by God
19 The third angel is Michael, chief of the archangels, the angel of mercy and sanctification, and the commander of the Army of God; he is present on every battlefield, granting victory to the side of the righteous; “victory” in this case betokening a wide range of outcomes, from triumph to triumph-by-martyrdom.
20 Michael is often portrayed in art as androgynous, but he has asked me to tell thee that he is in fact “all man”; and that if thou couldst see clear to painting his jawbone a little squarer, he would greatly appreciate it; because some of the other angels tease him about it sometimes, and even in heaven, words do hurt.
21 The fourth angel and chief of all is Gabriel, my messenger of good tidings; it is he who came to Daniel to interpret his visions, and foretold the births of John the Baptist and Jesus, and first revealed the Koran to Muhammad, and oversaw the Flutie-to-Phelan Hail Mary that beat Miami in 1984.
22 (By the way, it is foolish to call such plays “Hail Marys,” for Mary has absolutely no interest in sports; indeed, if thou ever besought her aid on such a play on behalf of thy team, she would smile and say something like unto, “Okay, which color costume are they?”)
23 Collectively I affectionately refer to Uriel, Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel as my “Kids in the Halo”; for they are quick-witted and nimble-minded, and have over the eons not only provided invaluable service on behalf of God and man, but written much of my strongest material.
24 And the fifth and last angel I will mention is Lucifer.
25 More on him later.
CHAPTER 12
1As I busied myself with expanding my business, I left earth well enough alone; hopeful that the mere memory of the Flood would suffice to keep its people on the straight and narrow path of ceaselessly expressing their gratitude to me through the regular incineration of large farm animals.
2 Yet in this I was disappointed, and most grievously.
3 It would have been one thing if humanity had simply started taking the sun and moon and seedtime and harvest for granted, failing to acknowledge who had given it to them.
4 This I might have chalked up to simple discourtesy, and dealt with through the usual array of etiquette lessons thou callest “natural disasters” (see Smitus 1–4).
5 But something far worse was transpiring: the people were inventing false gods in the form of stone idols, whom they would then praise, and worship, and sacrifice to, and “idolize.”
6 (Truly, I detest it when people verb a noun.)
7 I have been called a jealous God; the description is accurate, but misleading; for it evokes the image of a spurned lover or a rival tradesman, whereas my jealousy is of a far different nature.
8 Consider the toddler who scrawleth with a crayon upon a piece of parchment, and deems it a masterpiece;
9 How he runs to his mother, demanding that she behold his artistic creation and admire it.
10 It matters not if at that moment she is engaged in any of the numerous other activities that fill her busy life; nor that the drawing in truth resembles nothing so much as an epileptic’s doodle;
11 The toddler must have praise, and soon; else will he become agitated and surly, and tears flow, and breath held.
12 And so all household activities cease while the mother heaps sufficient encomia upon the lad; and hails his talents, and shouts his greatness, and magnetizes his work upon the keeper of cold foods that very moment.
13 Now consider that I am that toddler; and thou art that mother; and the universe is the picture; and that very moment is every single moment, ever.
14 This will start to give thee a sense of my laudatory needs.
15 Lo, it is very easy to create idols and give them desirable attributes; to envision them as animals, or the sun, or whatever objects or creatures float thine ark; even to invent a pantheon of such idols who share many exciting adventures, and harebrained schemes, and wacky misunderstandings.
16 Such deities will always bear the yoke of godship more lightly than I, and prove suppler instruments for thy mythmaking; for they have at their disposal the one weapon in the universe I can never wield: nonexistence.
17 Take Ninurta, the Sumerian farming god: he had no problem metamorphosizing into a winged lion, or retrieving the Tablets of Destiny stolen by Anzû, or bearing the slain Bison-Beast on his chariot beam, or consorting with Ugallu, or being worshipped as a healer and feared as the bringer of winds.
18 He was happy to serve all these purposes for the Sumerians, because he was not real; and was thus what I will charitably call “mythologically flexible.”
19 But Ninurta never sent a single actual rain cloud; he never called forth one stalk of actual wheat; he had no sense of responsibility; like everyone else in his pantheon, he never worked a gods-damned day in his life.
20 I may have my faults: impetuosity, jealousy, short-temperedness, and others I shall reveal; indeed, after this book is published, no longer will one of my faults be keeping things bottled up inside; I am coming clean, and it feels good; yea, I embrace the catharsis.
21 But unlike all other gods, I am real; I am the LORD thy God, King of the Universe; and thou art stuck with me.
22 Thus it is wicked and foolish for people to seek to escape this truth by carving ridiculous “divinities” out of stone, rather than follow the course of action dictated by both obedience and logic:
23 Burning beasts of burden on ceremonial altars until the smoky aroma of ox-fat is thick enough to appease thine invisible, B-B-Q–lovin’ sky-god.
