In the beginning, there was nothing but a perfect God. Everything that existed was perfect. So God decided to create the world, which he knew¹ would turn out to be imperfect. Now everything is no longer perfect. Good job, God.

God made the earth out of invisible water and established day and night on the first day, and he made plants grow on the third day. Then on the fourth day, he made the sun, so there could be a cycle of day and night, and so plants could grow.

On the sixth day, the invisible God created humans that looked like him, which made it difficult for him to keep track of where they were and what they were doing. So he put them in a garden containing a knowledge-giving tree and a life-giving tree. He told them they could eat from any tree in the world, but they couldn’t eat from the tree of knowledge, or they would die. (Not that they knew what death was.)

Now that there were humans to work the ground, plants would be able to grow, which had never happened before. At first God made only one human, but then he realized it was not good for the man to be alone, so he brought him some wild animals. That didn’t help, so he tried turning Adam’s rib into a woman. Adam liked that better.

Since speaking things into existence was such hard work for the all-powerful God, he took the seventh day off and rested, satisfied that everything he had created was very good.

While the all-seeing God left Adam and Eve unsupervised, a very good serpent came to let Eve know that God had lied, and they wouldn’t actually die when they ate from the very good tree of knowledge. Since Adam and Eve hadn’t yet eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they couldn’t tell the difference between good and evil, so they had no way to know whether eating from that tree would be good or evil. So the very good humans just followed the very good serpent’s very good advice, and ate some of the very good fruit from the very good tree of knowledge, so they could gain the ability to find out whether they should eat from that tree or not.

Just as the serpent had said, they did not die when they ate the fruit; their eyes were opened, and they gained knowledge of good and evil previously known only to God.

The all-seeing God was taking a walk in the garden, and he had some trouble finding Adam and Eve, because they had hidden behind trees when they noticed that they were naked. When the all-good God found them and heard that they had eaten from the wrong tree, he cursed them and their unborn descendants with deadly snakes, painful childbirth, sexism, hard labor, thorns and thistles.

God decided that since the humans had become so godlike after eating from the tree of knowledge, he needed to make sure they didn’t also eat from the tree of everlasting life and become even more godlike.

After his first failure, the all-powerful God was more careful about this second tree. He banished the humans from the garden and sent angel guards to make sure they couldn’t get anywhere near the tree of life. Later, all the trees of Eden were cut down.

The end.

The moral of the story

Don’t trust God; he’s a liar.

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