God's Trainees God was planning to retire. What? No, I can't see what's blasphemous about that, after all, he's omnipotent and if that doesn't mean he can do whatever the hell he bleedin' well likes I don't know what does. So obviously he had to create and train up some replacements to take care of things afterwards. No, not a replacement, replacements plural. They clearly could not be omnipotent like him, I mean, that's a contradiction in terms that is, you can't have two or more omnipotent things. So his three trainee replacements were lesser beings. Not something you or I would notice, believe me; bit like telling a virus that K2 is smaller than Everest really. But they were, so obviously there had to be more than one to come close to replacing sir in the control of the universe and so loving the world game. They had to learn all the basic skills from scratch so god sent them on an Advanced Universe Administration course at the University of God. (Principal: God BSc, PhD, FRSCE). They all had classes and tutorials on infinite love, divine mystery, theory and practice of creation and so on. There were also options that the trainees could take according to their chosen religious speciality, divine mercy for Christianity, divine retribution for Judaism and so on. Creation was a very important part of the course. You may ask why since surely that bit had been done already; the ongoing task would appear to be essentially a maintenance and support job. Some of you who work in maintenance and support may disagree (although you are obviously completely wrong - look who you're disagreeing with!) but God did not feel that anyone could do these things well without a proper hands on appreciation of the development process. In any case he had always had expansion in mind but had never quite got round to it. He envisaged his successors creating several more universes. As with the omnipotence thing, you may argue that it is a contradiction in terms to have more than one universe, if one universe does not include the others how can it be universal? Well, I don't want to belittle your intellect but you are really betraying your limited human understanding on that one I'm afraid! So the students came to their first year creation projects. The course would introduce more creativity into creation in their second year, but in their first year they needed a thorough grasp of the basic mechanisms and so the project God set was to create an exact copy of the world in its present day form. Their grade depended on how close they came to replicating it. Just a digression here. This is very similar to the way Renaissance artists were expected to learn by copying the works of their masters and very much more effective than modern techniques it was too. You doubt that? I suppose you think Tracy Emin, Damien Hurst and Gilbert and George are better than Rafael, Titian or Michaelangelo do you? God was a damn good tutor (the best) but unfortunately when he made the world he had never written anything down; with a perfect memory he didn't need to. Some humans had had a go on his behalf, but really! I don't want to offend Christian fundamentalists, but as an instruction book on how to create the universe Genesis is a little thin! Moses was obviously too busy with other things. There's more description about how to replace your exhaust manifold gasket in a Haynes manual, and that's got photos too! So his students found themselves a bit short on reference material and they did not like to keep running to god every five minutes with questions. But they all gave it a bash. Student A (their real names would have no meaning to mortals and anyway one is not supposed to say them) was a lazy so and so. He started out full of enthusiasm and did a great job of creating light and dividing it from the darkness on the first day. On the second day he did the dividing the waters with the firmament stuff and it all seemed a bit samey. He decided to spend the afternoon with Lucifer at the snooker club. (The original Lucifer, not one of the yet to be duplicated versions). If he got up really early the next day he could catch up. He overslept the next morning, and so it went on. It was all a frantic rush at the last minute and a completely botched job. The lights twinkled in the firmament instead of the heavens and the waters had not been properly gathered together so there was no proper dry land, just umpteen square miles of swamp. Just as well that he had not round to creating any living things that could creepeth upon the earth anyhow. He had not got anywhere near to creating man but he did have some great whales. They would have to do, so in his last hour great whales suddenly began to drive gas guzzling cars, manufacture armaments, make rotten B movies, drink cheap wine, go cottaging in public toilets and all the other things that make our own species so civilised. Student B was very arrogant, you know the sort, thinks he knows everything and won't take advice. He was quite sure he could create the current Earth much more efficiently than the boss had done it. What were all those blind alleys about? millions of years (fractions of a day in god terms of course) spent evolving the dinosaurs and giant mammals etc., only to wipe them all out again in some catastrophic climate change or meteor strike and then starting again practically from scratch. Clearly the initial design process had been totally inadequate. So he did a thorough analysis of the task. He looked at all the current species and then created just the right number of classes from his primordial soup for minimal evolution without all that pointless extinction fodder and set things going. It did not prove that simple. As every good cook knows, you do not create a great dish by shoving all the ingredients in a big pot and sticking it in the oven. The ingredients and the cooking processes have to be introduced in the right order and at the right time. Without the dinosaurs and then the great flesh eating birds to hunt them down and keep them small while they evolved properly, most of the mammals exploded in size like weeds fed with hormone weed killer. Unfortunately, they had not had the time to evolve the proper skeletal structures and musculature. Feeding and mating became difficult as few of them had the strength to manage it and after a few thousand years they all died out. The birds never got round to flying because there was nothing nasty and ferocious to escape from so they just hopped about a bit and then went back to being small creeping creatures because they were lazy little buggers and it was a lot less effort. When their feathers got soggy dragging in the mud they lost those too. Poor old B found out the hard way that the old man was not so daft, everything had its place and its role in evolution. He ended up with 36 million different sorts of worm-like object. Hard to make man out of that lot, so at the last minute he just made Tony Blair and a few New Labour ministers, that would have to do. Student C was the brightest and most conscientious of the bunch and made a great job of the basic creation. At lunchtime on the sixth day he had a complete world full of things that creepithed and flyithed after their kind and he saw that it was all darn good too. Unfortunately, he kept tinkering around guiding the lily and although he had made man in his image he had left hardly any time to guide 200 millennia of human evolution to its current point. He just had to bang together whatever he could in the time, based on whatever he could easily skim from the available material, mainly Hollywood movies. It was the abridged version. The Americas, the route to China, Australia, the North West Passage and Doctor Livingstone were all discovered by Columbus before he was eaten by Maoris at the Battle of Little BigHorn. John Wayne won not only both world wars but also the Napoleonic, the Crimean, the Boer and the Hundred Years wars as well. James Dean, Jane Mansfield and Marc Bolam all died in the same car crash when they were hit by the light plane carrying Buddie Holly, Richie Havens, the Big Bopper, Glenn Miller and Amelia Erhardt. They submitted their final projects as required at the end of the sixth day. And God saw every thing that they had made, and, behold, it was bloody awful. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Thus the duplicate heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And they were crap. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. But as for his damn awful students they had to do their first year course all over again. The lord sighed. His retirement would have to be postponed for another year.
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