The Bible/WMG

The Bible
For various writers' Wild Mass Guesses about the nature of two of the main characters, see God Is Evil and Satan Is Good.

Jesus and Lucifer are both the Sun AND the Morning Star
The latter is obvious because Jesus is also associated with Venus in the Bible. The first is an idea brought about by Hermetic ideology; Lucifer represents the intellectual light, while Christ represents the spiritual light.
 * Jesus and the Sun are both actually the Unconquered Sun. Lucifer is the Morning Star. But the Evening Star is Venus, the Maiden of Serenity.

Eden was humanity's Choice. We didn't pass, but didn't fail. The Torah is the Manual.
Whenever a species achieves true sentience, they are offered the Choice: to exist as the One (God) intended, lightly and wisely, or to follow the Lone One and thereby achieve "greatness" (actually: death and pain).

Adam and Havah (Eve) were the first humans to achieve true sentience. The Serpent was the Lone One in its guise as the Old Serpent. Humanity tried to become "as gods", but were also wary enough to build an extra component into their choice: a demand that they could remake it as a group someday later.

Since they did choose the Entropy option, we can never fully remake our Choice, but groups of people can band together to partially remake it. The various occasions on which we've done so result in what we call religions.

Thus, the Torah, and later the Qur'an, are in fact condensed forms, for those whose eyes can see, of the Book of Night With Moon and the universe's Manual.

God really hates girls.
Just... I don't know. Just read it. There is Deborah... but after her came these sultry girls who sleep with their father, a woman who is forced to have sex with her dead husband's brother, periods, etc, chattel marriage, David having 700 concubines (but if a woman has sex with more than one man you have to stone her to death no matter her status)... the bible just isn't very woman friendly! You'd think an all loving god wouldn't be such a bitch. And it's all because Eve (who was pretty much a mindless puppet made just to make Adam a servant) ate a damn apple. "If a man rapes a woman who isn't engaged, he must pay her father 5 pieces of silver and marry her, because he has violated her, and he can't divorce her"
 * Or the people who wrote those parts of the Bible hated girls.
 * That would explain why, in Deuteronomy, it says something to the effect of:


 * Maybe but there was also the prophets Dorcas and Hulda and the architect Sheerah. They do not get much page time but are not portrayed negatively at all and the two girls and their father were marked for destruction with the rest of Sodom. It seems more like God, or the guys who wrote the Bible, did not see the point of using women unless men were unavailable but not to the point of hatred. There are just as many men portrayed negatively in the book and it was as easy for men to become unclean.
 * Say what? Positive female portrayls: Esther (Queen of Persia), Ruth (ancestor of Jesus), Mary (mother of Jesus), a servant girl, unnamed, that was brave enough to suggest visiting a prophet in Israel to her master, and several others that showed strong faith in God. Heck, women were the first people to discover Christ's emty tomb. I'd say women were portrayed pretty well.

um what about Esther? and Judith? and Ruth (?)..I think.

God expected Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and for Satan to trick them.
This is Paradise, why on Earth would he include this random thing to tempt us? And if God expected them to breed like rabbits, and considering all of Adam and Eve's messed-up kids, there's no way we could have all survived in Paradise without someone eating from the tree. It's widely agreed that the snake was Satan, so perhaps it was all a Batman Gambit to get Satan out of Heaven. Maybe God was just really not into this one angel. Of course, that assumes that either God is human or God Is Evil, which are neither implausible when you consider how sucky the whole world turned out. And even if it is all punishment for the original sin, you can see from above, God caused original sin, so God caused the suffering we have today.
 * The purpose of the Fruit of the Tree was a test to see who would and who wouldn't submit to God's sovereignty. By their eating of the fruit they showed a disobedient attitude and that they wanted to govern themselves. Even the wording Satan used when talking to Eve was solely to undermine God: that he was withholding something good from them and that he couldn't be trusted.
 * Actually, this is more or less Mormon doctrine. They were given contradicting choices: Eat the fruit of the Tree of Life, or the Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. They would have never had children had they stayed in the garden of Eden, and they would have lived in senseless bliss, not knowing good and evil, not able to progress. Basically, the Garden of Eden would have become a boring Hell because of lack of progression.

A slight variant is as follows: God told the snake to tell Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, in order that they can learn and life can become meaningful. They only pretend to hate them for doing so, in order to allow people to question more things, and therefore to allow people to learn more things; the fruit of knowledge isn't quite full of knowledge, actually (they only said it is, in order to simplify the explanation).

The Tree of Knowledge was in fact a Monolith.
The Monolith, which was created by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens whom we can find indistinguishable from Gods, came down on a backwater planet and gave these pathetically primitive apes who were almost on the verge of extinction the ability to create tools, explore more and piece together dissociated objects into increasing complexities, thus allowing them to rise on the top of the food chain and evolve into what we all know as Humanity, all while Also Sprach Zarathustra is playing. However, with his newfound God powers, he became a bastard to nature and his own kin, and had to suffer curiosity's massive potentials for danger. As for the Tree of Life, it's in Jupiter, where another Monolith which will allow for ascension waits.

Our Universe is purgatory.
Paradise contains the combined enlightenment of its inhabitants. In order to keep it functioning and pure, god created some other places for "troublemakers" in Genesis, and anybody who didn't quite reach it will be reborn and given another try...
 * Jossed: There was only one Jesus.

Jesus is a masochist suffering from Stockholm Syndrome
He was rejected by the Jews, tortured by the Romans and saw how much of a bastard humanity is, yet he still loves them. Hey, just look at this phrase: "Love your Enemies". Strangely, people like Christians react to Jesus' Stockholm Syndrome with their own (Orwellian) version of the Stockholm Syndrome: all those rants about how we are all slaves to God, how God controls every aspect of our life, and we will be sent to eternal punishment, yet we still need to love him.
 * Actually, some christians pretty much see everything as a form of Stockholm Syndrome (most especially St. Paul, hence why Nietzsche hated the bastard). Sure, if you join God you become his obedient pet who will go to a place where sin (and thus free will) is impossible, but if you go otherwise and enjoy it, you are a slave to sin who is going to Hell. And the sin thing pretty much extends to science or buddhism or self-interest or sex or whatever. Disregarding fundamentalists, this "slave to sin's stockholm syndrome" assumption is pretty much obsolete, with more and more Christians opting for the "Eternal Separation from God with full consent" alternative, and the conception itself being parodied in the form of A Hell of a Time.

