Try the God Simulator. Hint: if you always pick the least logical, most insane action, you'll get a pretty good simulacrum of Christianity.
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"Simulacrum" is the right word.
From the OED:
Simulacrum 1. A material image, made as a representation of some deity, person, or thing. 2. Something having merely the form or appearance of a certain thing, without possessing its substance or proper qualities. b. A mere image, a specious imitation or likeness, of something.
Yup, that's about what you get.
So, as I played God, it occurred to me that the Flood was one ridiculous overreaction to a situation that I created myself. And, being God, I had two choices:
1. Accept responsibility for my pique in the garden of Eden.
2. Wipe the whole slate clean and kill every living thing on the planet, ignoring my own contribution to the state of affairs while having a great deal of fun watching innocent puppies, kittens and unicorns die.
Well, humans make gods in their own image. Look around you at what we humans are like. So what did you expect??
Now that is funny!
Oh, and scary. People create god/religion in his own image - or ideas of self. F___, is god stoopid!
Illuminating. I'm sure we can rack up quite a number of botched decision points for the abrahamic gods, without even breaking a sweat. (And now I understand why the video game flopped. :-)
I heard they wrote a book about it. Go figure.
Btw, I hadn't thought of it in a long while, but it was really unfair to impose a childbirth on a virgin. The other crimes against humanity was more non-personal. I figure someone owe her some good cuddling.
"These people's God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible's statutes. He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and all." ["Mark Twain and the Three R's, by Maxwell Geismar, p.124]
Indeed.
The person who wrote that simulator is the person who convinced me (through debates on a blog) that I should no longer be an evangelical Christian. Over the course of a few months, he made some good points, and eventually I found this simulator through his blog, and that was the turning point for me. I actually met him for the first time in Ohio at a humanist convention that Richard Carrier was speaking at.
For a simulation that's supposed to let you play an omnipotent being, there's a decided shortage of options.
Personally, I would've handed the first humans the apples and told them to enjoy their newfound sentience (and given it to cats, birds, sharks, dolphins, whales, and the occasional cephalopod as well), made trees a hell of a lot harder to cut down, and made rape cause the rapist's testicles to spontaneously combust.
No fair that it didn't let me do any of that. I mean, if I'm God I should at least get to name the First Couple something better than Adam and Eve . . . and maybe make pregnancy a voluntarily-started/sustained process that requires an orgasm first besides?
*pouts and throws Almighty hissy fit on the scale of the Big Bang*
Illuminating. I'm sure we can rack up quite a number of botched decision points for the abrahamic gods, without even breaking a sweat. (And now I understand why the video game flopped. :-)
I heard they wrote a book about it. Go figure.
Btw, I hadn't thought of it in a long while, but it was really unfair to impose a childbirth on a virgin. The other crimes against humanity was more non-personal. I figure someone owe her some good cuddling.