I'm back in South Florida, where it's very hot and muggy.

I've just read that there is a new hit TV show this season on CBS. It's called "Joan of Arcadia," and supposedly reflects a resurgance in the discussion of God on network television in the post-9/11 era. On the program, "16-year-old Joan Girardi (Amber Tamblyn) learns that God (who appears in guises ranging from a cute guy to a cafeteria worker) has plans for her."

Accroding to a story about the program in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

[T]he new shows are far heavier on questions than answers.

"We have tiny little pea brains, and God is enormous," says "Joan of Arcadia" creator [Barbara] Hall. "So the show is really a lot about posing theological and philosophical questions and not answering them."

Which sounds nice and humble. But, as it turns out, Hall actually has quite a few answers to offer us about God.

According to the story, she issued a list of "Ten Commandments" to serve as absolute guidelines for the writers of the program. They are:

1. God cannot directly intervene.
2. Good and evil exist.
3. God can never identify one religion as being right.
4. The job of every human being is to fulfill his or her true nature.
5. Everyone is allowed to say no to God, including Joan.
6. God is not bound by time - this is a human concept.
7. God IS NOT A PERSON and does not possess a human personality.
8. God talks to everyone all the time in different ways.
9. God's plan is what is good for us, not what is good for him.
10. God's purpose for talking to Joan, and to everyone, is to get her (us) to recognize the interconnectedness of all things, i.e. you cannot hurt a person without hurting yourself; all of your actions have consequences; God can be found in the smallest actions; God expects us to learn and grow from all our experiences. However, the exact nature of God is a mystery, and the mystery can never be solved.

And so one who claims we are too pea-brained to know anything about God actually thinks she knows quite a bit about Him. Or about "it," as she might put it. Though He's an insolvable mystery, she has solved much of it anyway.

Hall doesn't know much about God and would never say that someone's right or wrong about Him, except on a few minor points, such as whether He is a person, whether He acts in His universe, whether He reveals Himself to whomever He chooses whenever He chooses, whether He has exclusively revealed Himself through Christ, whether man's nature is ultimately sinful, or whether the Bible is God's authoritative word. On all those questions, she's certain the answer is "no," but she doesn't have any strong opinions on the important stuff, I suppose.