Authorised Autobiography of Me
Part 1: In the Beginning.
My afternoon siesta yesterday was interrupted by a message from my EBook provider telling me that a new book had just been released, one that going on my past selections, I would be interested in. With a certain amount of anticipation and enthusiasm, I touched the screen to access this new tome. My enthusiasm died as fast as it had sprung to life, it was the new and improved 435th edition of the unauthorised biography of ME, known as the 'Holy Bible'. How anyone could believe this crap was beyond me, and what made it worse was, I get no royalties from its sale. How unfair is that? I have decided to set the record straight, so here goes; for your interest and delectation, and to set the record straight, I give you the new, Official, Readers Digest condensed book version of the authorised auto-biography of ME (AAofM). In keeping with the modern trend, I will write it in the modern idiom, I will refer from time to time to that other book and comment on its accuracy or lack of. I might even throw in a couple of swear words from time to time, just to demonstrate how 'in touch' I am with the current trends.
In the beginning there was . . . nothing, just me sitting in this void with nothing to do. One millennia, a couple of hundred billion years ago, I said to myself (yes I was talking to myself, who else could I talk to, I hadn't invented you lot, yet). As I was saying, I said to myself, 'Self, what have you to show for your life up until now, eh?' And of course I had to answer my own question, no-one else was going to answer it, 'Nothing, I have done nothing, created nothing, built nothing.' On realising that up until then my life was meaningless, I decided to give it meaning and create something. So I created the Universe, or to be more specific, the Multiverse, and let me tell you it took a damn sight longer than six of your piddling little twenty four hour days.
First I had to come up with a concept, and you know how long that takes. Then I had to do the design work, I didn't have a CAD programme for that, come to it I didn't even have a computer. And then I had to produce engineering specifications and get planning approval for my design, and believe me that wasn't easy, my first couple of hundred concepts I rejected because I decided that they would never work. Then I hit on the 'Big Bang', how else could you explain the ginormous gas explosion needed to create balls of energy around which orbited smaller balls of energy that would eventually solidify into balls of rock? That was the easy part. Having these balls of rock spinning around in this endless space I called the Multiverse, but achieving nothing more than spinning around in this empty space, seemed to me to be a waste of effort, so I had to create life.
If you think that the unauthorised biography of Me (UBM) got it right with its description of how this all began, do I have an investment for you? If you give me a tenth of all your income, I will increase that amount seven-fold, in other words I will give you your money back plus seven times that amount. Think that's too good to be true? Does the term Ponzi spring to mind? You bet your sweet ever-loving A it is, do you really think that I'm stupid or what? If I had the money to give you that sort of return on your investment, would I need to borrow it from you in the first place? And if anyone tells you otherwise then they're telling porky pies (lies). The truth is that it didn't take just 6 days for Me to create the Earth it took a damn sight longer than that.
This is how the 'Message' version of the UBM describes the beginning:
'First this: God created the Heavens and the Earth -- All you see, all you don't see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.'
'God spoke: "Light!"
And light appeared.
God saw that light was good
And separated light from dark.
God named the light Day,
He named the dark Night.
It was evening. It was morning --
Day One.'
Okay, let's take a close look at this: I created the Heavens, what are the heavens? They are the stars and planets and moons and all of those other things that form the Universes. The stars are massive balls of flaming gases lighting up the space. And I made the Earth, supposedly a bottomless blob of soupy nothingness, an inky blackness, and then My Spirit was supposed to have sat on it like a broody hen until I introduced light. What is it that lights up the Earth? The star that you call the sun! How could I flick a switch and turn on the sun when it was there all the time? Then I was supposed to have separated the light from the dark, day from night. Just how was I supposed to have done that? Did I put a timer switch on the sun so that it turned itself off for a while?
It gets worse on Day Two:
'God spoke: "Sky! In the middle of the waters:
Separate water from water!"
God made sky.
He separated the water under the sky
From the water above the sky.
And there it was:
He named sky the Heavens;
It was evening, it was morning --
Day Two.
I know that I am supposed to be able to perform miracles, but this would be beyond my powers. Think about it; if you were to take a blob of water and divide it into two blobs with nothing but air between them, what would happen? Because water is heavier than air, the blob above would fall back on top of the blob below re-forming the original big blob. And then I was supposed to name the sky the Heavens! What came first, the chicken or the egg? I was supposed to have started with the Heavens and in the Heavens was a blob, and I divided this blob and placed the Heavens between them? Nah, it never happened that way at all. But it doesn't stop there:
'God spoke: "Separate!
Water-beneath-Heaven, gather into one place;
Land, appear!"
And there it was;
God named the land Earth.
He named the pooled water Ocean.
God saw that it was good.
God spoke: "Earth green up! Grow all varieties
Of seed bearing plants,
Every sort of fruit-bearing tree."
And there it was,
Earth produced green seed-bearing plants,
All varieties.
And fruit-bearing trees of all sorts,
God saw that it was good.
It was evening, it was morning --
Day three.'
Am I awesome or what! I produced all of that in one day, I shove the waters aside to reveal the Earth that was there all the time because I made it on Day One. And then I greened up the Earth, but what did I produce first, the seed or the plant, the fruit or the tree? I'll leave that to your imagination.
Then another awesome day:
'God spoke: "Lights! Come out!
Shine in the Heaven's sky!
Separate Day from Night.