Here’s yet another story.

Warning: if you aren’t a rational atheist, this is probably going to be offensive.

    It was darker than could possibly be imagined. Beyond dark. It was not that there was a lack of light; this was a different kind of darkness. This was the darkness of a space that had never felt the lucid caress of illumination, of a space that could never conceive of anything but absolute vacuum blackness, of a space that had never known change.

And then there was change.

It was unimaginable. Even in a passive, non-living state, the entire cosmos screamed in shock when the first rays of beautiful, incandescent light trickled into it. The darkness had never known light, and it had never known matter.

And yet, here was matter. A sphere rolled into existence, appearing out of nothing and spiraling into nothing. It was a barren lump of minerals, until gases were added. Its surface glowed with the unfamiliar light of its sun as it reflected off the atmosphere, and, further, the deep seas.

And there it stood: a testament to the genius of its creator, deserving of devotion, a beautiful, perfect sphere, absolutely stable and beautiful. Its seas glinted, its mountains shone, and its air rippled with its self-sufficient beauty.

It remained, perfectly stable, orbiting tranquilly, for millennia. And soon, there were more. None of them had the luster of the firstborn, but there they were, some huge, some miniscule, sucking each other into their orbits. Its family grew and grew, until there billions upon billions, an infinite space teeming with light and beauty. And it was the crowning pearl of this glimmering ocean, perfect in all ways, the firstborn.

And its creator looked down upon his magnum opus, and he saw that it was good. And yet, it needed more. And so, once more, he set his eyes upon his favored child, and he gave it the greatest gift of all, one to make the trillions of others pale in comparison.

He gave it life.

At first, there was no visible change. But slowly, he saw it unfold. In the depths of the seas, there were small, infinitesimal creatures, smaller by a hundredfold than a grain of sand. And yet, over the millennia, they grew. They mated, and they evolved until there was no trace of their original form. They grew until they could swim, and then they could walk, and their species branched off until their were dozens and hundreds and thousands of them. They evolved until they covered the orb with their beauty, their menagerie. And they kept evolving until it became a competition, a race to some unclear goal.

And the orb gleamed with a beauty unheralded, trees and grass garnishing its lowlands, its seas shining with algae and fish, its air swelling with birds. It was a beautiful blue-green jewel nestled in the centre of its black and silver ocean.

The creator was amused by this. He had not intended for there to be so many forms of his life, but he saw that it to was good, and he did not intervene.

But then, something happened that he did not intend. The race, in which all the forms of life had been running, was won. One species triumphed above all others, its evolutionary pursuit reaching its first goal. It became self-aware, able to think of its members as individuals.

And individuals they became: soon, they had risen above using pitiful sticks and stones and found the power that clubs, axes, spears wielded. They lorded their power over their inferiors gleefully, killing them for food and for sport. And soon enough they found ways to create their own food. They leveled the great forests and grew multitudinous fields of wheat and corn. And with this came the calamity of war.

They went to war for food, and then they went to war for morals, and then, to the creator’s surprise, for gods. They had invented their own petty gods for their squabbling. And the creator saw danger in this, but still he did not intervene.

And suddenly, their petty gods were not so petty. The creator found them, haughty and powerful in their own right among the stars. They challenged him, and he was forced time and time again to talk them down, to beat them down. The gods’ wars reflected the peoples’ wars. Soon, as the society on the orb advanced, the droves of gods who had originally been were narrowed down to a select few, and these were even more barbaric, clawing at each other for the edge that would bring them greater power. As a village conquered another on the sphere, as a host razed it’s enemies temples and brought their idols crashing to the ground, a god would die, screaming and clutching vainly to its existence until it could no longer survive.

The species swarmed across the orb’s face. Its war became more sophisticated, and soon their pathetic wars were fought with guns and bombs. Their deaths were more and more grotesque, but they did not cease. Hopelessly, they sank into deeper and deeper chaos as their gods watched fretfully from the blackness.

Finally, the creator intervened.

Manifesting himself as one of them, perfect, tall and beautiful, thousands of meters high, visible for miles, he shone like a lighthouse in the darkness of their once-beautiful sky, and he told them to stop. He invoked his right as their deity and creator to make them cease their folly.

But he did not realize his own. Even as he spoke to them, he heard the alarms begin to blare, and he saw them level their weapons. He screamed in sudden terror as they fired, realizing with a start the magnitude of his own frailty, how weak he truly was compared to his creations.

And then there was no god.

The denizens of the world entered a golden age in the knowledge that they had fended off a major extraterrestrial threat. As the realization that their was other life dawned on them, their leaders were able to cast off the shackles of war and oppression. Soon enough they had ceased believing in gods entirely, and the others in the blackness went the way of their predecessor, shocked at how little power they truly had.

And the civilization from the planet lived on, and it reached others amongst the stars, other civilizations with gods of their own, or who had cast off their gods just as the firstborn had. They had evolved outside of a creator’s influence, merely one more example of the weakness of gods and the power, the absolute endless power of the natural order of the universe.

The universe had outgrown war. It had outgrown enemies and classes and aliens.

And it had outgrown gods.

~ by pieboy on November 27, 2006.