Monday, October 12, 2009
Not The Bible - The Ultimate and Eternal Parody
by Tony Hendra
Earlier this week, an enraged righty named Andrew Schlafly, fruit of his Blessed Mother Phyllis' virgin womb, together with some of his fellow pseudo-Christians announced that it was time to rewrite the Bible. The Literal Word of God had somehow been corrupted into The Liberal Word of God. Time to snatch back the Good Book, from those who spend their worthless doing things like feeding the hungry, healing the sick, paying laborers a fair wage and casting money-lenders interior exterior darkness. You know -- stuff Christ might have done.
Unfortunately I and one Sean Kelly -- father of the estimable Chris Kelly whose posts are possibly the funniest pieces to grace these far too solemn columns -- got there first. 27 years ago to be exact, in the heyday of parody, we published a toxic tome called Not The Bible. It was precisely what Andy and his spluttering buddies are setting out to do: the Good Book as it should be, stripped of its socialistical and radic-lib pollutants. Returned to the pristine state God The Patriarch Creator of the Unregulated Universe, intended.
Here are the first three chapters of its very first Book. Not of Genesis of course but of Creation:
Chapter 1
1. In the beginning God created Dates.
2. And the date was Monday, July 4, 4004 BC.
3. And God said, let there be light; and there was light. And when there was Light, God saw the Date, that it was Monday, and he got down to work; for verily, he had a Big Job to do.
4. And God made pottery shards and Silurian mollusks and pre-Cambrian limestone strata; and flints and Jurassic Mastodon tusks and Picanthopus erectus skulls and Cretaceous placentals made he; and those cave paintings at Lasceaux. And that was that, for the first Work Day.
5. And God saw that he had made many wondrous things, but that he had not wherein to put it all. And God said, Let the heavens be divided from the earth; and let us bury all of these Things which we have made in the earth; but not too deep.
6. And God buried all the Things which he had made, and that was that.
7. And the morning and the evening and the overtime were Tuesday.
8. And God said, Let there be water; and let the dry land appear; and that was that.
9. And God called the dry land Real Estate; and the water called he the Sea. And in the land and beneath it put he crude oil, grades one through six; and natural gas put he thereunder, and prehistoric carboniferous forests yielding anthracite and other ligneous matter; and all these called he Resources; and he made them Abundant.
10. And likewise all that was in the sea, even unto two hundred miles from the dry land, called he resources; all that was therein, like manganese nodules, for instance.
11. And the morning unto the evening had been a long day; which he called Wednesday.
12. And God said, Let the earth bring forth abundantly every moving creature I can think of, with or without backbones, with or without wings or feet, or fins or claws, vestigial limbs and all, right now; and let each one be of a separate species. For lo, I can make whatsoever I like, whensoever I like.
13. And the earth brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, with and without backbones, with and without wings and feet and fins and claws, vestigial limbs and all, from bugs to brontosauruses.
14. But God blessed them all, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and Evolve Not.
15. And God looked upon the species he hath made, and saw that the earth was exceedingly crowded, and he said unto them, Let each species compete for what it needed; for Healthy Competition is My Law. And the species competeth amongst themselves, the cattle and the creeping things; and some madeth it and some didn't; and the dogs ate the dinosaurs and God was pleased.
16. And God took the bones from the dinosaurs, and caused them to appear mighty old; and cast he them about the land and the sea. And he took every tiny creature that had not madeth it, and caused them to become fossils; and cast he them about likewise.
17. And just to put matters beyond the valley of the shadow of a doubt God created carbon dating. And this is the origin of species.
18. And in the Evening of the day which was Thursday, God saw that he had put in another good day's work.
19. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, which is tall and well-formed and pale of hue: and let us also make monkeys, which resembleth us not in any wise, but are short and ill-formed and hairy. And God added, Let man have dominion over the monkeys and the fowl of the air and every species, endangered or otherwise.
20. So God created Man in His own image; tall and well-formed and pale of hue created He him, and nothing at all like the monkeys.
21. And God said, Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth. But ye shalt not smoketh it, lest it giveth you ideas.
22. And to every beast of the earth and every fowl of the air I have given also every green herb, and to them it shall be for meat. But they shall be for you. And the Lord God your Host suggesteth that the flesh of cattle goeth well with that of the fin and the claw; thus shall Surf be wedded unto Turf.
23. And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It just goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken billions of years.
24. And the evening of the fifth day, which had been the roughest day yet, God said, Thank me it's Friday. And God made the weekend.
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