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Everyone should have a plan for what to do if they are made God for a day. I would have a few personal issues to sort out first (no smitings, just some people whose improved health would be an improvement in my opinion). After that, though, the real work.

The first thing I would do is remove the leadership of North Korea, which is currently an insane hell-hole. Not to kill them; I intend to be a non-destructive God. I would take an appropriate selection of those currently in charge (I would know which ones, because I'd be omniscient), along with those of their families who wanted to go (again, omniscience is very helpful here), and plonk them down on a tropical pacific island.

Something well off the sea-lanes, where they would not be found (think Lost); with enough land and resources to survive. Let them establish their very own worker's paradise, where they can worship Kim Jong-Il to their heart's content. Meanwhile, the rest of North Korea could get back to living some kind of sane lifestyle.

So much for the entree (which for the Americans in the audience does not mean main course; it's French, go look it up). For the main course, the Middle East.

I propose to remove Jerusalem. Not the people; I'd leave them behind, in miraculous new dwellings wired up with power and water and all that, just as before. All the old buildings and the entire landscape would vanish. Morever, I would do some subtle shifting around of the terrain (including the continents) so that even a GPS unit wouldn't be able to point you unambiguously to the former location of any specific spot. All those sacred sites? Gone.

I don't know how long it would take people to find its new location in Antarctica. Well away from the penguin colonies, for reasons that will be clear later. Satellite surveillance for icebergs might see it, or some bored weather researcher, or maybe there's an automated system out there looking for changes, who knows.

When people went to look at it, they would find that it had some graffiti on it. Big graffiti. Carved in stone, in nice big unmistakable letters. The Hebrew for "thou shalt not kill". Arabic, with the same sentiments from the Koran. And round the edge, in English, "If you can't play nicely together, you won't have it at all". I would also cover it in some kind of really hard transparent polymer cement. No dismantling this one and returning it; it's staying here.

There would be a lot of theological disputes about all this, to put it mildly. Unambiguous evidence for a deity, which tradition was s/he really endorsing, that sounds like my mother - is God female? No doubt atheists like me would be on the end of a lot of "I told you so!". I'd be prepared to wear that, in exchange for God unequivocally telling religious nuts to quit killing people.

Dessert is an asteroid. Not a really big one; less than a kilometer across. Something to make a big noise and a spectacular crater, but not to really mess up the biosphere or anything. On an orbit that brings it to earth in about ten years, to strike somewhere in Antarctica... coincidentally, right where I put Jerusalem. Just to make the point crystal clear.

There will be graffiti on this one, too. Very large letters, on the smooth side, where the engineers studying it to try to move it aside will be unable to miss it. Probably in Hindi or Mandarin, just so nobody got funny ideas about Abrahamic religions being the "right ones". It would say "Learn To Cooperate".

All this might not be enough. There's plenty more nuts out there, after all, and all I would have really done was hand out a few hints. Lots of room for free will. No doubt there would be those who thought it was space aliens, or Satan, or something. But I like to think the bulk of humanity is sane, and given the chance will do roughly the right thing.

Of course, we have the same chance now, too. What will we do with it?