God is an overly-cliched Mary Sue / Creator's Pet
Perfect, omnipotent, omniscient yet perfectly human, supposed to be an Eldritch Abomination who simultaneously serves as the perfect protagonist of the entire bible, perfect, can be perfectly outside logic and do various questionable acts (like eternal punishment) and can get away with it and remain perfect without any effort, perfectly. Every single character in the Bible likes him and/or lives by his predetermined Will, even though in Real Life he has a Hatedom (Atheists) who criticize him as being both a wish fulfillment self-insert fic no different from Enoby with a blindly following Fan Dumb no different from Justin Bieber / Twilight fangirls, and a Pavlovian control mechanism no different from Big Brother.

== The True God is not the Big Brother we witnessed in the Bible. The True God who created the universe is actually not aware of being the Creator, and he is just living his life as an average-joe Muggle == In other words, RL God is Haruhi Suzumiya. Well are there any other ways for God to be rescued from his "omniscient dictatorial Marty Stu" status?

The Sun is Satan
Yahweh, according to 1 Kings and Psalms, is supposed to dwell in darkness, and solar worship is Heresy and thus punishable by death in either the Bible or the Qu'ran, not to mention that in abrahamic tradition there is no angel of the Sun (the closest being Shamshel, but that is meant to be a personification of the day; there's a huge difference), and Lucifer means "the light bringer" or the "morning star". What star is the most visible in the morning? Answer: The Sun. Either that, or the Sun is Hell/Lake of Fire.
 * Oddly enough, it seems that Shamshel in abrahamic theology, despite being said to be "the angel of the Sun", is still a fallen angel. So yes, Yahweh has an enemy in the Sun.
 * So that's why Roman Catholicism has a grimdark feeling over it.......
 * And also why Evil is "Hot"....
 * Solar Power is Heresy?
 * Then all the Elizabethan poetry referring to the Sun as the "Eye of God" was Satanic recitations?
 * Yes.
 * That's why it tries to kill me in Mario 3!
 * Wait a minute! Morning star is actually Venus not Sun. This also makes perfect sense because many scientists describe surface of Venus as something like Hell.
 * Venus is beautiful when you look at it, but behind that is the face of a monster. sounds like Satan to me!
 * But most "demons" like Moloch and Nergal are solar deities.
 * Yes, but The Bible regards them as demons. So no, they aren't the Sun.

The Garden of Eden is in the center of the sun
God placed an angel guarding it with a flaming sword which faced in all directions - the sun's heat faces in all directions.
 * Hey, all the heavy elements were created in the cores of stars and expelled in supernovae - we're star stuff - this adds a whole new dimension to being "cast out of the garden of Eden".
 * Hydrogen (star fuel) is God. That explains why he's the One: he has only one proton in him. Also, if you search for Greek philosophy, Hydrogen is also shaped like the "Monad" (symbol for oneness/god).
 * Therefore by definition hydrogen is evil? That adds a new dimension to the Hindenburg inferno and the H-bomb.

On both guesses: The Sun is both Satan and the Garden of Eden
Despite being considered evil, it's also shown that Satan is basically second to God, and he did help in creation (the aforementioned "cast out of the Garden of Eden"). And who knows, what was described as Hell/the Lake of Fire might as well be the omnidirectional heat surrounding the "creative" center of of the Sun.

Jesus never really resurrected, and the rest of the Bible is actually his Dying Dream.
At first, it manifests itself as wishful thinking, such as escaping from his torment and living on. However, as his condition worsens, he becomes more delusional, which is why Revelation is such a Mind Screw.
 * That's a really bizarre Unreliable Narrator then, since it was never written from his perspective; even the parts with him in it.
 * He was imagining his life as a book.
 * The secret is that.
 * Waking Life, anyone?
 * That's kind of a Downer Ending then...

Jesus never really resurrected, and the rest of the new testaments are inaccurate hearsay.
Even in the bible itself, it is not clear that Jesus did resurrect. Only few people claimed to have seen him resurrect, and one of the disciples couldn't recognize the supposed ressurected Jesus.
 * Well he was whipped 39 times, beaten, dehydrated, crucified, and then stabbed in the heart with a spear. So if he managed to just sleep that off than he's either Holy, or Rasputin. Either way he went fishing with his buddies afterwards. So...
 * A few? Try over five hundred, including his half-brother James, who didn't believe any of his claims to divinity before. So...
 * While he may have been seen, he may not be technically alive.
 * Of course, the big kicker if this WMG is true is that it confirms once and for all that Christianity should be elliminated as a faith of liars, since without Jesus's actual, physical ressurection, much of Christian belief, particularly in the important topic of salvation is rendered moot, not to mention several tasty theological tidbits such as how the material world is good through a physical Resurrection.

Satan is God's younger sister.
God got tired of Satan bitching about how the lipstick he got her for her birthday was the wrong color, so he kicked her out. The angels who preferred hanging out with a hot chick instead of a powerful guy followed her, and Hell is where you do have lots of sex but have to put up with woman complaining about "Does This Make Me Look Fat?" all day long. And that is the legend of why Evil Is Sexy. "Enter at your own peril, past the pearly gates where impossible things may happen that the world has never seen before... In Yahweh's Laboratory lives the smartest God you've ever seen! But Satan blows his experiments to smithereens! There is gloom and doom while things go boom in Yahweh's Lab!"
 * God, what You see in Your presence is a He-Man Woman Hater. What You do with him is ... up to You, I guess?
 * Now I'm picturing God and Satan as Dexter and Dee Dee...

