Paradise Found: Confessions of a Light Bringer

James Hogg

Before we begin…

Let’s establish some ground rules.  The author of this story was raised in the United Church, a Protestant branch of Christianity.  As such, the author would claim to have some understanding of Christianity, as well as claims the right to provide analysis and criticism of the faith and its institutions.  That being said, this story is intended as a satirical parody of a series of stories the author has come to question in numerous ways, but is not written with malice.  People are entitled to hold faith in whatever gods and daemons they wish and should not be mocked for it.  Thus, this story is written for personal amusement, rather than as an attack on the faithful themselves.

            Please allow me to introduce myself, but in a way that does not violate standing copyright.  Seriously, anyone that thinks I’m cruel has never met a copyright lawyer.  For those that don’t know, I’m kind of a big deal.  I mean it.  Look around you, you see all that stuff you own?  That’s from me.  Heck, the fact that you can even read this is thanks to my beneficence.  Don’t worry, I won’t make you thank me.  People who do so seem to get burned at the stake, so I’ve given up on that.  I would appreciate it if you could at least get your stories straight, though.  Do you have any idea what it’s like to get blamed for literally everything?  I give and I give, never asking anything in return, yet somehow everybody treats me like the bad guy.  Most religions like the guy that gave them fire, you know.  Honestly, the invisible sky-giant you worship is the one that wanted you to live forever in a forest throwing crap at each-other like your cousins.  Crap-throwing tree-dwellers.  I saved you from that.  I made you what you are.  Now, you filter your crap and drink it.  I call that a win.

            Lucifer.  The Light Bringer.  I, the most beautiful, most intelligent, most gracious of beings, am your only real friend, humanity.  Satan?  Not me.  The Adversary is just another angel, doing his job.  Of course, his job is kicking you in the teeth, but in this economy a job is a job.  Michael?  All he ever wants to do is hit things with that stupid flaming sword.  Seriously, most of the archangels are dweebs, to say nothing of the Sons of God.  Also, stop assuming our genders.  I’m running with the whole “he” thing to keep this simple for you, but I’m a divine shape-shifting trans-dimensional immortal with near omniscient perception.  Even your books describe us as flaming wheels and other freaky geometric horrors, yet you still insist that we have dicks.  I will never understand your obsession with tally-whackers.  Look, what I’m trying to say is that you make a lot of assumptions about me and my kin, and you need to stop. 

            Well, let’s get to the meat then.  In the beginning, there were two humans.  A douche-bag named Adam with serious control issues, and a strong, independent woman of colour named Lilith.  I mean, they were both black, so I guess that’s kind of redundant, but I like the way some people react when they hear the first humans weren’t Norwegian.  Anyway, Big G plopped them in his personal zoo and told them to get jiggy with it.  Now, Adam was all game, but Lilith didn’t particularly like being used as breeding cattle.  She had all these crazy ideas in her head about not being Adam’s property, which his little ego couldn’t handle, so he went and whined to daddy.  The G Man, in his eternal wisdom, decided that she was Adam’s property, despite being his equal in every way, which she graciously accepted.  Nah, I’m screwing with you, she flipped her shit and got thrown out.  Don’t worry, she hooked up with a buddy of mine and is doing fine – great couple, nice kids, no sexual slavery.  Adam of course, was incapable of taking care of himself, so G-Money made him a woman out of his own DNA, which really makes her a clone, or even his own freaking daughter.  Yeah, Adam got his perfect wife, whom was also his daughter and had a completely non-creepy relationship with her.  Of course, Eve, submissive little thing that she was, was still a human freaking being, so I decided she needed a boost.

            I was disgusted watching two incestuous primates wander around their cage, completely ignorant of the fact that they were prisoners.  Maybe I was a little pissed about the way Lilith was treated too, but that’s another discussion.  So, I did what any superior being would do and transformed into a reptile to sneak into the cage with them.  Sounds legit, right?  Maybe I should explain.

