The Story of God (5 page)

A mob of homosexuals appeared at Lot's door and started yelling, “Bring those men out so we can have sex with them!” (Gen. 19:5) God's jaw dropped—this was even worse than he'd expected! Not only were all the men in Sodom homosexuals, they were also rapists! They wanted to rape his angels (“exactly as I knew they would,” he admitted to himself). God saw young
boys in the mob, some as young as four or five—was that a two year-old?!—and found that puzzling. (Gen. 19:4) Were boys born homosexual in Sodom, he briefly wondered? “No,” he instantly knew. “They
chose
it. It is an abomination and they will all die for it.”

Lot tried to calm the mob by offering them his two virgin daughters for what would much later be crudely referred to as a “gangbang.” (Gen. 19:8) But of course that wasn't going to work. “That mob of men wants penis and balls, not girls,” God muttered to himself. He was slightly, uncomfortably excited by what was happening. There was a part of him, he had to admit, that actually wanted to see the mob rape his male angels. “Oh, they would, they
definitely
would,” he whispered hoarsely, then shook his head slightly. “Focus, Lord,” he told himself.
“Focus.”

For a moment, God wondered whether what Lot had done, offering his virgin daughters to a rape-mob, was in any way “wrong.” No, he decided, it was not. Lot
knew
all these men were homosexuals and wouldn't accept his offer, therefore it was not wrong. “It's not the homosexuals who want those girls,” God chuckled to himself, “it's Lot himself!” And he would have them too!

God looked back down at Sodom. He'd taken his eye off it for a moment while he was thinking about Lot; the situation had deteriorated. The homosexual rapists were just about to break into Lot's house. (Gen. 19:9) “Time to move,” God said to himself. He aimed a finger downward and instantly there was a blinding flash of light. (Gen. 19:11) The rapists staggered around, rubbing their eyes, suddenly helpless.

Lot grabbed his family and they rushed away. The angels told them not to look back (God wasn't totally sure why he didn't want them to look back; he just didn't, that's all), and when Lot's wife
did
look back, God took this opportunity to turn her into salt. (Gen. 19:26) It looked fantastic, better than he could have hoped—a bright white human statue, mouth agape, eyes wide. “A salty picture of terror,” God thought to himself. (In years to
come, animals would lick the salt sculpture down to nothing, which was both annoying and amusing to God.)

God sent holy fire down from the sky and burned up Sodom and Gomorrah and all the homosexuals who lived there. (Gen. 19:24) (“So much for our little ‘deal,'” he smirked, thinking of Abraham.) It had been awhile since he had killed a bunch of humans at one time—since the flood really. As he watched all those sinners burn, shrieking and moaning in agony, God thought to himself, “This is good. This is what they deserve.” He liked burning people—it was visual and exciting in a way that drowning them was not. Hell, he decided, when it was up and running, would be like this, except that rather than burning for 30 or 40 seconds, the wicked would burn
forever.
It was a delicious idea. Two little girls ran past, on fire. God stroked his mighty chin, wondering, did they have it coming too? Yes—yes, they did.

Lot and his daughters escaped to a cave where the old man had sex with both girls and impregnated them. Lot apparently felt slightly uncomfortable about what happened because he tried to lie and say it was the
girls'
idea, not his. (Gen. 19:32) “They got me drunk, I had no idea what was happening,” he lied. “They told me that there were no other men on earth!” Which was ridiculous, God knew that very well; other than Sodom and Gomorrah, there were towns full of men everywhere! Lot had specifically asked for permission to take the girls to the next town! (Gen. 19:20) But God decided to let Lot get away with the story because, really … who cares? He had just wiped out the most abhorrent sin there was, homosexuality; what did he care if creepy old Lot wanted to have sex with his own daughters? As usual, God had no idea what their names were. (Gen. 19:31) “Women are so utterly boring to me!” he said to himself, amused. The sons that would result from these pregnancies, though, Moab and Ben-ami (“I always know the boys' names,” God noted proudly to himself) would lead nations! That's how “wrong” Lot's behavior was! (Gen. 19:37–38)

When the two male angels returned to heaven, God looked at them and nodded, “well done.” They really were distractingly handsome.