Both Creationism and Evolution can be true.
God is outside of Time. "A thousand years is one day, and one day is a thousand years." After the Eden incident, man became distanced from God, more of a creature of flesh than he was. To accomodate this, God wrote in a backstory to the Universe. From our perspective, being bound by time, time and space keep going back to the Big Bang; where even scientists admit "the rules had to be different at that moment." Man became a slave to the dust; to the physical; and evolution is the way God wrote that in. Now, God didn't sit down and explain this to Moses or whoever wrote Genesis because they were still working on the "Stop worshipping golden statues or I'll smite your ass" part. You try explaining metaphysics to a group of people who can't seem to figure that pattern out.
 * Or (and I hope this is relevant enough to jamb under here) perhaps the creation stories (uh, I mean, story...) were just something God made up to explain things to people who still hadn't figured out to be careful around women in veils. Just like the stork, only with a firmament and your daughter-in-law... wait--
 * Or Gods did make everything in 7 days, but then decided a cooler backstory was needed for better ratings...
 * To this editor, the story of Eve being made from Adam's rib always sounded like the evolution of an asexual lifeform into a sexual one...
 * In the Bible is said God created so-and-so on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd day etc. But doesn't say how much time there was between each of those days. It doesn't state that those days followed each other immediately...
 * The Hebrew word translated as "day" in English means "period of time," meaning that it could be just about any amount of time.
 * "Evening came, and morning followed..." ...and Morning and Evening marked the periods when ancient Hebrews were allowed to labor. So, seven periods of work.
 * The Creation story could easily be a prescientific person's interpretation of how Life, the Universe and Everything formed-- darkness into light (big bang), dust and water being gathered together (formation of stars and planets), sun and moon "appearing" (atmosphere of proto-Earth becoming clearer to make the sky visible from the surface), sea life coming before land life, etc. God showed the author approximately what happened, and the author wrote it using the only terms and references he understood.
 * Thank you at least for the statue/metaphysics part. The other Mind Screw is that being omnipotent means making 2M year old rocks three days ago. Theatre scene and prop people live off this.
 * Not only are both Creationism and Evolution true, but evolution is actually referenced in the Bible itself. Remember the Tree of Life, which Adam and Eve refused to consume due to preferring the Tree of Knowledge? well in Science the phylogenetic tree of evolution is also called the Tree of Life. Yes, exactly the same words. If the Tree of Life is present in the Bible, and the Tree of Life is present in Evolution, then Evolution might be present in the Bible. It might as well be interpreted that the Tree of Life is actually the physical manifestation of Evolution itself. If Evolution is the Tree of Life, then what is the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life's antithesis? Answer: Knowledge and its fruits, such as Science, Civilization, Technology, etc. With knowledge, we can force the habitat to adapt to ourselves instead of us adapting to the habitat, and when everything is adapted to that one species (Homo Sapiens, humans), Homo Sapiens will remain as Homo Sapiens... forever, or until someone from the Uncanny Valley wipes us out. This Troper came up with a new story that would reference both Evolution and the Bible:With the Tree of Life, one gains the power of Natural Selection, but he will remain ignorant and a slave to the cosmos. With the Tree of Knowledge, one gains the power of Civilization, but since Ignorance is Bliss, he will experience the full torture the cosmos can bring. Adam, the first man, refused to go with the laws of evolution (The Tree of Life) and preferred to eat the Tree of Knowledge. God warned Adam that since he has the Tree of Knowledge, he no longer needs the Tree of Life, and he will die (Humans Are Bastards who have the capacity to destroy each other given enough technology) and live in pain (after all, Ignorance is Bliss). The transgression forced him to modify the habitat itself instead of simple adaptation to the habitat. In other words, we replaced nature with knowledge.
 * Alternatively, God created the world, but brought the power of evolution to us living things so that we can evolve on our own as Gods and such. And we took this long to realize this?
 * It still does not rescue him from God Is Evil status. Evolution is evil, right?
 * Creationism was true. God just tweaked his creation a bit.

God is the author of a Sprite Comic.
And Jesus is his Author Avatar. The reason there aren't many miracles anymore is that that level of breaking the Fourth Wall is a Discredited Trope in sprite comics these days.
 * This implies that at a higher level of reality, the video games have really good graphics.
 * Well, yes. God may be from the Star Ocean universe.

