Author" (Washington) or "a Superior Agent" (Jefferson).
And, crucially, you will want to choose a surrogate whose values and beliefs are close to yours, if you want him to follow your plan rather than try to divine the Almighty's.
He compared the Almighty to "a kind of divine North Korea" with arbitrary rules and a hatred of freedom and rationality.
The 82-year-old British retail entrepreneur made a "deal" with God several decades ago, when he barely had enough capital to get his business ideas off the ground, to share half his fortune with the almighty in return for some divine help with his finances.
At first glance, a non-Buddhist would classify it as polytheism, since (less-than-almighty and limited in time) divine beings, Dharma Guardians, are integrated parts of Mahayana devotion.
Now give that corporate entity a divine mandate from "the almighty" to carry out a mission with exclusive books of revelation that required a hand-picked or privilege-born class of interpreters (think lawyers on Wall street), and we are getting closer.
That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle".
Jim Carrey could reprise his role in Bruce Almighty as the down-at-heel reporter who inherits divine powers for a day if studio chiefs get their way.
What you are not free to do, and what only an Almighty God is free to do, is to control the divine consequences of your proposed action".
To that end, if the outcome of the game rests in the hands of the Almighty, then one has to wonder why those less fortunate teams have received neither divine inspiration nor divine intervention.
