PRAISE FOR THE STORY OF GOD
“Part Kurt Vonnegut, part Douglas Adams, but let’s be honest, Matheson had me at ‘Based on the Bible.’”
—Dana Gould, comedian and former writer and producer for The Simpsons
“It isn’t easy being God, as this book makes quite clear. It’s a full-time job and any screwups can haunt you for an eternity. What Life of Brian did for Jesus, The Story of God may do for the Father … or the Son, or the Holy Ghost … It humanizes the poor guy, which, after all, is appropriate since he was created in the image of man.”
—Lawrence M. Krauss, director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University and author of The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing
“Matheson punctures the pretensions of organized religion with unremitting hilarity.”
—Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution Is True and Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible
“Half the people who read this book will laugh out loud, certain Chris Matheson is a twisted comic genius; the other half will laugh silently, equally certain that Chris will spend eternity writhing in hell.”
—Ed Solomon, screenwriter of Men in Black
“The Story of God is an original, funny, and devastating book.”
—Jay Phelan, coauthor of Mean Genes
“If there is a God who wrote the Bible, when he reads this he’s going to wonder why his editors didn’t point out all the problems in his text before publication. Brilliant and irreverent.”
—Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, author of The Moral Arc
“At times the story Matheson tells of God is not just funny, but laugh out loud funny. It’s thought provoking too. I loved it!”
—John W. Loftus, author of Why I Became an Atheist and The Outsider Test for Faith
“God has never been this damned funny in this pseudo-sacred, sacrilegious piece of silliness. In his debut comic novel, Chris Matheson, screenwriter for the Bill & Ted flicks, grabs a seat at the theater of the absurd for an on-the-scene report about The Story of God. With the Bible as script, Matheson perceives a ready-made fantasy plot, ripe with conflict driven by a divine protagonist…. Literalists will cry blasphemy. Thoughtful theists will find more profitable afternoon reading.”
—Gary Presley, Foreword Reviews
“To say Chris Matheson’s The Story of God is irreverent would be misleading: irreverent does not begin to cover it. Matheson sets out to be just about as offensive with this treatment of the god of the Bible as is humanly or divinely possible. Whether or not this book proves to be your cup of tea, you have to admire his commitment, not to mention his lack of regard for errant lightning bolts once word of his little book reaches the Almighty.”
—David Nilsen, Fourth & Sycamore
“This is the version of the bible Gutenberg should have printed. Only difference is, it’s much more fun. Hilarious. Irreverent. Timeless.”
—Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists
“Matheson’s hilarious romp through the Bible reveals the book for what it is—an Iron Age myth. He also reveals the disdain this myth has for women—they are unclean, portrayed as whores, with daughters sacrificed to God while sons are spared. Why any woman believes in this today is a mystery to me.”
—Karen L. Garst, PhD, editor of Women Beyond Belief and blogger at www.faithlessfeminist.com
Pitchstone Publishing
Durham, North Carolina
www.pitchstonepublishing.com
The Story of God © 2015 by Chris Matheson
Satan’s Story © 2016 by Chris Matheson
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-939578-27-3 (mobi)
ISBN 978-1-939578-28-0 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-939578-29-7 (epdf)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Digital cover image of William Blake’s Satan Exulting over Eve (1795) courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
ONE
I don’t know where I came from. None of us do. Most of us don’t claim to. Only the Old Man does that. He claims that he’s been around forever and that he created everything, including me—and I can’t rule it out absolutely—but I doubt it. The truth is, someone else might have made us both. Or we may never have been “made” at all; we may actually be “eternal.”
Anyway, after what felt like an eternity of cold, empty silence, out of nowhere, everything started to suddenly move. Just as it began (or was it just before, I still don’t honestly know), I heard the Old Man yell, “Let there be light!” As if he was doing it. Or maybe he did do it. A lot hinges on that moment, really— and there’s no way for me to know for sure what happened. All I know is that in an instant, where there had been essentially nothingness, there was now … well, something.
The Old Man stood about 100 feet away from me, naked. As I studied him from the shadows (that first light was quite dim), he looked down at his body—then slowly began feeling himself. When he got to his penis, he stopped and stared down at it. He touched it and his eyes widened. Had he never done this before, I wondered? I’d been doing it since—well, as long as I could remember. But maybe he hadn’t. He certainly acted like he hadn’t. He looked shocked for a moment, then upset, even mad. He yanked his hand away and quickly covered himself with a white robe, then stood there in the faint light for a while. “Let there be sky!” he suddenly called out and once again, I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen. Was he making these things occur? I’d have to assume he was, yes. Especially after he called for “land” and suddenly, in the darkness below, there was an entire planet.
Now there was no sun yet, remember—no stars at all. The only illumination was from that dim first light the Old Man had called for—but now there was a planet below us. I didn’t know much anything about—well, anything really at that time, but even so, I had a feeling that the Old Man was proceeding in a very misguided way here. It seemed obvious to me that a star should have come before a planet. (“It was at that moment that I first realized what an idiot we were dealing with here,” Baal later informed me. Yes, he was there from the start too. So were Molech, Zeus, Odin, Krishna, and many others.)