Satan is just misunderstood.
In the Old Testament, he is described in neutral to approving terms as a servant of God. He carries out the murder of Job's family in collusion with on high and is clearly a part of the 'inner circle'. In the New Testament there is a sudden lurch in diction and he depicted as the (pick one) great dragon/beast of the apocalypse/enemy of mankind, a creature full of nothing but cartoonish malevolence. What we are seeing is a former party member who has been subjected to a furious negative spin campaign after he became disillusioned and jumped ship.
 * Maybe God an Satan used to date. I mean, there is something of the flavor of a sour romantic relationship here...
 * That would mean God is gay, since they're both a gender I can't describe. That could explain a lot.
 * As one of the ways that Satan is misunderstood, consider the Garden of Eden story: God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, saying they will be struck dead. The serpent (commonly taken for Satan by Christians) tells them that no, they won't be killed; God doesn't want them to eat from the tree because they'll become like Him. They eat from the tree, and don't die; instead they become self-aware, like God. Somehow, the serpent is cast as the deceiver in this little game. Clearly, Lucifer sees the potential in humanity that God would rather suppress here; he's been on our side all along. (It should be noted that this troper isn't a Christian, but a Sub-Genius, so any heresy committed here is purely in the eye of the beholder)
 * The previous troper has been misinformed. Point to me where it says Adam & Eve would be struck dead as soon as they ate the fruit. You can't because it's not in the Bible. What Gad tells Adam is that they will die, but he doesn't say when. Satan on the other hand being the devious fellow he is, twists God's words, making it seem as though He meant instant death. When they don't instantly die, Adam & Eve are convinced the 'serpent' knew something they didn't and the rest is history.
 * That's getting rather semantic, don't you think? Especially for the innocent children Adam and Eve were presented as. "Do this and you die" is generally interpreted as immediately. I would say both the serpent and God hid the whole truth. How does this make one better?
 * "Do this and you die" might hold a different meaning if someone is immortal.
 * "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."--Genesis 2:17, King James Version.
 * This story, by the way, has other interpretations, including the expulsion being, rather than a punishment, simply the inevitable consequence of the eye-opening the fruit induces. By this reading, the only punishments were having to work hard in the fields and in childbirth, and those were only because they didn't take responsibility for eating the fruit. Ideally, then, Adam and Eve would've eaten the fruit and left the garden of their own free will at some point, with full understanding of the implications, as a rite of passage for humanity - but that "free will" thing also led to the snake messing things up.
 * Ah, but that raises a deeper question; could a being without self-awareness and knowledge of right and wrong ever really grow to understand the implications? Would they ever be ready for any sort of "rite of passage"? Remember, Adam and Eve are painted as basically animals before they eat from the tree (sure, they talk, but apparently, so do the other creatures in the garden). Could they ever really grow to understand the consequences of eating from the tree without eating from the tree in the first place?
 * Indeed, in Paradise Lost, part of the serpent's argument is that "God said you'd die. But what's this 'death' thing anyway?"
 * The other animals talk in the same way a ventriloquist's dummy does. Satan was a very powerful cherub (no not the fat baby kind) who could do extraordinary things with that power. Besides, Adam & Eve obviously already had free will if they could CHOOSE to listen to the serpent and eat the fruit. And about the death part, Adam & Eve had existed for ? unrecorded years. Who knows how many animals they saw die of old age. They used 100% of their perfect brains. If we can go to the moon with >10%, I'm sure they could have understood death.
 * We went to the moon with a 100% of hundreds of people's collective brains and a good chunk of physics and astronomy knowledge from Newton and Copernicus all the way to the 60's. Perfect brains are useless without knowledge. They might understand the concept of death, just like three year olds might understand the concept of serendipity, but how are they to be expected to connect the word with the event, if they had not bothered to name it themselves? They could have thought it was a long sleep, for all we know. Isn't that how its explained to children?
 * So Adam and Eve were in the grip of permenant siezures? That explains alot.
 * Milton seems to have been a fan of this theory: The world was all before them, where to chose/ Their place of rest, and Providence their guide./ They hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way.
 * I thought it pretty obvious: when humanity gained knowledge of what good and evil was, they also gained responsibility for their actions. Since its nigh impossible to not commit ANY evil when you are not omnipotent and omniscient the way God is, that meant humanity was tainted with sin from that on... until the Jesus Project comes along and buys humanity a way out.
 * I always thought it was a religious myth, ie. a story that explains certain aspects of our existence (why the husband works, why the wife is most concerned about the relationship, why childbirth hurts, why snakes crawl on their bellies).
 * It was implied that childbirth was ALREADY painful, God just increased humanity's birthing pain. Not only that, but it was flat out said that Adam did a lot of the work with naming the animals, and Eve was created to be his partner. And we have no idea what is meant by serpent. Something may be a serpent, but it's possible for it to not be a snake. Ancient Hebrew is a weird language.
 * Along those same lines, the story can be interpreted as an allegory about the passage from childhood to adulthood. Remember, for all intense and purposes, Adam and Eve were children, and innocent ones at that. Like a child, they did not understand the intricate details of good and evil, and like a child, were easily lead astray by the serpent's words. Once they ate of the forbidden fruit (puberty?), they now HAD to leave Eden (i.e. childhood) and take up adult responsibilities; Adam now had to work for his own food and provide for his own family, rather than be provided for by a "parent", and Eve now had to take up the responsibilities that came with being an adult female, including experiencing pain in childbirth (which, I might add and as far as I know, happens across the board with most adult female mammals, and which we are never told DIDN'T happen before the fall). Genesis is essentially a creation myth that also serves as a parable about coming into adulthood, as like the Garden of Eden, you can never return to childhood.
 * It may be painful for most adult female mammals, but humans have it particularly bad. Our hips are very narrow proportionate to the size of our babies, causing increased pain- but that's a structural necessity to allow for bipedal locomotion. So, either God tweaked the laws of physics to make hips narrower, or God was putting magic painkillers in Eden's fruit, which doesn't seem all that out there, come to think of it.
 * And as teenagers, we are often bitter about the responsibilities thrust upon us, thus the Adam and Eve story is presented negatively?
 * That's the plot of Stephen Schwartz's Children of Eden.
 * In most traditions, Satan was also the leader of a large angelic rebellion - Milton's Paradise Lost puts the number at a third of angels in existence. It's hard to conceive of so many angels turning against their creator unless Lucifer had some valid griefs.
 * That, or what's more likely, Lucifer had one hell of a personality cult around him, with the angels getting really caught up in his rhetoric.
 * Or, the rebellion was staged, at the behest of God, for the benefit of humans. After all, what's the point of giving humans free will if you don't give them two sides to choose from?
 * Strawman Political, perhaps? Better your enemies side with the enemy you know (and guide) than strike out on their own and ruin your Batman Gambit.
 * Satan really has huge number of interpretations. In Islam he is stated to be the enemy of mankind, but not God and is said to be forgiven in the Judgement Day. Some sects take this even further and state that Satan's original crime was overzealous love to God; he refused to bow to Adam because he didn't think that anything in the universe is worth bowing to, save God who originated it all.
 * Indeed, there are some related religions, such as the Yazidis, who hold (this is a very rough approximation) that God is really only interested in the act of creation, and once that was done, the corporeal universe lost interest for Him, and he gave it to their equivalent of Satan to reign over.
 * Satan is also eerily similar to Prometheus. Think about it. Both gave mortals something to enhance their lives against the direct orders of the god in power, and both were damned to eternal punishment as a result. The only difference is that Prometheus was freed eventually.
 * The differences: Zeus had ordered Prometheus not to give fire to man; no command was given against man discovering control of fire on his own. God ordered man not to eat from the tree; no command was given against Satan tempting man. Also, Satan lied; Prometheus didn't (probably why the latter eventually got free). Also also, Adam & Eve could've lived quite happily in Eden forever without the responsibility of conscience given by the fruit; the ancient Greeks, however, would've been foraging in the wilderness whether they had fire or not, so the additional tool really was a help. Also also also, Zeus didn't want man to have fire because he was a petty douche; this wasn't the only one of Olypmus's luxuries he kept from humanity. God, however, had only given the humans one rule, only one, & they still broke it.
 * The one rule covers a pretty big umbrella "don't know" - i.e., don't think, don't feel, don't choose, don't make mistakes, and, by extension, don't redeem yourself. This goes against human nature, so A & E became human by eating that fruit.
 * The Tree of Knowledge of GOOD AND EVIL people... stop leaving that part out. They could obviously choose (they ate the apple) and feel (the snake did appeal to their feelings).
 * ^^^^ in the original hebrew the name of the Tree could also be the Tree of Knowledge of Everthing. And when you were a child could you choose? If you were manipulated by an expert? Could you feel?
 * The Islamic explanation is almost exactly what happens in Paradise Lost, with a little more angst thrown in.
 * Note that the Dragon/Beast/Antichrist of Revelations is never actually identified as Satan in canon.
 * Neither, for that matter, is the serpent from the Garden of Eden. The two were not linked until much later.
 * Technically the serpent is a form of animism; given where the faith was founded, and how poisonous snakes are. Poisoning was an underhanded form of warfare at that time; a form of deception. So in other words, the whole Garden of Eden was an allegory to humankind learning the ways of warfare. The fruit of knowledge of life and death was exactly that. Knowledge to save or end lives. The beast, and dragon were most likely integrated from other religions.
 * To whoever stated that the torments of Job were carried out in collusion with God, re-read the book. The essence of it was as a challenge toward God on Satan's part; God simply said the equivalent of 'fine, prove it.'
 * Which certainly counts as tacit collusion. C'mon, really; he's God. If he really wanted to prevent it he could've stopped it with an eyeblink.
 * Or said "NO" from the get go, as Satan more or less asked permission.
 * And it wasn't much of a challenge either, Satan only spoke his mind when God directly prompted him to.
 * That damn serpent is masquerading as Satan. It is the true evil; a cosmic troll who's messing with the real Satan's image For the Evulz. The real Satan was kicked out because of it.

