The Story of God: A Biblical Comedy about Love (and Hate)

“Part Kurt Vonnegut, part Douglas Adams, but let’s be honest, Matheson had me at ‘Based on the Bible.’”  —Dana Gould, comedian and writer
 
The Bible offers some clues to God’s personality—he’s alternately been called vindictive and just, bloodthirsty and caring, all-powerful and impotent, capricious and foresighted, and loving and hateful. But no one has ever fully explored why God might be such a figure of contrasts. Nor has anyone ever satisfactorily explained what guides his relationship not just with angels, the devil, and his son, but also with all of creation. Might he be completely misunderstood, a mystery even to himself? Might his behavior and actions toward humankind tell us much more about him than it does about us? Enter the mind of the creator of the universe, travel with him through the heavenly highs and hellish lows of his story, from Genesis to Revelation, to better understand his burdensome journey: being God isn’t easy. After hearing his story—at times troubling and tragic but always hilarious in its absurdity and divine in its comedy—you’ll never look at a miracle or catastrophe—or at our place in the universe, or God’s—the same way again.




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.


http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/satire-at-its-finest-chris-matheson.html#more

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Part Kurt Vonnegut, part Douglas Adams, but let's be honest, Matheson had me at 'Based on The Bible.'" —Dana Gould, comedian and writer


"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, Origins Project at Arizona State University, author, The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing 


“Matheson punctures the pretensions of organized religion with unremitting hilarity.” —Jerry Coyne, author, 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 he will spend eternity writhing in hell.” —Ed Solomon, screenwriter, Men in Black


“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, Skeptic magazine; monthly columnist, Scientific American; author, The Moral Arc


“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, A Manual for Creating Atheists


“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 Loftus, author, Why I Became an Atheist and The Outsider Test for Faith


“The Story of God is an original, funny, and devastating book.” —Jay Phelan, co-author, Mean Genes