Where to begin...Genesis

In the beginning, there was the earth, and after many billions of years there was life on the earth, and then after many millions of years there was man on the earth. Man developed into communities of shared benefit, and man thrived and multiplied. And man developed language so as to better communicate with their neighbors.

Yet almost as soon as man learned how to speak, he too learned how to deceive. And when man developed a system of reading and writing, some of those deceptions were committed to posterity and passed off as truth.

Man has forever looked into the heavens and at the world itself and wondered, What is the earth, and the stars, and the sun, and the moon? Where do all things come from? When man was very young and very ignorant of its surroundings, the answer which arose out of the debated suppositions was the gods.

The gods are all-powerful and can accomplish, explain, or justify everything. Each of the great races of men had their own gods. The Egyptians, The Mesopotamians, The Hellenes, and the Barbarians of the North. There was one tribe of men who claimed one true god, The Hebrews.

Now each tribe worshipped according to their local customs, offerings of one form or another were in abundance. But since the gods never would take the offerings themselves they were most often left in the care of those of the tribe who were closest to the gods; the priests.

Now a priest is a thoroughly disputable sort of being, often a raving madman who hears voices, or has visions, or is somehow possessed of secret knowledge. These priests confound and confuse the simple village man, or the trusting child, or the doddering oldster, with their pronouncements of the will of the gods, or the nature of things unknowable, or of the history and lineage of the local pantheon. These priest claim the voice of the gods themselves for their own, and woe is the product of their falsehoods.

And the priests grew fat off the sacrifices to the gods, whose names were many, and whose stories were varied from priest to priest and community to community. So many, wealthy priests held great meetings and standardised their lies in writing, much as they did for the choirs at their ceremonies who all sang from the same song sheets.

In the beginning man created the gods...