HEAVEN – On a short Zoom call with stakeholders, today, God informed those present that the most recent mass shooting in the United States was the result of a too-broad junk filter in Heaven’s prayer software.
The Lord began with an explanation of how he discovered his recent oversight. “I was going through my usual morning routine, catching up on any prayers that came in overnight, when I noticed one from Darren Poresling in Chicago that began ‘further to my previous prayer’”.
“Seeing as how I didn’t remember getting one from Darren since the late ‘90s, when he asked for a baby brother (delivered, by the way!), I checked the old spam folder, and wouldn’t you know it, a cathedral’s-worth of requests that I stop all the needless violence! Anyway, I knocked those off and I think we should be good moving forward”.
When asked how he could miss so many entreaties, the Heavenly Father clarified “We’ve had to implement some pretty strong filters ever since Lucifer found out about JibJabs. You can only receive so many animations of St. Peter twerking in a Santa hat before it becomes a nuisance. Anyway, in this case, we started to get prayers from Americans about mass shootings so frequently, that the algorithm figured they had to be bots.”
“It’s just that there were so many that the system figured that the system decided they must all be duplicates from the same horrific event. I mean, you see that many in a short period of time, you’re thinking it’s for something like 9/11, and we KNEW the USA was going to fix that, right?”
The Supreme Being also cautioned that just going through heaven’s backlog might not be enough. “We’ve noticed a lot of requests coming in from politicians, but we can only partially handle them”, continuing, “Confucius handles a lot of work on the ‘thoughts’ side of things, and he said they’re similarly backed up. But, hey, politicians don’t just need us to get things done, so I figure we’re good, there”.
Moving forward, the Creator insisted he’ll try to be more vigilant in future. “The fact is that after the Civil Rights Act I kind of figured the States were moving in the right direction and I could focus my attention less on intra-national affairs and more on the international. I didn’t really see this war-machines-as-home-appliances trend coming. Anyway, I promise to check ‘Spam’ at least once-a-month, that should cover us, right?”
In closing the Almighty expressed his embarrassment. “Really, I should have known better. This is just like the time I missed out on all those benedictions from that actual Nigerian prince”.