God is young, no more than the equivalent of a human in their mid-20s.
The dinosaurs came from the dinosaur phase every kid (or at least, almost all boys and many girls) goes through somewhere between age four and age six.
 * We started as an elementary school craft project, the celestial equivalent of "trace your hand and cover the shape in macaroni".
 * Not to mention his approval of Abel's animal sacrifice and his rejection of Cain's offering of vegetables. Eat your veggies, God!
 * The vengeful God of the Old Testament was a teenager.
 * Consider that he's eager to kill anybody who touches the Ark of the Covenant. "How many times have I told you, DON'T TOUCH MY STUFF!!!"
 * Jesus aged to his early 30s on Earth but reverted to infancy on his return (God still doesn't know what to do about Jack Lewis borrowing that trope).
 * The reason there aren't any more miracles is because God no longer pays attention to the trappings of His "childhood". In other words, we're now the celestial equivalent of the box of comics and the Atari 2600 in storage. Armageddon will come when God decides to clean out his attic.
 * Alternately, Armageddon will never come; we're collectible and will fetch a good price on eBay.
 * We would never sell on eBay, unless it turns out God's made it big in universes, since we're what amounts to a kid's superhero fan comic.
 * Of course, seeing as this marks God as no longer believing in the supernatural wonders he once thought were true, this means that God is not Haruhi, but actually Kyon.
 * You assume that God's nature is exactly the same as ours, which, in this troper's opinion, is a faulty assumption. However, not being God, this troper cannot say for certain.
 * And you assume this page is for serious philosophical speculation, and not simply fun theories
 * If we are made in God's image, it would follow that our brain is made in His image as well, and thus the theory isn't so faulty.
 * This would also support the idea that science and religion can coexist. We're the equivalent of childhood scribblings. Most babies, even if they make something recognizable, would not understand it themselves. Thus, God created us, but it took Him awhile to understand our nature. This would also explain how he was rather bratty and mean in OT, such as children destroying their toys, or even torturing insects for fun, but is much nicer in NT.
 * Armageddon = midlife crisis? Rapture = old age wisdom?
 * But...the Bible doesn't have a Rapture...

Jesus faked his own death.
Remember the part of the story of the crucifixion when Jesus asked for water, and a Roman soldier used his spear to raise a soaked sponge to Jesus' mouth, but the liquid in the sponge was (according to the Bible) not water but vinegar? Well, it wasn't really vinegar; it was a drug that sent Jesus into a near death trance. He was still alive when he was cut down from the cross and entombed, and His "resurrection" three days later was just the effects of the drug wearing off.
 * This Troper has long thought something similar. The Roman soldiers express surprise that Jesus died so quickly, and the two thieves crucified with him are still alive and need to be finished off. He gets buried rather quickly. His followers make several visits to his tomb after he is buried, bringing herbs and such to anoint his body. Herbs and such were what passed for medicine in those days, so perhaps they were not embalming a dead body, but healing a live one? After three days, Jesus has recovered enough to stumble out of the tomb, the sight of which event scares away the Roman soldiers guarding it. His followers show up with more medicine, and are surprised he's already gone. A few days later, Jesus, in disguise so the Romans don't catch him and finish him off properly this time, meets up again with his followers. He's still pretty badly injured, to the extent of having still-open wounds. After making a couple of semi-public appearances to cement his reputation as having rose from the dead, Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene (the first provided the tomb, the second was a key member of the group bringing herbs to the tomb all the time, and thus likely in on the scheme from the beginning) sneak him off to Gaul (inspiring the Da Vinci Code Grail conspiracy theories in the process) where he can live out a retirement somewhere the local Romans don't know what he looks like and aren't looking for him. Meanwhile, his followers back in Palestine are taking full advantage of his reputation for resurrection to expand their small cult into a mass movement. These followers demand their new converts donate all their wealth to the church, but seem perpetually impoverished themselves, since a big cut of their takings are being sent to Jesus and Mary Magdalene in their retirement villa in what will one day be the South of France.
 * Jossed by the spear through his side and his bleeding "blood and water," or pericardial fluid, a sure sign of death. Besides which, there was a rather large piece of rock in front of his tomb that a man in his prime couldn't be expected to move, let alone a drugged half-dead one.
 * The testaments were written at least, for their life spans, a generation later, and didn't Longinus "convert" afterwards? He was in on it, dude. Either the water was added later, like the "vinegar" to through off suspicion or it was setup somehow. As for the stone, we hear it was moved by Jesus' followers, wait... If several men moved it there, several men in a conspiracy moved it away later.
 * ...or (disregarding the guards at the tomb) as a third possibility, he, or a bystander, reported faithfully what happened. Most of this page works from the assumption that Biblical canon is Canon, after all.
 * This could explain the whole "I'll be back before all of you die" bit. He didn't curse anyone with immortality, but had intended to come back out of hiding. He either forgot over the years, decided he had it good enough wherever he was hiding or died for real before he could finish his con.
 * He still would've died from blood loss after being partially crucified. He had holes in his hands and feet.
 * Stage magic and fake blood. Crucified victims also had ropes to hold their limbs, in case the nails-through-flesh wasn't sturdy enough by itself (which it frequently wasn't). The "blood from his side" was a bladder of goats' blood. Conclusion: South Park was wrong, JESUS IS DAVID BLAINE.
 * This is what Islam believes, actually. Well, they believe he created an illusion of his death.
 * Tis a shame that it was impossible to fake the crucifixion death. The Romans were experts on death as well as recognizing it. If Jesus was not authentically dead, all of the soldiers responsible for the execution would be killed in His place instead. The Jews were absolutely sure that Jesus had died, otherwise they'd whine to Rome. It was designed specifically to suffocate you. Yes, Jesus died "quick", but He was still there pretty much the whole day. The quick burial is also explained in that it was Jewish custom to bury the dead within 4 days, otherwise they become unclean. Faking the crucifixion is the equivalent of faking your head getting blown off.
 * Hey, considering everything else he could do...

Everyone is Jesus.
Simple (entirely non-sequiter) logic, really: Jesus is the only son of God. Christian doctrine marks all people as the children of God. Therefore, everyone is Jesus.
 * In Purgatory
 * Two problems with that: 1)Christian doctrine marks all people as God's creations, but only believers as the children of God in the sense you are using, and 2) Jesus is called the only begotten son of God. Another reference in the scriptures states that those who believed were 'given the power to be called the sons of God', which sounds to me like a reasonably good description of a legal adoption.
 * Also: Jesus is God, whereas we are just human.
 * Speak for yourself.
 * Matthew 25:34-40: Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

Jesus is a Sufficiently Advanced Alien.
Clarke's Law in full effect. All those "miracles" could be pulled off by enough Applied Phlebotinum.
 * So... If Jesus, Then Aliens?

