Satire At Its Finest: Chris Matheson Tells The Story of God Most Excellently!

[Re-dated post since this book is now available]

Chris Matheson is a screenwriter whose credits include the movies Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and Rapture-Palooza. If you have never seen the classic movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure do so soon, as it's EXCELLENT! The WIKI page for it is here.

Chris will release a book in just a month, where he writes a comedy about God from the biblical texts themselves, titled: The Story of God: A Biblical Comedy about Love (and Hate). I was very honored to see it beforehand and write a blurb for it, along with Jerry Coyne, Lawrence M. Krauss, Peter Boghossian, Michael Shermer, and others.

Below I'll whet your appetites with the lines from the first section of his hilarious and intelligent book. Humorously he points to some incongruities in the biblical text itself so we can laugh. This is satire and ridicule at it's finest and I highly endorse it. Will it convince people like Randal Rauser? *Cough* It's not meant to. [Rauser has still failed to respond to Tristan Vick's book, The Swedish Fish, Deflating the Scuba Diver and Working the Rabbit's Foot, for which I also wrote a blurb.]
CHAPTER ONE

God sits by himself, alone in the darkness. How long has he been there? It feels like forever. Has it been forever? How did he get here? Who put him here? Did he put himself here? When did he do that? Around him: Nothing. A void, no light. Just him, sitting there in the darkness. Was he sitting? Standing? What was he? Wait... Was he even alone? What was that sound? Peering down, in the darkness, he realized something.

Underneath him was water; (Gen. 1:2) cold, empty, utterly lifeless. It was creepy. Where had it come from? Did he make it, then forget about it? Did he not make it? And if he didn’t-- then who did? He had to have made it-- yet he couldn’t remember doing so. But if he had created water (as of course he had) then why had he created only that much reality and no more? Why had he been sitting there in the darkness, above the water, basically forever? He didn’t know why-- he just sort of... had. But now, for whatever reason, God had a thought: He wanted to see.

How would he do it? God tried clapping his hands. Nothing happened. He tried clearing his throat loudly, then closing his eyes tightly and re-opening them. Nothing worked. Was he stuck here forever, sitting in the darkness with the dark water swirling beneath him and absolutely nothing to do? It sounded horrible, “hellish,” as he would later say.

God had an idea.

He would speak aloud what he wished for. He had never spoken before. He thought about what he wanted to say. “Light, please?” No, it seemed weak, lacking in gravitas. “Turn on the lights?” Stronger perhaps, but who would he be making this demand of? “I want light.” Too child-like. “LIGHT!?” Good, he liked it-- but it was also meaningless. “Light what?”

God sat in the darkness for another chunk of time. How long? He didn’t know; time didn’t exist yet. Then it hit him. He was sitting slumped, head in hands, listening to the water below, staring at the inky blackness around him through his fingers, when he suddenly knew exactly what to say.

“Let there be light,” he called out.

And there was. (Gen. 1:3)

God was delighted. He could do this, he could make things happen, create whatever reality he felt like. It was an extraordinary moment for him. An unwanted thought crossed God’s mind: Was someone already there who responded to my command?” Impossible, he was God, he was alone.

“I was obviously talking to myself, commanding myself to make light, that makes perfect sense!” God told himself.

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