God's books

TL;DR

As a kid I heard talk about some Book as the Word of God, which set me to wonder, is that the best an omnipotent guy could get his message out, one crappy little book in one crappy little corner of the universe? What would he really do?

Science fiction has thought a lot about how to communicate with other races who might not have language as we know it. Or mouths, for that matter, or hands or eyes or ears. Maybe they'd be aquatic, or insectoid, or look like sea slugs. Maybe they'd be like octopi and use polarization to talk, who knows?

This came up in real life when NASA sent the Pioneer spacecraft out of the solar system. On the off chance it ran into aliens they wanted to let them know the Good News (see what I did there? and by good news they meant that here was an intelligent race--not that the Milky Way was infested with genocidal maniacs that would kill them on sight especially if they looked like spiders).

Hey aliens, look out!

So what did NASA do, write a book in some obscure language? No, they made the Pioneer Plaque, with symbols that would be universally recognized by anything with intelligence. See the pictures? Why doesn't the bible have pictures? There's no diagrams or graphs, not even an emoticon. That's the best god could do, a lot of boring text?  I could only conclude that god is dumber than NASA.

If I was god, I'd at least make a video, maybe in 3D, maybe a full on hologram, interactive in some way. Hell, if I was omnipotent I could make some kind of obvious code like the DNA sequence only easier to figure out. Best of all would be to give some them actual samples, even put them right in the middle of it so they couldn't live their little lives without interacting with it. Yeah, that's how I'd do it. 

Now I'm all grown up, into some kind of pagan nature worshipper so I'm excluded from the family's Sunday bible study and relegated to baby-sitting. I think about all this while the old folks are locked indoors poring over some musty ancient book and I'm out here in the sunshine with the kids investigating acorns and oak trees, spider webs and worm burrows.

Suck it Christians, your god authored some hoary old tome, my gods authored Nature.