But the Old Man was incapable of admitting a mistake. Rather than quickly creating a sun, he now started covering the earth with plants—all of which quickly withered and died because there was no light or warmth. As he watched all the trees dying and plants withering, the Old Man looked enraged. “As if it was the planet’s fault it was dying,” I remember thinking to myself.
I could tell from the whispered furor around me that the other gods were worried. A single dead, reeking planet in an otherwise empty void was not what we were here for. This situation had to be corrected, and quickly. The Old Man stood there, glaring downward at earth. He obviously had no idea what to do next. Then he reacted in shock as, slowly at first, then faster and faster until it became rather dizzying, the sky began to light up with stars—literally trillions of them. Where there had been only the dark, dying earth, there was now—well, an entire universe. The Old Man looked stunned for a moment, then suddenly called out, “Let there be MORE lights!”
TWO
I still don’t understand why the Old Man created women. Why not create a reality where there were only males, which he so obviously preferred? I’m not totally sure, but my belief is that God had a powerful “feminine” side that needed to be expressed. He was terribly uncomfortable with it—scared of being homosexual, I suppose, though
why that scared him I still don’t know. But the way the Old Man treated Eve was unkind. The poor creature had just been yanked into existence, fully formed, an adult, given no time to grow up, and was now facing her creator—who seemed to dislike her. How can I help her, I instantly wondered?
The Old Man had placed a tree he called the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” (he was pretentious that way) in the middle of the garden the humans lived in. He told the man, Adam, that if he ate of this tree, he’d instantly die. I was pretty sure that was bullshit, that the point of this tree wasn’t “knowledge,” the point was “obedience.” And I told the woman so.
The Old Man’s reaction to the humans’ eating the fruit was fascinating. He turned white with rage and literally stomped down from heaven and around the garden, yelling at the humans, “Where are you?” (He loved to claim that he “knew everything,” but stuff like this kind of gave him away.) The man and the woman, poor things, were resting in each other’s arms when the Old Man found them. He stood there, hands on his hips, a hard, cold gleam in his eye. But underneath his anger I saw something else: a tiny little smile. The Old Man was happy about the way this had gone. He liked being mad at the humans, I suddenly understood; he wanted to blame and punish them. “You will WORK!” he shouted at Adam, and I wanted to point out, “He’s already been working, it’s a meaningless threat!” But I didn’t. “You will suffer giving birth,” he snarled at the woman. “Another meaningless threat,” I wanted to say. “You were already going to have a hard time giving birth, Eve, for purely physiological reasons!”
But before I could speak, the Old Man turned on me. It was the first time he’d ever looked directly at me and it was.. strange. He looked imperious, utterly superior—but there was also a palpable undercurrent of insecurity in his eyes. “As for you, serpent,” he said. “You will crawl on the ground!” I almost laughed. “Serpents already crawl on the ground,” I thought to myself. The Old Man followed that up with, “I will also make sure that women hate snakes!” which was laughable too, because I was possessing a snake, I wasn’t actually a snake. Why was he threatening all snakes? It would have made sense for him to say something like, “Henceforth, all humans will despise you, Satan!” But to issue empty threats to snake-kind? Weak.
As Adam and Eve exited the garden, the Old Man looked at me again and spoke, this time in a lower, quieter voice—less for effect. “Now that he’s become like one of us,” he said, nodding to Adam, “what if he should eat from the tree of life and live forever?” I stared back at him and thought to myself: “What the hell are you even talking about, Old Man? There is no tree of life. Why would there be? Who would it be for?” But here’s the thing with the Old Man: once he said something, he would never, and I mean never, back down. He’d keep digging his feet in deeper and deeper to prove his original point.
In order to prove that there really was a tree of life to protect, the Old Man now created what appeared to be flying man-servants. They were muscular guys with wings dressed in short white robes, all of them quite handsome and athletic. The Old Man gave them swords and told them to chop off Adam’s head if he tried to sneak back into the garden.
THREE
With regard to that first family of human beings, I’ve often wondered to myself: What exactly did the Old Man think was going to happen? In order for mankind (the whole point of this thing for him, as far as I could tell) to continue, one of the two sons, Cain or Abel, would have to have sex with his own mother. Why the Old Man couldn’t see this problem coming is beyond me. It seemed so obvious. For a moment, it seemed like the human story might end before it even began. Then I got an idea. I’d already made reptiles, frogs, lobsters, and many other things (all the things the Old Man doesn’t take credit for, basically); why couldn’t I make people too? So yeah—that’s what I did. I made a whole tribe of people on the other side of the river. One of these people became Cain’s wife and the populating of the world continued. Just like Adam and Eve were similar to their father (i.e., the Old Man) these new people were a lot like me: They were skeptical, doubtful—far less trusting and childlike. They asked more and better questions; they poked and prodded and picked at things. They certainly weren’t inclined to believe the Old Man’s story. I heard that drove him crazy, which I can’t say I minded by this point.
