The Product of a Tired and Possibly Not Undiseased Mind
Once, there was a man living in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers now known as Mesopotamia. There were actually many people living in that region, but our story pertains to a single man, a hermit by trade, who lived in the mountains somewhere outside of an ancient suburban region near Ur. This man was once a successful Sumerian accountant and scribe, and, having made a fortune off of his work in cuneiform, he came to a realization.
He was getting paid for depressing little triangles into a slab of wet clay.
This man was surprised, for he thought writing to be such a simple thing that anyone should be able to do it—being paid for it was a form of legal fraud—it was like being paid for sitting around and thinking. He came to the conclusion that nobody knew anything and because he knew he knew nothing he knew more than everybody else who thought they knew something. This view made him unpopular because it often led to discussions like these:
Neighbor: "Lovely day, isn't it?"
Our Hero: "Possibly."
Neighbor: "I bet my wife is cooking something special for dinner today."
Our Hero: "How do you know?"
Neighbor: "She always makes something special for holy days."
Our Hero: "Is today a holy day?"
Neighbor: "Last time I checked…"
Our Hero: "Do you have a calendar in front of you?"
Neighbor: "No…"
Our Hero: "Then how can you be certain that today is holy?"
Neighbor: "I remember looking at a calendar five minutes ago…"
Our Hero: "Even if you did, which is uncertain, why should a calendar denote holiness? Did Baal come down from the skies and tell you it was holy?"
Neighbor: "No…"
Our Hero: "Then it is just as likely that your wife intends to poison you today as make something nice for dinner, no?" And so on. Obviously, such a pre-Socrates Socratic attitude was not conducive to social success. Before the neighborhood could rally themselves to thoroughly banish him, however, he tired of everyone's knowledgeless knowledge and exiled himself to a God-forsaken rock that loomed over an expanse of the Arabian Desert. Here, using a cistern he dug himself for water and growing a small garden watered by aforesaid cistern, he survived and pondered away his life, far away from those imbeciles who thought they knew something.
But, as everyone who believes in the Big Three know (no, Buddhism is not one of them) of the world religions, the area between the Persian Gulf and the eastern edge of the Mediterranean was one of holy mystery in these times, where God came down biweekly to tell some new sucker a seemingly conflicting story of The Way Things Really Are. This biweek, the Big One decided to come down and talk to our pre-Socrates Socratic and tell him How Things Really Work. Everyone else, usually shepherds and old town leaders, had gotten it wrong and totally bent His message into some writ which had little resemblance to the original ideas. These faulty "holy" scriptures had caused untold trouble and strife, and so God decided to talk to our hero—being a thinking man, he might be prepared to see reason and actually tell The Truth.
So God came down from upon high, with the accompanying parting of the clouds and the light from Heaven and the otherworldly cherubim mistaken for low-flying UFOs and all that. Our hero shielded his eyes and asked, rather dumbly:
"Who are you?"
God said, "I'm God. Why do you shield you eyes, child?"
"It's bright—and why am I suddenly a child? I'm forty years old, God (if that's who you really are), and I should be dead by now."
"I meant that you're my child."
"I remember (although memory is imperfect and no proof of the past) someone less shiny being my father."
"I created the Universe, and the world, and thereby created you. Everyone is my child."
"Been busy, have we?"
"Get your mind out of the gutter! Here I am, about to pass on How Everything Really Is and there you are, making underhanded references to an activity that I neither do nor have to participate in (despite the notions which have been passed on by bastardizations my earlier attempts to tell My creation The Truth)."
"Sorry, Shiny Man. Hit me with some truth."
"All right, fifteen billion years ago there was nothing…"
"Whoa, Big G, what's this 'ago?' Are we going to depend on memory for this?"
God sighed. "I'm God, I exist in all times at once, and not only that, I'm in charge of Everything. I think that I can be listed as a trustworthy source."
"Do you have this so-called fifteen-billion-year-old nothing in front of you?"
"Look, smartass, I can take you back if you want to see it, but I doubt that the conditions of a universal monoblock would do for a corporeal being such as yourself."
"And we are making up numbers now? Fifteen I got, but a billion?"
"It's a one with nine zeros after it."
"A what with nine whats after it?"
"It's a tally mark with… oh… you haven't invented zero yet, have you? No matter… A really long time ago…"
"If you're going to tell The Truth, give me an accurate time frame."
"I can't give you an accurate time frame because your Me-damned mind is too small to comprehend it!"
"So you admit that you, a theoretically perfect being—"
"There's no 'theoretically perfect' about it, I'm GOD!"
"—cannot explain to his realistically imperfect creation how everything works."
"Drop the 'theoretically' and you've just explained the situation."
"My, our ego is touchy, isn't it—well, is it my fault I'm imperfect? It looks like an engineering error to me."
"Wha—no, you can't get away with blaming engineering. Anyway, history isn't important—"
Unfortunately, our protagonist had lost interest with the shiny omnipotent immortal who thought he knew something and began to walk off to find a less God-infested rock. For an aging man, he walked rather quickly.
"What's important is that everyone be nice to each other…" God yelled to Its departing creation.
"Yeah, sure, whatever God," Its snippy creation replied absentmindedly.
"…and that you take care of everything! Be wise in your use of resources!" It was too late—the pre-Socrates Socratic had walked out of earshot in the thin mountain air. God cursed quietly to Itself and decided to try again in two more weeks.
Our protagonist, half an hour after meeting God, fell down a terminally steep section of mountain and landed on terminally sharp rocks. This was not an act of vengeance, it was Fate—God's angry and stupid little sister.
Two weeks later, God talked to some Semitic shepherd about How Everything Really Worked. This Semitic shepherd dictated directly from the mouth of God. God, pleased that Its Message had finally gotten through, returned to Heaven and decided to sip the holy equivalent of a mint julep.
The Semitic shepherd, after rereading his dictation, realized that it didn't make sense. He rewrote some portions to account for what he perceived to be reality and made up the rest. After encasing the voluminous parchment in a convenient tubular container, he covered the container in shiny objects and placed it in his tent to be used as a conversation piece with passing traders:
"What's that?" asked Achmed.
"Oh, it's just something I got from God," replied Abraham.
"Well, I have one too…" said Achmed, his eyes darting from side to side.
And we all know the rest of the story…