Satan's Story

“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

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!”

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.