Did it surprise me that the guy the Old Man picked to restart human life after the flood was a complete asshole? Nope, not in the least. The Old Man had awful judgement in people. Of course he’d choose a drunken bully. Of course his “fresh start” wouldn’t work any better than things had worked up to this point. Of course in a short time, the Old Man would be murdering thousands of people again. Humans were what they were. He’d done nothing to change their essential natures. He’d simply killed all of them off, then restarted, seeming to believe that this time everything would be different.
It was around this time that I met Baal for the first time. I can’t say I liked the guy. He was shallow, tiring—extremely vain—and kind of in love with his own appearance and presumed sexiness to, he apparently thought, pretty much everyone.
Baal had a one-track mind. He was pretty much only interested in sex. It made him fairly interesting for a while—and then quite dull. But my people gravitated to Baal. They liked him, found him exciting. Which didn’t surprise me. My people liked sex a lot; I hadn’t told them not to. I hadn’t told them much of anything, really. I’d simply created them and let them live. If they wanted to believe in Baal and participate in his ridiculous ceremonies, well, I didn’t care—and as I said, I certainly wasn’t surprised.
I was a bit surprised, however, when some of the Old Man’s people were drawn to Baal too. The Old Man didn’t know how to handle this. To see Baal, who was not supposed to even exist, attracting his people—well, it was priceless to behold.
I never got tired of watching the arrogant old fool squirm as he watched things happen that, from his standpoint, should have been “impossible.”
A few hundred years later, for a variety of reasons—I think the Tower of Babel had something to do with it—I remember suddenly thinking: “This asshole will never be happy.” I decided it would be fun take him down a notch. I’d just had enough of him, that’s all. I thought long and hard about how
I wanted to do it. And then one day I woke up and I knew what to do.
FOUR
The Old Man was strolling around his heavenly garden with a group of angels, talking too loudly (as usual), gesticulating too broadly (as usual), and bragging (as always). “Job loves me SO much, it’s incredible how much Job loves me! And did I tell you what a good man he is? He is very good. No, I would go so far as to say, he is perfect!” The angels stood there, nodding vaguely and smiling. “Don’t they find him boring?” I often wondered. I later learned that most of them were, by human standards, mildly retarded. Good-looking, obedient, male, and dumb: the perfect companions for the Old Man. So no, I don’t think they were bored. I think they found him quite interesting, in fact, poor things.
The Old Man hadn’t done much work on heaven at this time; his giant remodel was still a few thousand years in the future, but you could already see what garish taste he had. At the center of the garden there was a huge, like hundred-foot-tall marble sculpture of the Old Man, one hand raised, the other on his hip, a stern look on his face. There were several “heroic” portraits of the Old Man hanging on trees. They were crude and obvious, like the work of untalented children. Turns out they’d been painted by angels. But the Old Man obviously loved them.
I thought there would be at least some sort of security around heaven. But no, there wasn’t; I walked right in. When I was about twenty feet away from him, the Old Man stopped talking and noticed me. We looked right at each other as I walked up to the group and stopped a few feet away. There was silence for a moment. The Old Man looked puzzled by my presence—then displeased—and angry. Would he tell me to leave—would he attack me? I hoped not. He was bigger and stronger than me, an
d even if I was quicker and smarter (as of course I was, am, and always will be), he outweighed me by fifty pounds at least. But no, he just stood there, staring at me. I saw a number of things playing across the Old Man’s face. (I’m good at psychology, by the way; it’s one of my strengths.) He looked scornful, contemptuous, utterly superior. Yet at the very same time, he looked worried— even slightly scared. He wanted desperately to come across as “all-powerful,” but he knew—somewhere deep inside him he knew—that it simply wasn’t true. And the longer I stared back at him, the more uncertain he appeared.
Finally, he spoke with forced friendliness, as if to convey to his angels that yes, of course he’d invited Satan to heaven. “Where have you been?” he asked me. I quickly told him the truth; I had been wandering the earth. There was another pause. The Old Man cleared his throat. He didn’t like silence, I could see that. Finally, he smiled broadly, thinking of something to say. “Did you see Job?” he asked me.
“He’s a very good man who loves me.” I lowered the boom on him. “Of course Job loves you,” I said. “He has a nice life. Take that away from him and see what happens.”
The Old Man’s face instantly hardened. His lips got thin, white. Clearly restraining himself, he shrugged casually. “Go ahead and ruin his life then, Satan. You’ll see,” he said.
I have to admit that I was surprised when Job continued to love the Old Man even after I’d dismantled his life. I had assumed he would turn on the Old Man quickly. When I saw the Old Man the next day, I instantly noticed that he looked excited, ebullient even. He’d been publicly vindicated and he obviously felt wonderful about it. This time, as he saw me approaching, his face broke into a huge grin. “Turns out you were wrong, Satan. Job does still love me even though you got me to destroy his life for no reason at all!” he crowed, then suddenly stopped, apparently aware that what he’d just said sounded, you know, bad. It meant that the Old Man knew what he’d done was wrong; he’d just admitted it. The door was cracked for me, so I pushed it open.
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