The Last Testament: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

most grievously.
3 It would have been one thing if humanity had simply started taking the sun and moon and seedtime and harvest for granted, failing to acknowledge who had given it to them.
4 This I might have chalked up to simple discourtesy, and dealt with through the usual array of etiquette lessons thou callest “natural disasters” (see Smitus 1–4).
5 But something far worse was transpiring: the people were inventing false gods in the form of stone idols, whom they would then praise, and worship, and sacrifice to, and “idolize.”
6 (Truly, I detest it when people verb a noun.)
7 I have been called a jealous God; the description is accurate, but misleading; for it evokes the image of a spurned lover or a rival tradesman, whereas my jealousy is of a far different nature.
8 Consider the toddler who scrawleth with a crayon upon a piece of parchment, and deems it a masterpiece;
9 How he runs to his mother, demanding that she behold his artistic creation and admire it.
10 It matters not if at that moment she is engaged in any of the numerous other activities that fill her busy life; nor that the drawing in truth resembles nothing so much as an epileptic’s doodle;
11 The toddler must have praise, and soon; else will he become agitated and surly, and tears flow, and breath held.
12 And so all household activities cease while the mother heaps sufficient encomia upon the lad; and hails his talents, and shouts his greatness, and magnetizes his work upon the keeper of cold foods that very moment.
13 Now consider that I am that toddler; and thou art that mother; and the universe is the picture; and that very moment is every single moment, ever.
14 This will start to give thee a sense of my laudatory needs.
15 Lo, it is very easy to create idols and give them desirable attributes; to envision them as animals, or the sun, or whatever objects or creatures float thine ark; even to invent a pantheon of such idols who share many exciting adventures, and harebrained schemes, and wacky misunderstandings.
16 Such deities will always bear the yoke of godship more lightly than I, and prove suppler instruments for thy mythmaking; for they have at their disposal the one weapon in the universe I can never wield: nonexistence.
17 Take Ninurta, the Sumerian farming god: he had no problem metamorphosizing into a winged lion, or retrieving the Tablets of Destiny stolen by Anzû, or bearing the slain Bison-Beast on his chariot beam, or consorting with Ugallu, or being worshipped as a healer and feared as the bringer of winds.
18 He was happy to serve all these purposes for the Sumerians, because he was not real; and was thus what I will charitably call “mythologically flexible.”
19 But Ninurta never sent a single actual rain cloud; he never called forth one stalk of actual wheat; he had no sense of responsibility; like everyone else in his pantheon, he never worked a gods-damned day in his life.
20 I may have my faults: impetuosity, jealousy, short-temperedness, and others I shall reveal; indeed, after this book is published, no longer will one of my faults be keeping things bottled up inside; I am coming clean, and it feels good; yea, I embrace the catharsis.
21 But unlike all other gods, I am real; I am the L ORD thy God, King of the Universe; and thou art stuck with me.
22 Thus it is wicked and foolish for people to seek to escape this truth by carving ridiculous “divinities” out of stone, rather than follow the course of action dictated by both obedience and logic:
23 Burning beasts of burden on ceremonial altars until the smoky aroma of ox-fat is thick enough to appease thine invisible, B-B-Q–lovin’ sky-god.
24 (And for the record, if thy meat is smothered in Sticky Fingers Smoke-house’s Tennessee Whiskey Sauce, consider thyself entitled to ten sin-free masturbations.)

CHAPTER 13
1 B ut I was out of the end-of-the-world business; true, I had left myself a loophole whereby I could smite mankind by any means other than a