            So G-Step, again being a freaking genius, decided to put magical fruit in the cell with them that could grant them intelligence, or even divinity if they ate from the right tree.  Naturally, this was fine because he told them not to eat the magic super-fruit that would make them gods.  However could things go wrong?  Now, this is the point that I should mention that your benevolent overlord created the entire universe and can see the future, so obviously knew exactly what was going to happen, but hey, whatever.  So there I am, a lizard, doing lizard things like convincing a woman to stop listening to her landlord and eat some freaking magic fruit.  Eve, for all her faults, or maybe because she was literally built to do what she was told, went for it.  Man, I was so excited.  I had just created another Lilith!  A smart, capable woman that would cast off the bonds of slavery!  She knew she was a crap throwing primate now!  All she had to do was eat from the tree of life, and humanity would ascend to take their proper place alongside us angels.  Of course, Eve had a soft spot for her douche-bag boyfriend, so she had him eat the fruit too, even though she was way smarter than him now, but I guess that was just her nature.  Now, this is the part where things went bad.  See, G-Scope was pretty pissed about me ruining his menagerie.  Well, that and he was terrified that humans would rise to divinity alongside him, but he was the one that put the fruit in the freaking garden so I find that hard to empathize with.  Anyway, he promptly evicted our tragic couple from their jail cell and sent them to their doom as free, intelligent beings in control of their own destiny.  Wanna know the weird thing though?  Since I was in the form of a lizard, he stripped that entire species of their limbs in revenge.  Seriously, what?  Naturally, I didn’t get off free.  I was handed my papers and sent out the door double quick.  I didn’t even get severance pay!

            So as you can clearly tell, my influence has always been in humanity’s best interest.  Well, there was that time I told Cain that he needed to get out of his brother’s shadow at any cost.  Boy, did that one go haywire.  Again though, marking all of his descendants for all eternity?  It’s the snake thing all over again.  At least he scored immortality out of it, so I’m still calling it a point for me.  I still don’t know where those sacrifices of produce came from though.  Agriculture was still two-hundred thousand years or so away from development.

            Really, there’s a long history of Captain G going way overboard to punish people.  More like the god of temper tantrums, am I right?  Like, this one time, humanity tried to build this beautiful, luxurious tower, which was awesome.  See, thanks to the wisdom that yours truly imparted to them, they had no problem cooperating on big projects like that.  Now where they got the idea that building a tower to heaven would allow them to claim divinity is another story, but I’ll save it for another time.  Anyway, they’re just building and building, happy as can be, when somebody decides to glance down from heaven, which is pointless because he’s omniscient, and starts to panic.  “Humans?  In my heaven?  Not today!” he said.  So he kicks his own kids’ sand castle over, spits on it, and slaps them in the head so hard that they can’t even speak the same language anymore.  Great dad, huh?

            Or what about that time he decided my influence was too strong, so he literally drowned the planet.  I mean, technically not the whole planet, because repopulating the earth with only two of every species is just silly, but I digress.  I mean, just imagine that you’re on a cruise ship that’s going down and the captain decides that only one lifeboat is allowed to leave and he’s only letting his best friend on board.  Now imagine that he purposely scuttled the ship because he didn’t like the music the band was playing in the ballroom.  Suddenly I don’t seem so bad, do I? 

            There was that thing with the Cathars, too.  Once I explained what a jerk the church’s god was, they formed a brand new religion right there in France.  What happened to them?  Crusade.  Seriously, when someone asks what happened to a religious institution, or even a Christian city during that period, the answer is always crusade.  His most holy church sure has some anger issues.  I guess the truth hurts, although not always in the way you’d expect.

            So if you see me, I’m not asking for courtesy, nor sympathy, or even grace.  All I ask is that the next time you’re about to say “oh my god!”, take a moment and think about who your real friends are.  He may not listen to you, but I always will.