(A bit later, God got Abraham back for questioning his wisdom. “Kill your son, Isaac,” he told him. God could barely keep a straight face at the old man's shocked reaction. God wasn't going to actually
allow
Isaac to be killed, obviously; the boy was quite important to him, in fact—but he was going to have fun with this practical joke, and he took it all the way. Abraham had the knife in the air, poised over his son, when God finally sent an angel down to stop him. “Abraham looked like he was going to shit his pants, it was hilarious!” God roared to some angels. “And I'll tell you something else too: He never talked back to me again!”)

Time passed. Humans came and went. God, having, he felt, wiped out sin when he incinerated Sodom and Gomorrah, took a step back. “Let the humans figure things out for themselves for a while,” he thought. Of course he knew they
wouldn't
figure things out, but he decided to let them try. (The truth was, he hadn't even wiped out towns full of homosexual rapists, it turned out!) (Jud. 19:22) Also, he had other things to work on. Hell, for instance, which was coming along nicely. It really was going to be spectacularly horrible. Heaven too. God's home in the sky had started out as basically nothingness floating over water. Boooo-ring.

Now God had begun to work on it and as he did, he realized that he had very specific tastes, and that he loved it. It was gaudy and colorful and
fabulous.
Heaven was becoming the wonderful home he'd always wanted for himself. Designing and decorating it took a
lot
of time and effort, though. At the center of things, there was a massive marble sculpture of God, one hand raised, the other on his hip, a stern look on his face. It was marvelous. There were also lots and lots of mirrors; God loved mirrors. There were, as well, a number of heroic portrait paintings of God hanging in midair. Most of them had been painted by angels, who were not particularly gifted artists (most of them, God much later realized, were mildly retarded), but no matter, they were still excellent.

One of the few times God looked down at what was happening on earth, he saw a man named Onan, who refused to impregnate his sister-in-law, pulling out before he ejaculated. (Gen. 38:9) This was absolutely unacceptable! Sperm was precious stuff,
not
to be spilled on the ground! Onan would also sometimes masturbate, which God was infuriated by. “That glorious seed is not to be wasted!” he nearly shouted as he watched Onan “whack off.” God killed Onan, obviously. (Gen. 38:10)

After several hundred years of working on heaven, as well as traveling around the universe he'd created (“not much,” he thought to himself), God felt reenergized, ready to reengage with mankind. It was around this time that a human being came along who God liked in a wholly different way than any he'd known before. The man's name was Moses, and he was smart, tough, ambitious, and loyal. For the first time, God thought to himself, “This is a guy I'd like to be friends with.” Moses, naturally, felt the same way, and so a beautiful friendship was born. “This guy understands me,” God would think to himself. “I can express myself with him! I can tell him exactly how I want my people to act!”

Their friendship had gotten off to a very rocky start. Moses had not cut off his own son's foreskin, as God had demanded, and God was furious about it. “I like Moses very much, but that foreskin of his son's
has
to go,” he had thought. God
hated
foreskins. “My biggest mistake,” he had called them. “I should send Moses a message,” God had thought. “Get your son circumcised
immediately.”
Yes, that was the obvious thing for him to do. But then God shook his head violently. “No. I'm going to
kill Moses,”
he had suddenly decided. (Ex. 4:24) “I like him and I want to be friends with him, but this foreskin thing is too much. I'm going to beat him to death with my bare hands.”

God flew down to earth and walked toward his peoples' camp. It was night, very dark. There were a few small fires burning, a few quiet voices. God stomped toward the camp, clenching his fists. Suddenly he stopped, feeling his foot sink into something
soft and squishy. The smell hit him. He looked down. It was human poo! God cursed; he had to remember to command the humans to bury their poo! (Deut. 23:14–15) It was all over his sandal! God was even
more
furious now. He
hated
the humans at this moment, the way they pooped on the ground, the way they disobeyed him, the way they didn't remove their foreskins!