24 (And for the record, if thy meat is smothered in Sticky Fingers Smoke-house’s Tennessee Whiskey Sauce, consider thyself entitled to ten sin-free masturbations.)
CHAPTER 13
1But I was out of the end-of-the-world business; true, I had left myself a loophole whereby I could smite mankind by any means other than a flood; but had I done so, everyone’s last thought would have been, “Wow, another apocalypse . . . guess Someone’s out of ideas.”
2 So I decided to take a different approach; to focus on a handful of Chosen People, already rich in righteousness, and, through a generous real-estate offer, incentivize them to spread their moral wealth, that it might trickle down to the less piously fortunate.
3 The quest to find these People became one of the first tasks of my new support team, and their solution was ingenious: they constructed, alongside a well-traveled trade route in Chaldea, a single wooden stall, like unto a lemonade stand in the middle of the desert;
4 And its top part bore a sign reading, “Wouldst thou be Chosen? Inquire within!”
5 And lo, on the very first day, who should stumble across the stand but a spry young man, no more than 75; with fire in his eyes, and dreams in his heart, and foot rot in his sheep;
6 That is why he was in the area, actually, to let his flock walk on the dry dirt, that they might obtain hoof relief.
7 He was, of course, Abraham; the patriarch of monotheism; the progenitor of my three great religions; the father of the Israelites, the Ishmaelites, the Edomites, the Midianites, and the Parasites;
8 Though he hated that last group; all they ever did was sleep in his tent and ask for money.
9 Abraham had already shown himself a literal iconoclast; for months earlier he had broken into his father’s idol shop in the town of Haran, and smashed all the idols to demonstrate the folly of ascribing divine power to manmade artifacts.
10 (He had also shown himself wise, by having previously purchased small-business theft insurance on his father’s behalf; and staging the crime scene so that it appeared to be the work of the Haran-sackers, a notorious gang of local cat burglars.)
11 I was anxious to begin; so I told Abraham that if he would move from his father’s house I would take him to a land where I would make of him a great nation, and make his name immortal, and bless those that bless him, and curse those that curse him; but that I needed an answer quickly, as I was kind of in a rush.
12 And Abraham agreed; so he left the land of Haran and set forth f
or Canaan, along with his slaves, and his considerable possessions, and his wife Sarah, and his nephew Lot; or, as the angels and I used to call him, “Vacant Lot”; for truly, he was not the sharpest spear-point in the desert.
13 I say not that Lot was dumb; merely, that his tent had a couple of poles loose.
14[Rimshot on the tabor.]
15 Truly; I say not that Lot was dumb; merely that he was a few camels short of a caravan.
16[Rimshot on the tabor.]
17 Verily; I say not that Lot was dumb; merely that his flocks tended him.
18[Rimshot on the tabor.]
19 No, for the last time I plead with thee, do not misapprehend my meaning; by no means am I declaring Lot lacking in wisdom;
20 Merely, that they recently unearthed a book about him from a cave, called The Braindead Sea Scrolls.
21[Large rimshot on the tabor.]
22 Yea, Lot was not very bright; nonetheless he was virtuous, and that is why he and his family (with one exception) were the sole survivors of the most famous strategic bombing campaign in all of scripture.
23 I speak, of course, of Sodom and Gomorrah; but I cannot speak of them without first addressing, in greater depth, a topic that has already been broached in this memoir.
CHAPTER 14
1The Bible’s verses on homosexuality have been the focus of more debate and rancor than any others; a fact I confess I did not foresee.
2 For when I transcribed the Torah to Moses, I anticipated the most controversy would surround the verses in Leviticus 27 mandating that those dedicating part of their family estate to me must value it according to the amount of seed required for its planting, at the rate of fifty shekels of silver per bushel of barley seed.
3 I remember dictating these lines to Moses; and afterward looking up to find him staring at me in wide-eyed astonishment, and saying, “Thou do knowest that when the Israelites read this, they’re going to lose their fucking shit, right?”
4 But we were wrong; it is the lines on homosexuality that proved most contentious; so let me first express my appreciation for the fact that, more than 3,000 years after the writing of the Old Testament, so many of you still regard its words as the final arbiter of morality.
5 Thou art right to do so; for my injunctions on sexual intercourse, and dietary laws, and menstruation, and the need to sacrifice bulls with grain offerings of three-tenths of an ephah of the finest flour mixed with half a hin of olive oil, and the right and wrong ways to sell thine own daughters into sexual slavery, are not the product of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time;
6 They are timeless.
7 The last thing thou shouldst ever do, is create thine own set of moral values based on the realities of the world in which thou actually livest.