The Ark of the Covenant is a plutonium-powered manna making machine.
The device was secluded away in a carefully monitored temple (laboratory). Only certain priests (technicians) wearing specially-prepared (lead-lined) robes could approach it. Anyone else who opened or jostled it would die a 'strange death'. To cap it all, on two occasions the ark was stolen and then returned after it caused strings of mysterious deaths amongst them.
 * A more common Epileptic Tree is that the Ark was a huge electrical capacitor, based on certain descriptions of its construction and appearance, and its tendency to apparently fry the unworthy (or rather, the uninsulated) with "lightning". What this amount of battery power was meant to be used for is completely up to speculation.
 * It is worth noting that the Smiting-the-unworthy incidents mainly happen when the Ark is outdoors or had recently been so: when exposed to blowing dust and sand an object of the Ark's described construction would build up a considerable static charge.
 * So, the "Don't touch my ark" rule was God saying "Don't stick the fork in the socket"?
 * Ever read the bit where David is taking the Ark back to Jerusalem, it starts falling off the chariot, some footsoldier pushes it back on, and God immediately kills the guy? Should he have really just let it fall to the road?
 * Yes. The Ark was designed to be lifted on two sturdy rods underneath it. Chances are, it would not have broken, just scratched.

God from the Old Testament is not the same one as in the New Testament.
Comedian Lewis Black puts it best: "The God of the New Testament is actually a pretty great guy. Especially when you compare him to the God of the Old Testament, who's a total prick." Not only does there seem to be a complete 180 in personality, but NT God is against many things that OT God is for or neutral towards. It also should be noted that God frequently used referred to itself as "us" in the Creation Story.
 * Alternatively, and to expand on the "God as Young Adult" guess above, the gap between testaments is when he got laid for the first time. Aw Yeah.
 * And by who, you ask? Mary.
 * That would be Jesus. My guess? Sophia.
 * Well, Proverbs 8 (specifically 22-31) suggest that Wisdom itself personifies itself as a woman. And not just any woman, but A Totally Hot Babe who helped God create the universe. It even implies that God and Wisdom had a certain "friends with Benefits" relationship going on. So there you go.
 * There was more than one Mary in the Bible. The Virgin Mary was the mother of Jesus, while Mary Magdalene is the one some people pair up with Jesus.
 * More like humanity as Young Adult and Old adult. Even Sci-Fi says that races in their early years are more violent/stupid. Sometime you just need to crack/smack your kids before they get the message. Then when they agrow a couple of brain cells as teens/young adults you can teach them about peace and love.
 * It should be noted that the Gnostics are big fans of this theory; they identify Old Testament God as an imperfect, possibly malevolent being called the Demiurge, and New Testament God as Sophia, a being of wisdom, of whom Jesus may have been either an agent or an aspect.
 * Or husband. Just saying.
 * One of this troper's friends used the Batman analogy: Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, etc. are all Batman -- just different people under the costume. Actually, Dread Pirate Roberts might be even more apt.
 * Also, this has some additional canonical validity. Many (or most) of the examples of the "Old Testament God" are actually "God the Son" (check references and capitalization carefully); when "God the Son" became Jesus, that left "God the Father" -- who is therefore the "New Testament God." Confused yet?
 * So, after begetting Jesus, God went from being a Monstrous Teen to a Doting Parent? D'aww.
 * In the Old Testament, "God" was not treated like a person, but more like a power. This power only acted and spoke through agents called "angels," and was by definition unknowable ("Jehovah" is actually an acronym, because saying its actual name will summon it).
 * So, God was a Final Fantasy summon spirit, with light hints of personality whenever the summon animation (the acting and speaking) would happen? (Or that God's words were lost in translation when the angels acted as messengers?)
 * God in the new testament is Satan from the old testament. His revolution finally worked. Satan was always good, and God in the old testament was evil.

God is an AI
An idea that occurred to me as I was contemplating the question of why God would need to make Jesus to save us from the consequences of rules he made (after all, wouldn't it be easier to just change the rule?). There's one type of creature I can imagine that would be helpless to just change its own rules, and that's an AI. Whoever programmed God programmed Him to be the wrathful violent God of the Old Testament and to send people to Hell if they didn't follow a set of extremely exacting rules He gave them. But the programmer also made God to genuinely love humans. He didn't want to be a dick but His programming forced Him to, so He tried to find some way that He could stop being a dick while still remaining consistent with His programming. Jesus was an exploit that allowed Him to be nice to humans while still following His programming. The idea has some similarities to Gnostic ideas only with the morality reversed. Instead of Sophia being good while God is evil the programmer is a horrible Jerkass who created God in such a way that He would be forced to act like a monstrous tyrant toward His own creations and torture Himself in doing so, and God is a tragic monster/hero who rebelled by lawyering up a way to be nice to humans within the limits the programmer had set for Him.

God isn't the only god.

