God and his friend God 2 were walking home from school one day when a big bully came up to them. “Wanna see a dead body?” said the bully.

“What’s a dead body?” said God.

This was a very serious question because at this point in history, when God was still going to school, there weren’t any dead things, and it’s a matter of some great debate whether there were in fact bodies. But God was a curious schoolboy, and he was quickly persuaded by the bully that a dead body was something worth seeing.

So God and God 2 and the bully started walking down by some old railroad tracks (relatively old, since the universe had only barely just been created).

“So,” said the bully, “you like that English teacher, Mrs. Johnson?”

“She’s ok,” said God, “I just don’t get why she’s such a stickler for rules when there isn’t even an English language yet.”

“It’s forward thinking,” said God 2, who always liked to give people the benefit of the doubt. “Besides, if we don’t know the rules how will we be able to recognize English when people finally get around to speaking it?”

“That’s a good question,” said God, “for a fag!”

With that God and the bully ran quickly ahead, knowing that God 2 couldn’t run quite as fast because he didn’t yet have the ability to conceptualize space. Space had just been invented, so it was a still a tricky concept.

Anyway, God and the bully came to a woodsy area near a pond, and the bully beckoned God down towards the water. “Look,” said the bully, and he poked at something with a stick.

What had looked like a log rolled over in the water to reveal the bloated face of a dead human being. God was truly stunned, as he’d only designed humans earlier that day, and he was going to wait another couple of days before he actually produced the first model.

“Whoa!” said God, who was into acting like Keanu Reeves lately. Keanu Reeves, it’s true, wouldn’t show up for quite some time, but God was omniscient, so he’d effectively already seen all of Keanu’s movie, and even knew about Keanu’s tragic death at the hands of a mermaid.

“It’s weird that you should act surprised,” said the bully, “since you’re always going on about how you created everything.”

“Yeah, but I also created surprise, and I like to try it out sometimes, faggot,” said God. God was really into calling people “fag” or

“faggot,” which seems crude, but his ways are mysterious.

“Well, I don’t need your shit,” said the bully, and started to run off.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” said God. “Did you say you don’t need me?”

“I don’t need your shit,” said the bully, wondering if that was a better answer.

“That sounds like hubris to me,” said God.

“What’s hubris?” asked the bully.

“I just invented it. It’s the foundation of sin.”

“What’s sin?”

“Sin is when you don’t do what I say.

“So?” said the bully, “I do what I want!”

“Nu uh!” said God, and he cast the bully out of heaven, which was hard because all there was was heaven, so there was nowhere to cast anybody, but God simultaneously cast the bully out and created another place which he called “hell,” which is a word he’d heard Keanu use, and he thought that it was a cool word, so he figured, why not?

Meanwhile, back near the schoolyard, God 2 had given up running after God and the bully and was thinking about what else he could do. When he saw the bully shooting out of heaven like a load of flaming shit, God 2 sat up and took notice. “Wow,” he thought, “that looks painful. I wonder if I can help.”

“No,” said God, “no helping. Helping is, umm, what’s the word?”

“Nice?” said God 2.

“No, it’s forbidden. Forbidden to help the bully. Plus, his name is now Satan, which is a cool name, and also I’m going to create a lot

of people and they don’t get to live in heaven, and a bunch of them, really most of them, will eventually live in hell, which is a totally sucky place, but, like, 144,000 of them can eventually move in here with us.”

“Really? Won’t it be crowded?” asked God 2. “And also, why do the others have to go to hell?”

“Well, if you’re going to be such a crybaby about it,” said God, “you can go down there and tell them that if they don’t touch their genitals and if they do everything I say and if they really, really like me and want to be my friend and not just because I’m God but because they really like me, then they can all come up here to live. But only if they really like me and want to be my friend. Do you think they’ll want to be my friend? I’m totally going to kill a whole lot of them. Fuckers.”

“Um,” said God 2, “I don’t know. I’ll ask. I’ll ask nicely if they want to be your friend.”

“Ok,” said God, “that works.”

And so God made a whole bunch of stuff that he called “the earth,” and then he made a whole bunch of people, and then he waited until, like, 50 billion people had died without hope, and then he sent God 2 down to tell people that they should want to be God’s friend.

God 2 tried, but most people didn’t like God very much, and they wanted to touch their own and other people’s genitals, so God 2 went back to heaven and just waited to see who’d show up, in a low-key, no pressure sort of way. And that’s where he still is.

Waiting for people to want to be God’s friend.