8 But there has been a fundamental misinterpretation regarding the specific verses thought to condemn homosexuality in Leviticus: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it [is] abomination,” and “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death.”
9 In retrospect, I understand how “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind” could be seen as a proscription against homosexuality, among those of a predisposition to find it so; yet that is not what was meant.
10 What was meant is this:
11 If thou art a man, and thou seest another man that thou desirest, do not cut off his genitals, use a knife to carve a slit where they were, and insert thyself into it, that thou mayest “lie” with him as thou wouldst a woman.
12 Surely even the gayest among you would agree that that is detestable.
13 I have already shown how I created Adam and Steve; and to those who say, “If God wanted us all to be gay, he would have created us with both male and female sex organs,” I say, “Yea; but if I did not want any of you to be gay, I would not have made the male anus so accommodating to the erect penis.”
14 And to those who say, “Homosexuality is a sin, because it goes against God’s directive to be fruitful and multiply,” I have already conceded the point biologically; but I would note that creatively speaking, gays have it all over straight people, fruitfulness-wise;
15 And as for multiplying, though it is true they cannot reproduce by themselves, nowhere do I forbid them from receiving help in bearing young from other members of their communities;
16 Such as donors, or surrogates, or a female best friend who neareth 40 and hath not yet found her perfect breeding partner, and whineth continually of the slow beshadowing of her biological sundial.
17 Besides, it is an undeniable fact that those clergymen harshest in their condemnation of gays and lesbians are often those struggling hardest against their own hidden urges; which is why they cannot even preach straight.
18 It was certainly true in regard to the serpent in the Garden; and it has certainly been true of many other “men of God” in all three of my great religions who have spoken out against homosexuality.
19 Joel Osteen, for instance; he is gay.
20 (Note that I do not say he has committed homosexual acts, for that could be shown to be demonstrably true or false; I simply say that, in the secret recesses of his heart, Joel Osteen yearns for the tender touch of another man.
21 This is subjective, intangible, and my opinion, and said without actionable malice, divine or legal.)
22 Verily, I hope I have made myself clear on this issue.
23 I have been accused of many things in my day, and of some rightly; but I am in no way homophobic.
24 Gay, straight, bisexual, transgendered; ye are all equally smiteable in my eyes.
CHAPTER 15
1Which brings me to Sodom; where it is true that the custom of male homosexuality was prevalent.
2 (Even then the word “sodomy” was used to refer to it, though not as a noun but an adjective; as when two men would draw unusually close in a tent, and an onlooker would say, “Is it just me, or is it getting sodomy in here?”)
3 But that is not why I punished Sodom; and it is certainly not why I punished Gomorrah; which had hardly anything by way of a gay scene, except for one clandestine tavern operating on weekends, The Fire and Rimstone.
4 No; the reason Sodom and Gomorrah had to be destroyed was simple: they were the twin hubs of a massive international money-laundering operation.
5 The plan was cunning: a bandit would come to the cities with stolen merchandise; he would take it to one of the many retailers in the bazaar, then offer to barter it for a small “legitimate” ware, such as pottery or some cloth; this ware being offered at an extremely high price, in effect the merchant’s “cleaning fee.”
6 The bandit would then hand over all his goods; and the storekeeper would give him the ware, and return his “change” to him in untraceable coins.
7 Thus, the bandit cameled away with “clean” money, and a record of a seemingly lawful commercial transaction; while the merchant was left with a whole new cache of stolen goods to resell—and be restolen yet again by his cohort, the bandit;
8 For, as thou mayest have guessed, they were in cahoots.
9 Nearly every citizen of Sodom and Gomorrah was in on this scheme; it was a criminal enterprise unparalleled in scope, and it may put it in perspective if I reveal that, in 1653 B.C. alone, the dishonest tradesmen of the two cities collectively laundered over 5,000 shekels.
10 That is not a misprint: 5,000 shekels.
11 The two towns were corrupt to their marrow, and I had no qualms about ordering them destroyed; but I knew good old Vacant Lot lived in Sodom along with his two daughters and his wife, Trish.
12 (Yea; her name is not given in Genesis, but it was Trish.
13 Not short for Patricia, either; just Trish.)
14 And two angels came to Lot’s house, and he showed them his usual brand of oafish hospitality; until the crowd gathered outside, and demanded that they come out, “so that they might know them�
��; wicked behavior, for it would have not only been rape, but, the worst kind of rape: angel-rape.
15 Truly, thou dost not wish to know what eternity holds in store for angel-rapists.
16 And as it saith, Lot spoke through the closed door, “I have two daughters which have known not man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing, for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.”
17 I wish I could convey to thee in words the look on Lot’s daughters’ faces at that moment.