The Scathing Atheist

by Noah Lugeons

Not many people know the story of Mikey. The less ambitious of the two brothers, Mikey was gifted with the same omnipotence as Jehovah but found himself less inclined to direct it in any meaningful way.

On the first day, Mikey was playing a video game. His omniscience had already seen all the video game consoles that the future had to offer and despite the vastly superior graphics of later systems, he still preferred the old school gameplay of the Nintendo Entertainment System. At the time that God interrupted, he was playing Ghosts and Goblins, a game that required omnipotence to beat.

“What the fuck is that?!” Mikey asked, shielding his eyes as the door swung open.

“I call it light,” Jehovah said excitedly, “I’ve got a whole plan… heavens, seas, animals… it’s gonna be crazy.”

Mikey reluctantly paused his game and followed his brother outside. A pair of sunglasses (the first pair, to be exact) phenomenized in his hands and he donned them as he glanced up at God’s creation.  “Whatever,” he said dismissively, “I’m going to bed.”

On the following morning, Mikey awoke violently as water splashed onto his face. “Now what?!” he grumbled as he stormed outside through knee-deep liquid. “What the fuck are you doing?” he called out as he swung open the door.

“I call it water. Don’t worry,” God said with a passive wave, “I’m going to create solid ground next.”

“Well can you hurry the hell up? It’s kinda hard to sleep with all this churning and rolling.”

“Yeah, I should be done with the ground tomorrow sometime.”

“Tomorrow! Why tomorrow?”

God waved his arms in a sweeping gesture, as though to convey the enormity of the project at hand. “I promise… I’ll get to it as soon as I can. I’m still separating all these seas.”

Mikey rolled his eyes and a canoe (the first canoe, to be exact) phenomenized before him as he made his way back to his bed. He tried creating a stable platform on which to sleep, but it churned with the waters and he was ripped back to consciousness each time a splash of the cold liquid splattered onto his skin. He tried a few more constructs before eventually settling on a large enclosed space that would roll comfortably amongst the new waves.

He slept through the day and awoke on the following morning with his enclosed structure blissfully beached on steady ground. He stretched and a cup of coffee appeared in his throat. He considered seeing how Jehovah was doing, but he almost feared whatever monstrosity might await him outside so he remained inside his boat and played a few games of Mario Kart. Later he phenomenized a pizza and a bong and before he knew it, he was asleep again.

On the fourth day he finally came forth from his protective encapsulation. He stepped on to the upper deck of his refuge and glanced down. “Yo, Joey!” he said, calling to his brother.

“My name’s Jehovah,” he muttered.

“Digging that big orange ball of flame… it’s nice. I’d have put it a little higher up, but hey, that’s just me.”

“It actually rises and falls back over on that side. It moves kind of slow. I’m trying to get it to exactly 24 hours but it’s a pain in the ass.”

“How close are you?”

“I’m within a minute.”

Mikey shrugged. “Close enough.”

That was often Mikey’s solution to a conundrum, but God decided that in this instance he was probably right. “I like your ark,” he remarked as he took in his brother’s improvised shelter. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

“Loving what you did with the sky, little bro,” he said as he climbed down from his perch. By the time he reached the sandy shores a beer had appeared in his hand. “Little white patches floating by… nice touch.”

“Clouds, I call ’em. You should see it at night. I did stars and everything.”

“Nice,” he said as he cracked open the beer. “So what are you planning with this whole thing?”

God smiled and Mikey could tell by his expression that his brother had been dying to lay the plan out since this whole thing started. It had taken a few days for Mikey to take the bait and he could tell immediately he was in for a long story. He phenomenized a chair and sat back as he drank.

“Well… I still gotta finish the moon, but then the next couple days I’m working on animals.”

“What the fuck are animals?”

“Little living, sentient things that’ll eat each other and compete for limited resources. It’ll be fun to watch.”

Mikey wrinkled his nose. “Sounds like a pain in the ass. Are you gonna take care of all those things? You know… take ’em for walks and stuff?”

“Nope. They’re on their own in a cruel world, bro. But hold on, I haven’t told you the…”

“Wait… a cruel world? Why would you create a cruel world?”

“Cruelty will act as a lesson about the vastness of my power. I’ll creating suffering so that they can enjoy bounty in its absence.”

“That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“No… it does. See, you can’t have good without evil.”

“Yes you can,” Mikey said, finishing the last swallow from his beer, “You’re omnipotent, remember? You can have anything you want.”

“Anyway, don’t worry about it. That’s not even the best part. I haven’t told you about ‘man’ yet.”

Mikey caused his sunglasses to reappear just so that he could slide them down his nose and glance skeptically from behind them. “What are mans?”

“Men.”

“Okay, what are mens?”

“No, man, but when you pluralize it, you say ‘men’.”

“See, that doesn’t make any sense either.”

“I work in mysterious ways, Mikey.”

“Whatever… fine. So what are ‘men’?” he asked, forcing an overly sarcastic emphasis onto the word.

“Okay… this is so cool… They’ll be like little versions of us. My own image and everything. And I’ll give them free will and I’ll stick them in a garden paradise…”

“Well that’s nice of you…” Mikey started, but Jehovah wasn’t finished and simply spoke over him.

“… but I’ll put a tree in there with really delicious fruit on it and I’ll tell them not to eat it and when they do… and you know they will… anyway, when they do, I’ll curse them for all of eternity.”

Mikey offered only a glacial blink.

“And then I’ll fuck with ’em for a few centuries and totally remove myself from their world. And if they don’t believe I exist after that, I’ll condemn them to spend eternity burning in a fiery pit.”

“What’s a fiery pit?”

“It’s something I’m going to create just to be a miserable ass place to spend eternity in.”

A long moment passed as Mikey tried to absorb all this information. Several times he started to speak and then realized he lacked sufficient words to express his disbelief. He looked into his brother’s eyes and saw the hint of madness he’d always suspected was there.

Finally, he responded with a single syllable, the only syllable that seemed remotely appropriate under the circumstances: “Why?”

“Because I want them to see how awesome I am,” he answered with a straight face. “They’ll love me or they’ll burn in hell in an unending orgy of tragic pain for all of time. It’ll be great!”

“Dude… you’ve lost your fucking mind. I’m sorry to just lay it out there like that, but you’re fucking crazy. That’s the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard. Seriously… I should create mental asylums just so I could lock you in one.”

“Go ahead. See if you ever figure out how the tides work, dick.”

God turned his back on his brother and Mikey retreated to his ark to play some more video games. It would be centuries before he came out again and by then, his brother had so irrevocably fucked up his experiment that he’d simply given up on it and moved on to a new project.

Mikey shrugged and went back inside to play some Gears of War.

Thus ends the gospel of Mikey.