Faith & Spirit Quote by Douglas Adams

Adams lands the punchline with the clean cruelty of logic: the character is so afraid of cosmic accountability that he tries to recruit God into abolishing God. The sentence turns on a small mechanical click - the word "then" - which signals not spiritual growth but a debugging moment. Prayer is treated like bad code: it compiles until you notice the contradiction.

The intent is classic Adams: puncture metaphysical dread with bureaucratic rationality. Instead of wrestling with eternity in grand theological terms, the character approaches it like a nervous office worker filling out the wrong form. "Hoped and prayed" sets up an earnest rhythm, the kind you expect from someone in a crisis; the reversal makes that earnestness look faintly ridiculous, which is the point. Adams isn't mocking fear of death so much as mocking the human habit of smuggling self-interest into our highest ideals.

The subtext is darker than the quip admits. Wanting no afterlife isn't just secular preference; it's a desire for escape, an annihilation fantasy presented as common sense. The contradiction he discovers isn't merely philosophical; it's moral. Prayer assumes a listener, which means admitting a universe that might keep receipts.

Context matters: Adams wrote in a late-20th-century Britain where skepticism and spiritual anxiety coexist comfortably. His comedy thrives in that in-between space: people don't believe, exactly, but they still bargain, just in case. The joke works because it treats the afterlife not as mystery but as an administrative problem - and reveals how quickly our convictions collapse when the stakes become personal.