A MISPLACED CHAPTER FROM THE BOOK OF GENESIS

(Last week was reading week at UBC, but we were so freaking busy that we didn’t even get a chance to rest. Therefore, this week we get to catch up on our sleep by reprinting some of our finest. Enjoy.)

– FROM THE ARCHIVE –

And lo, it came to be that God was sitting around in his Lazy-God recliner one quiet millennium, and He sayeth unto His Godlike self: “God is bored and needs some entertainment.” And lo, God created the Earth and all it’s inhabitants without getting up from the Lazy-God chair, even whence God needed the occasional short beer break while working, still He did not leave His chair, but simply reached into His Almighty Demi-God Fridge which He always keepeth beside the Lazy-God chair.

Late in the week, as one Godlike afternoon twinkled into evening, God looketh down upon His new entertainment system called Earth and He smiled at the little animals and plants that He created. He giggled at their natural tendency toward intra- and inter-species violence, and He snickered with slight embarrassment at their obsessive mating rituals. After a few more Godweiser’s from the Demi-Fridge, God decided to make a man. Much later, God realized that He should have done this before His eighth beer of the evening.

And lo, God created mankind, and womankind, and He did smile upon them and snicker in slight embarrassment at their obsessive mating rituals. Soon, in God-time that is, God realized that this mankind He had created was getting quite good at thinking on its own, and was getting rather uppity and rude with God. This mankind seemed to enjoy flaunting God’s arbitrary rules, and so God, in His infinite kindness tried all kinds of subtle punitive measures: like banishing the first man-family into the desert, or drowning everyone on Earth except for one man-family. After such measures did not stem the tide of mankind’s uppity-ness, God decided that He would use His infinite powers to hide Himself from man’s view.

And so God created the shroud of evolution. Yes, God, who valued truth and the love of mankind above all else, created an elaborate lie in order distance Himself from His most clever creations. Much later, God realized, He probably should have created a therapist and some anti-anxiety drugs for Himself.

And lo, God, who had created all the world in only six days, had created mankind on the fifth or sixth day (He could never remember which, because eight beers is a lot, even for God). After this great achievement God decided to devise elaborate falsehoods to hide His accomplishments. He made man think the Earth was over 4 billion years old, instead of several thousand years old. He made man think that life had started with the smallest of organisms, and that through an elaborate system of controlled reproductive errors and adaptive selection of beneficial mistakes that man eventually “evolved” from these simplest organisms. He hid fake fossils in the ground, and tinkered with genomes, and designed elaborate taxonomic relationships among the existing organisms such that mankind would take years and years to elucidate all His lies. He bought a small desk at the God-ware store and put it next to His Lazy-God chair, spending night after God-night sweating over the elaborate lies upon lies that He needed to create to keep mankind fooled. As man became more sophisticated and invented tools and high cost scientific apparatus, so God needed to become more sophisticated in His lies. Soon, God was spending the bulk of His time on His elaborate fabrications, and ignoring His own real first interests: truth and love.

Some men and women really made God’s head hurt. These humans, who called themselves scientists, made God’s life a living Hell. Here He was, a supreme being of love and truth, who commanded all mankind to seek perfection in love and truth, and He had to stay up late almost every bloody night of the week, and most weekends, fabricating increasingly elaborate lies to keep these so-called scientists thinking that He did not exist and that the Earth and all its living beings came about via a slow, semi-random process they called “evolution”. These two conflicting ideologies, love and truth versus elaborately constructed falsehoods, swirled around in God’s giant brain causing Him much guilt and consternation, not to mention loss of sleep. And then one day the matter and anti-matter of God’s brain simply collided, and God’s head exploded.

The matter and anti-matter of God’s exploding head shot outward at terrific speeds on that fateful day, fourteen billion years ago, and in a matter of mere moments created billions of galaxies each filled with billions upon billions of stars. Remnants of this big bang are visible today with the telescopes and other scientific tools the current inhabitants of Earth have designed. About ten billion years after this big bang, some of the exploded contents of God’s head cooled enough to form planets, such as the one we call “Earth”. Life evolved on Earth, and likely has evolved on other planets, because God simply cannot be still, even in exploded form.

Some of the bits of God’s exploded head contained memory-bytes of the dilemma that caused God’s head to explode in the first place, and these memory-bytes sometimes haunt the subconscious of the most highly intellectually evolved Earth organisms, such as dolphins and even humans. These thought-dreams of God’s memory both confuse and comfort the beings that are sensitive to them. And so it came to be that God was everywhere, in every atom, in every subatomic particle, exploded across the Universe in a gigantic irrepressible splatter of life, and love, and truth, and even and always: conflict.