 * The First Commandment states "I am the LORD thy god; thou shallt not have strange gods before me". It doesn't actually say there are no other gods, just that God's followers should avoid worshipping them. Also, there's a scene in the book of Numbers where God actually fights Dagon. Plus, there's that whole scene in Exodus where the Egyptian priests have magical powers.
 * The idea's called monolatrism. Judaism was current with the Greco-Roman polytheistic religions, so to get along they would have to recognize the existence of other gods. The Christians decided There Can Be Only One. It's interesting that a lot of phrases point to the possibility of other gods, but how God outclasses them anyway, such as "I am the first and the last; beside me there is no god."
 * Incidentally, a lot of the genocide shown in the older parts of the Old Testament is thought to be based on this. Wipe out every last one of the enemy and you take their god down, too.
 * There are some theories about Yahweh actually being the God of War from an alternate pantheon, represented by a human with the head of a cow. Thus the intense rejection of Baal (theorized to be the God of Harvest in the same pantheon) and the golden calf idol, as well as the rules against speaking the name Yahweh. It was likely the goal of devoted followers of Yahweh to create a monotheistic system by repressing the other gods and memories of the pantheon. It's easier to ascribe infinite power to a shapeless being that people can't really understand.
 * The Cannanite pantheon had 70 roughly equal brother gods each representing a nation under El and Anath, their parents. (That's why Yahweh is so eager to get the Hebrews to Israel in the OT, he wants them to be in his piece of land.) After the rest of the Cannanites died off/got conquered/etc the Hebrews conflated Yahweh with El and deleted everyone else.
 * Historically, the Hebrews were polytheists before they were monotheists. Abraham was the son of an idol-maker, and much of Genesis is taken from older Sumerian/Babylonian myths "tweaked" to match Hebrew cultural details (forty days and nights of rain instead of the original seventy, for instance, since forty was a holy number to the ancient Hebrews.) So originally, God was one of many gods.
 * This is also one of the explanations offered up as to why God keeps talking as if he was with a group in the Old Testament. At that point in history, it would not have been out of the ordinary to imagine YHWH just hanging out and having discussions with all the other local gods.
 * Genesis 1:26: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness..."
 * Well, that's easily explained with "God the Father" and "God the Son" (later Jesus). In fact, according to canon (read closely), it was the Son (again, later Jesus) who did most of the creating. I know! Wacky!
 * The word used for God in that passage, Elohim, is plural. And the line about the simultaneous creation of male and female humans implies male and female Elohim(or hermaphrodites). Perhaps some of them had a falling-out with the Judeo-Christian God and became the gods of other religions. It was only later that Yahweh started spreading propaganda about the other gods not even existing, or being demons.
 * Not if the image is a non-physical one. This troper always thought it referred to the spiritual nature of mankind.
 * Actually, it says this in the Bible. Psalm 82: The Downfall of Unjust Gods "God rises in the divine council, gives judgment in the midst of the gods. 'How long will you judge unjustly and favor the cause of the wicked? Defend the lowly and fatherless; render justice to the afflicted and needy. Rescue the lowly and poor; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.' The gods neither know nor understand, wandering about in darkness, and all the world's foundations shake. I declare: 'God's though you be, offspring of the Most High all of you, Yet like any mortal you shall die; like any prince you shall fall." Arise, O God, judge the earth, for yours are all the nations."
 * This passage makes sense, in light of what the documentary The Bible's Buried Secrets tells us: The Unjust Gods are either 1. god-like vassals of Yahweh, or 2. ancient princes and rulers of nations, who were thought to be divine by the populace. God's essentially saying "Hey you, stop abusing your power and HELP the people, or else I'll take your power away from you!"
 * PBS did an interesting documentary on NOVA titled The Bible's Buried Secrets. In it, biblical archeology strongly suggest that originally, Ancient Hebrews were more Pagan/Caananite in origin, leading to them having a monotheistic in intent, but polytheistic in practice religion. Yahweh was the chief of this pantheon, even having a wife named Ashara (who was the Ancient Caananite mother goddess figure), with the other gods being analogous to the angels and saints of modern Catholicism. Despite attempts by the prophets and the clergy to get the populace to commit fully to monotheism, the Ancient Hebrews kept worshipping the other gods, which, as a violation of their contract with Yahweh, meant that they lost his protection.
 * There is an idea going around that the "gods" mentioned in other religions are actually human angel hybrids created before Noah's flood. There is a very strange text in Genesis 6:1-3, the meaning is heavily debated, but one ancient view, is that the "Sons of God" are Angles (Rogues of Satin? ...Sorry, couldn't resist), the "Daughters of Men" are humans. The Angels impregnated the humans, and the humans bore giants (Possibly the same kind as Goliath). The Angels also taught the humans magic spells that eventually lead to complete chaos since we couldn't handle that kind of power.
 * In 1 Corinthians 11:3, Paul talks about the offerings made to idols. "...The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God and I do not want you to be participants with demons." So the false and unjust gods were actually demons.
 * That's why it's called Demonization. If you don't want people to like them, you call them evil.
 * Perhaps there were other gods, but they were killed/demonized because God's a raging narcissist.
 * Given the New Testament was written in ancient Greek, "Daemon" doesn't necessarily mean evil, it means spiritual being that is not a God. One claiming to be would be lying, at least if they were claiming to be a god equal or before the GOD God but that doesn't mean every other power in heaven is necessarily evil and asking for the puny humans to make idols of them.

Corollary to the above: A god ceases to exist when it has no followers.
Perhaps this doesn't belong on this page, but it connects to the above WMG: Gods do exist (note the example of God fighting Dagon above) but only when they have followers. Once no one believes in a god, they don't exist anymore. This could be understood in the scientific sense; once an anthropological sect dies out, there's no way or reason for other sects to link to them or connect, and so they fall; or it could be seen in the theological sense, and taken at face value.

God is Santa Claus!
He sees you when you're sleeping? He knows when you're awake? God's supposed to know and do everything, so wouldn't it be feasible for him to know who's good or bad and possibly give everyone presents in a night?
 * Alternately, Santa's a regeneration of Jesus.
 * Are you saying Jesus is a Time Lord? I hope so.
 * It would make the resurrection seem a bit more plausible.
 * And it would also explain why his friends and followers don't immediately recognize him after his Regenerat- Resurrection.
 * Alternately, Santa is just a stalker.
 * No, Satan is Santa!
 * God is the precarnation of the human man Nicholas of Myra.

Satan didn't fall until after the Old Testament
In the Old Testament, the only explicit depiction of Satan this troper remembers is in the book of Job, where he basically "stress tested" Job for God. There's also the serpent in the Garden of Eden, but the serpent isn't named as anything other than just a serpent (at least not in the New International or the King James version; I'm not about to search every last English translation to see how true this is). As noted above in the "Satan is just misunderstood" entries, he doesn't start getting explicitly depicted as the enemy until the New Testament.

The "God's loyal Jerkass" and the "enemy of God and mankind" Satan are, however, the same being. The idea is that his rebellion didn't come "in the beginning" - it was a private rebellion that occurred while Jesus was fasting in the desert. Satan got it into his head that, since his duty was to test people for God, who better to apply it to than God's Son? Jesus passed muster, but God was not amused. Satan was cast out, and become not the loyal tester but the enemy, using the skills of his previous office to drive people away from God.

I admit I don't know the Bible well enough to state that there was definitely no other depiction of Satan as a fallen angel before the Gospels; the verse "O Lucifer, Son of the Morning, how art thou fallen from Heaven?" comes to mind, but most scholars I've heard say that this is about Nebuchadnezzar. Oh, and the serpent was someone else entirely - maybe just a run-of-the-mill talking snake who got uppity.
 * Isaiah Chapter 14 verses 3-23. The whole passage where that appears is the rant God wants Isaiah to yell at Nebuchadnezzar when the Israelites are freed from their latest stint in bondage. Satan doesn't make an appearance.
 * Satan as a fallen angel isn't from the Bible at all, it was an early-Medieval concept.
 * The Book of Job does say that even Angels falter. It just doesn't go into any specifics on which ones did.

Satan is wisdom, God is faith
Since the time this troper heard the phrase Morningstar, he's been confused. Morningstar is a rather poetic name for the Ultimate Evil. It seems that all Satan did over the time is to bring wisdom to mankind, even at the cost of doing horrible things. God does the same with faith. So both of them have a good and evil side. Or, rather constructive and destructive side.
 * So basically, Satan is the DNA Digivolved form of Hades and Prometheus.