God saw someone walking toward him from the camp. It was Moses! God charged him and tackled him, knocking him to the ground with a heavy thud. Moses looked up, amazed. “God?” he managed, before God punched him in the face,
hard.
Moses' head spun to one side, his eyes rolled, a trickle of blood ran out of his nose. God hit him again in the mouth, crack! Moses' lip split; blood ran between his teeth. “What are you
doing?”
Moses whispered, before God grabbed him by the throat and started to squeeze. “I'm going to kill you, Moses,” he said between clenched teeth. He slowly throttled Moses, feeling the life ebb out of him. God hesitated. Was he really going to kill Moses, the future lawgiver, just because his son still had a foreskin? Yes, he was,
definitely.
Moses' eyes bugged out, his face was purple, he was nearly dead.

Then God heard frantic footsteps rushing toward him and a woman's voice screaming “wait, WAIT!” As God pulled back for a second and Moses sucked in a desperate breath, his wife, Zipporah, her son in her arms, rushed between her husband and God. Wielding a sharp rock, she very quickly and efficiently proceeded to yank up her son's little robe and cut off his foreskin! (Ex. 4:25) God sat back, out of breath, amazed at Zipporah's actions. Somehow, from inside their tent, she had grasped that God was throttling her husband to death because their son still had a foreskin. Grabbing a rock (“a
rock,”
God marveled), she had rushed out and, in near darkness, cut the wailing baby's foreskin off! She had then rubbed the bloody foreskin against Moses' leg and said to him, “Now you are truly a bridegroom of blood.” God got up and, without a word, walked back into the desert night, trying to understand Zipporah's odd remark but failing.
Then he flew up to heaven and cleaned the last bit of shit out of his sandal.

God was glad Moses was still alive. In Moses, he finally had someone he could open up to—someone he could share his desires for his people with and also trust to communicate that vision to others. “I could just appear in the sky, I suppose,” God mused to himself. “Talk to all of them at once.” It wasn't a bad idea exactly—but he didn't want to do it. He wanted to talk to
one person,
Moses, and then have
him
talk to all the other people. It just felt better that way, and by this point God had learned to not second guess himself.

Moses traveled back to Egypt, and this gave God the chance to mess with Pharaoh again. He had enjoyed causing plagues back in Abraham's day, “but that was nothing,” God grinned to himself. “This time, Pharaoh is
really
going to pay.” (“For what?” popped into his head.
“For not believing in me,”
came the instant response, followed a second later by, “Exactly according to my plan!”)

God pondered how he would torment Pharaoh. “If he will not allow my people to worship me—which he won't, I will
see
to it that he doesn't!—(God could control Pharaoh's mind and make him do whatever he wanted, “like a puppet,” he chuckled to himself) (Ex. 7:3)—then I will plague him with … hmm, what?” God stroked his chin, thinking of the
worst
things he could send at Pharaoh. Snakes? Wasps? Spiders? Suddenly he snapped his fingers; “I have it!” he exclaimed. “I will send a plague of frogs at Pharaoh!” (Ex. 7:27) God despised frogs—their slimy skin, popped out eyes, and hideous croaking. God would send them into Pharaoh's palace. That would teach him!

The plague of frogs worked brilliantly, Pharaoh begged to have the frogs removed. (Ex. 8:4) God told Moses to warn Pharaoh that the plagues were just beginning. “I could kill you if I wanted to,” God had Moses tell Pharaoh. “The only reason I don't is because I want you to see my power, so I will become more famous!” (Ex. 9:16) God was slightly surprised by what
he'd just said. He wanted to be famous? He was the creator of the entire universe, why would “fame” matter to him? Immediately God moved on. “So I want fame, so what?”

Pharaoh softened a little; he was about to let God's people do what they wanted. But that was no good. God wanted to keep punishing Pharaoh; he loved punishing him; he had no interest in ending what he by now called “my little hurting game.” So every single time Pharaoh came close to doing exactly what God demanded of him, God hardened his heart and forced him
not
to do it! (Ex. 10:1, 10:20, 10:27, 11:10, 14:4, 14:8) For a moment, God considered the idea of “free will.” That is, did humans have it? If God could mind-control Pharaoh, the most powerful man in the world, who
couldn't
he control? Answer: No one—he controlled everyone. But if the humans weren't free, if he was controlling them, then on what basis was he punishing them? “Am I not the puppeteer who hates his own puppets?” God asked himself, then quickly answered: “Indeed I do hate them and I'll tell you why: Because they are wicked!” Problem solved.