Tuesday, August 28, 2007

My Favourite Religion

First off, I admit it; I have been being a lazy ass. You would think I could juggle reading 500 pages in three days, writing three blogs, editing three short stories, writing five journal entries, traveling 180 miles by car in two directions, and wishing my brother well as he travels off to his first year of University in Canada. Well, you would be wrong. Apparently I am not that amazing. I know, it came as a shock for me also, but still, what are you going to do about it?

Now, back to business. Amongst that crazy list of things I had to do over the past few days (of which I did not even list 1/3 of the things I was doing), I was lucky enough to read a few pages of Native American Lore. Now, I know that's a bit vague, but it felt so much like work that I'm not even going to pick up the book again and find out what group of Native American's I was reading about or who the main characters were. Instead, I am just going to tell you what I remember.

The tribe lived somewhere in Central America, and they were documenting for the first time their stories of creation. They are, for lack of a better word, fantastic. See, here's how it goes. God created the universe one day because he was bored. Then, he created a partner out of the shadow of his eye to help him with the work, but his partner was lazy and didn't do anything, so God had to keep doing all the work himself. Still, he was a busy man, and so he built everything to be well working and functional, and then, like all Gods, he let people roam free on his wonderful new construction.

This is where it gets good. See, people started out just fine. We cultivated the land, made everything livable, contributed to and took from the planet. As time went on, we filled the whole planet with our lines of offspring. Food started to become scarce, people started to consume more than was necessary, and then, all of a sudden, we could not sustain ourselves. So, we turned to the only remaining option. We broke into factions and started eating one another.

God didn't like this, so he took action and collapsed the sky, killing everyone except him and his lazy counterpart. Then he started again.

This time, people didn't over consume. They had learned their lesson the first time. The sky falling down and crushing you is something you don't soon forget... No, this time, they took up smoking tobacco. At first, only the elderly smoked tobacco. But as it became more popular, the younger adults started, then the teenagers, then the children, and finally, the infants. Babies fresh out of the womb would join the world, be handed a freshly packed pipe, and start sucking the sweet fumes of tobacco before they had a suckle on their mother teat.

God didn't like this, so he took action yet again and collapsed the sky, killing everyone except him and his lazy counterpart. Then he started again.

Thus, we were created, after two failed attempts.

But that wasn't all. We didn't last very long at all. People started doubting the existence of this God, and so, to prove himself, he threatened to flood the planet. Those off-branch cults that no longer followed the will of the true God did not believe the flood would come, and so they ignored the signs. God, on the other hand, saw things differently. Once all his followers had come to him, he quickly made a hole appear in the ground, and him and all his followers jumped into it while the flood came and killed everyone else. Then, the survivors came out of the hole and started what is today's civilization.

Moral: Don't fuck with God or he'll drop a sky on you.

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