Fictional Suits
In the comedy film The Man Who Sued God (2001), a fisherman played by Billy Connolly successfully challenges the right of insurance companies to refuse payment for a destroyed boat on the common legal exemption clause of an Act of God. In a suit against the world's religious institutions as God's representatives on Earth, the religious institutions face the dilemma of either having to state God does not exist to uphold the legal principle, or being held liable for damages caused by Acts of God.
Similarly, in an Indian film, Oh my god (2012), the protagonist Kanji Mehta (character played by Paresh Rawal) files a lawsuit against God when his shop is destroyed in an earthquake and the insurance company refuses to take his claim, stating that "Act of God" is not covered under his insurance policy.
In the "Angels And Blimps" (1998) episode of the television legal drama Ally McBeal, a boy with leukaemia attempts to sue God. In the episode "The Nutcrackers" (2006-2007) of the television legal drama comedy Boston Legal, a woman sues God for the death of her husband. "God in the Dock", a 1980 episode of Christian TV series Insight, featured Richard Beymer as God put on trial by humanity.
In the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880), one of the characters tells the story of a grand inquisitor in Spain who meets an incarnation of Jesus, interrogates him and exiles him.
Former Auschwitz concentration camp inmate Elie Wiesel is said to have witnessed three Jewish prisoners try God in absentia for abandoning the Jewish people during the Holocaust. From this experience, Wiesel wrote the play and novel The Trial of God (1979). It is set in a Ukrainian village during 1649 after a massacre of the Jewish inhabitants, possibly as part of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. In the play, three travelling minstrels arrive in the village, having intended to perform a play. Instead they perform a mock trial of God for allowing the massacre. The verdict is innocent, after a stirring lone defence by a stranger who, in a twist, is revealed to be the Devil.
The television play God on Trial (2008), written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, depicts a scene similar to that attributed to Elie Wiesel, but is also described by Boyce as "apocryphal". In it, three Auschwitz prisoners sue God. The trial returns a guilty verdict, although with likely reasons for appeal.
In the Touched by an Angel (1998) episode "Jones vs God", a town is dying from a drought while other towns around it have received rain. Mr. Jones therefore sues God for unfair treatment. Tess represents God in the matter.
In a satirical news piece, The Onion parody newspaper published an article stating that New York attorneys had filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the Children of Israel (the Israelites). The suit alleged a breach of the religious covenant between God and his chosen people, and sought $4.2 trillion in punitive and compensatory damages.
Blameless in Abaddon, the second book of the Godhead Trilogy by James Morrow, features a magistrate who tries God for crimes against humanity.
Christ on Trial is a book written by Roger Dixon describing a TV program trying Jesus Christ in a US court.
Read more about this topic: Lawsuits Against God
Famous quotes containing the words fictional and/or suits:
“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“I love meetings with suits. I live for meetings with suits. I love them because I know they had a really boring week and I walk in there with my orange velvet leggings and drop popcorn in my cleavage and then fish it out and eat it. I like that. I know I’m entertaining them and I know that they know. Obviously, the best meetings are with suits that are intelligent, because then things are operating on a whole other level.”
—Madonna [Madonna Louise Ciccione] (b. 1959)