[the rules] 10 rules for Joan of Arcadia

It's been a long time since I did any of this, but I used to collect lists of rules; the more specific their purpose, the better. The following is a set of ten rules the creator of Joan Of Arcadia laid down for writers on her show. (In which a teenage girl starts getting messages from God and doesn't know if she's crazy, etc. As far as I know, she doesn't join the army or start dressing in drag.)

1. God cannot directly intervene.

2. Good and evil exist.

3. God can never identify one religion as being right.

4. The job of every human being is to fulfill his or her true nature.

5. Everyone is allowed to say "no" to God, including Joan.

6. God is not bound by time. This is a human concept.

7. God is not a person and does not possess a human personality.

8. God talks to everyone all the time in different ways.

9. God's plan is what is good for us, not what is good for him.

10. God's purpose for talking to Joan, and everyone, is to get her (us) to recognize the interconnectedness of all things - i.e., you cannot hurt a person without hurting yourself; all of your actions have consequences; God can be found in the smallest actions; God expects us to learn and grow from all our experiences. However, the exact nature of God is a mystery, and the mystery can never be solved.

I find it interesting that the rules are so bland on their face but also exclude substantial amounts of what TV writers normally do with a higher power of whatever kind. About half of them preclude the use of God as deus ex machina (yeah yeah, I know) or as treacle factory, the things one expects from mainstream shows, and the rest would seemingly interfere with a Buffy/X-Files approach in which arbitrarily powerful or abstract-sounding entities can turn out to be just like humans, only with better superpowers. Only #3 seems intended to make the writers' lives easier, not harder.

That said, the one episode I saw had little going on except a lot of earnestness. But I respect the idea.