There are many reasons to doubt the existence of a kind and bounteous God - Jacques Chirac, Lurgan, George Galloway, Martin Ferris, athlete's foot, synchronised swimming - but all of these are themselves open to debate.
Jacques Chirac is kind to his slippers. Lurgan has exits. George Galloway is not Jacques Chirac. Athlete's foot might not be pretty to us, but if Martin Ferris had it, it would be the prettiest thing about him. Synchronised swimming sometimes goes wrong, and the performers drown.
The argument over the existence of a benign and generous God is thus unresolved. So what's left? What decides whether or not God is a genial old chap in the clouds, indulgently tut-tut-tutting at our many misdemeanours, or a gnashing, snarling old fiend, showering us with bolts of lightning, afflicting our cattle with the murrain, and littering our bottoms with unlanceable boils? This time of year provides the clinching argument. It goes by the usual name of "horsefly", gadfly in older English and the cleg in dialect.
Now the "horsefly" sounds quite amiable. So too does "gadfly" because of the coincidence of sounds. The usual meaning of "gad" is of light-hearted pleasure seeking. However, it is an unrelated word which is the root of the word gadfly, which comes from gaddr, the Old Norse for spear.
The spear-fly just about sums up the horsefly, known to science as haematopota. My Greek is just about non-existent, but I know haema- all right. Blood. And I may be wrong here, but that topo- bit looks ominously like "place". In other words, the fly which goes for the place where the blood is, which is fine as it goes. Flies have to eat too, you know, and what to us is a precious blood vessel to them is the works cafeteria.
Moreover, most of us can spare the odd armful of blood or two for our lesser, six-legged friends.
But the real problem about the cleg is what the little lassie feasts upon between her banquets of blood, which is faeces. It's all the equivalent of a cleggy pub crawl. First you stop off at a nice heap of stinking, rotten fox dung of which you inhale as much as you can. Then you saunter off to the nearest expanse of exposed human body, and amble into the licensed premises marked "vein", using the heat-seeking vision of the cleggish brain. You go to the bar, you insert your proboscis, and you inject half an alimentary canal of mammalian excrement into the soft tissue around the vein. This will stop the blood clotting; and now it's time to let rip, and drink of your fill, and to wassail away like Pistol, Falstaff and Mistress Quickly as the chimes of midnight ring about their ears.
The brilliant key to the continued survival of the horsefly is that at a certain point, its activities will trigger a response, a small tic, from its host, the equivalent of the barman's "Have youse no homes to go to?" At which point, the horsefly will promptly depart. Without the tic, so intrepid boys told me in my youth, the fly will continue inhaling haemoglobin until she explodes: they proudly boasted that they had allowed gadflies to do just that on their arms. One minute she's sucking away like an American teenager at a milkshake, next she goes pop!, cascading the contents of her tummy all over her gallant host's arm.
Do girls allow gadflies to stay on their arms to do this? No. Is this because the cleg who browses from stool to vein is solely female? I do not know what the male of the species does - goes to air-shows, probably, the poor fool - but he doesn't sup at the pool of poo and then banquet upon human blood, thereby spreading vile infections.
And though I know the female of the human species is in other regards a sturdy brute, I can hardly believe that it is sisterliness alone which prevents a girl steadfastly watching a gadfly on her arm gorge itself until it blows up in a shower of blood.
Thus, provided the horsefly is spared a boy's little plucky cunning, she will then depart for her next hostelry, which could be cow-dung or dog-droppings. And then back to a human vein; and so on and so forth, as this delightful little feeding cycle wends its merry way, with each human guest being injected with a little syringe of bacterial filth which over the next days will become infected, septic and swollen.
So wherefore the cleg? Whence the gadfly? Why has God in His wisdom given it such a pernicious food cycle, and moreover, made us part of it? It all seems so gratuitous. Look at other insects. Bees sting only to protect themselves. Wasps the same. Ditto ants. Mosquitoes - like the others, all female - do not choose to spread malaria, but merely want a soupçon of your blood. For they too are the hapless victims of the malaria parasite, and that is only doing what any species does, namely, reproduce. It doesn't want its host to die - either you or the mosquito - any more than you want the plane you're flying in to crash.
With the cleg or gadfly, it's different. It is designed solely to inject excrement into human flesh. So, St Thomas Aquinas, what do you have to say about a God which designed such a beast? Speak up, St Thomas: we cannot hear you. Ah, struck dumb, are you? I thought as much.