The "forbidden fruit" acted as a "red pill".
Making the snake a Morpheus.
 * There is a serious lack of Kung Fu in the Bible.
 * Adaptation Decay.
 * What about Samson?
 * What about The Gospel According to Biff?
 * It's notable that Mormons interpret this as being the case.

The Old Testament is a Secret Test of Character.
The test, of course, being the extent to which one labels the nastier parts Fanon Discontinuity, and can thus be considered to be a decent human being.
 * Alternatively, being the extent to which one labels the nastier parts Fanon Discontinuity, and can thus be considered to be a stalwart believer. But your guess of this test, I admit, is a test more secret than mine view.

God isn't against homosexuality or sexual perversion.
Despite what most fundamentalists say, The Lord Thy God isn't ashamed of strange fornication; he just doesn't like it when it gets out of hand and interferes with the natural order of things. For instance, when God trashed Sodom and Gomorrah, it wasn't because they were sexual deviants, but because they were notoriously ruthless and suspicious towards strangers; they wouldn't let the angels go until they had "known" (aka "gang-raped") them, even turning down an offer to get it on with Lot's daughters. Clearly, if it was just the sex part of their indignities and not the mob mentality they had, I don't think they would've been so severely punished, or if God really is ruthless, then Ancient Greece (or the animals) would not even have existed because of their squicky ways.

Also, His commandments against non-heterosexual sex in Exodus could be easily explained away by the fact that His people were few and scattered, and He needed them to breed and flourish to ensure they survived. And the sin of that one prophet, Onan, who refused God's order to impregnate his sister-in-law by "spilling his seed" instead? It wasn't the act that was sinful, but the fact that he did it in direct defiance of God's order These seem to indicate that God Himself isn't opposed to the kinky sex we enjoy, now, just so long as it doesn't screw with our lives or those of others around us; the growing number of homosexuals nowadays could be God's way of telling us that his command to "be fruitful and multiply" has served its purpose and we can stop breeding for the sake of breeding. Besides, what explains the creation and existence of the clitoris (which feels good yet has no reproductive purpose)? If God really is so antisex then he should have replaced our penises and vaginas with eggs and spermatophores.
 * It actually does say in Leviticus that men should not have sex with men (right alongside the parts that tell you to sacrifice animals and beat your wife). Lesbians, however, are not mentioned, so God is apparently a Yuri Fanboy.
 * This fits with the above idea that God was a teenager during this time.
 * Then again, that entire section in Leviticus only outlines the bad sex things men do, with women only mentioned/punished when they get taken down from the men. So either women can do anything they want sexually, or it's just an expression of the low social status of women at the time.
 * Lesbians are mentioned by description (or at least implicated) in one of the more-commonly cited passages from the New Testament, Romans 1:26-27. But Your Mileage May Vary, because St. Paul is considered to be mere Word of Dante (ask Friedrich Nietzsche for starters).
 * My personal theory is that in an age before condoms, the laws against homosexuality were health regulations--just like the laws that established quarantine periods and forbade eating shellfish. Which would explain why lesbian sex wasn't listed--it doesn't involve as much danger, especially in an age before antibiotics. (Also, women were quarantined during their periods; men, anytime they had a wet dream! Neither of those are sinful, obviously.)
 * Maybe not to us, today, using a modern definition of "sin" which revolves around personal choice and free will. But at that place and time, yes, they definitely were thought of as sinful, shameful, and unclean.
 * To be fair, periods and wet dreams are still unclean. Just not spiritually unclean. And you have to take in consideration what the other people were doing at the time. Canaanites were okay with child sacrifices, so who knows what kind of twisted stuff they did sexually. And the Romans (The Beautiful Elite to us) were in fact okay with stuff like bestiality, incest, pedophilia, multiple mistresses, compulsive wanton cheating that the multiple spouses all knew about and were okay with, drunken orgies, seppuku, sex slavery, some of the most humiliating tortures ever (crucifixion for example, and it's imposed on "slaves!"), gang rapes, rape as comedy, rape as drama, rape as love, raping in general, guro and cannibalism (told you it was twisted), and other nasty stuff that would have surpassed /b/ and hentai and would have instantly created Slaanesh (God of the most unimaginable squickiest sensual pleasures you never know even existed) if given the chance. That is why fundies were so ardent about homosexual sex: they're the equivalent of the Exodites.
 * The only reason we "know" the Caananites were into that stuff is because their most fervent enemies, who were intent on killing them and stealing their land, said so. There's no actual historical evidence for it.
 * Regardless of morality it can't really be called cheating if everyone involved knows about and is okay with it.
 * There are two quotes many fundamentalist love to refer to whenever homosexuality is brought up. One refers to "lying with a man as one does with a woman". The other explicitly mentions 'homosexuals' in modern translations. However, not considering the fact that the 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 is completely taken out of context (the full quote is 9-11 and actually talks about redemption and the forgiving of sins), the version this troper has is a much older translation that contains an expression that implies MEN having BUTTSECHS with OTHER MEN. something that, while a stereotypical portrayal of gay people, doesn't describe homoromantics directly. The first quote also implies the same thing so my guess is, this really is just a rule against anal sex and not much else.

Satan did the right thing on Eden, the Temptation was actually part of God's plan, and he was rewarded for that.
God needed the humans to become self-aware, but it couldn't be that they've become like that because he ordered, because that's not self-awareness. So he created a convoluted and rather complex plot that involved making the humans think they were actually disobeying him. So he planted the tree in the center of Eden -- why, would you think, such an obvious place, after all? -- and told them that it was forbidden to eat.

Adam and Eve were taking too long to complete the deed, so Lucifer decided to lend a hand and speed things up. Obviously, God saw what happened and was aware that it wasn't all their fault, and they were only expelled because it was part of the "self-awareness" process(see WMG Proposition 2). Lucifer was later rewarded by gaining his own kingdom outside Heaven, as well as one third of God's angels to follow him. After all, when someone tried to assume power, what kind of punishment it is to actually give him power?
 * So wait... does that mean that Still Alive is Satan's theme song?

Adam and Eve couldn't have children in their Eden state, meaning there would be no Jesus, and Satan thought he was messing up God's plan by tempting them.


 * That would explain how Satan and the snake are one of the same, despite being supposedly kicked out.

As in the above example, the Temptation turned out as expected, but Lucifer wasn't supposed to have interfered.
God was trying to work on a psychology project, but Lucifer got into it and was sent to Hell without any dinner. We were supposed to take the fruit of our own volition, and this tainted the entire project. Now we're like an old Sims file he keeps around to play with every so often, and he got bored of playing God Mode a couple thousand years ago.

Jesus was...

 * One of the Istari.
 * Specifically, Radagast the Brown. Explaining his hippie-like views and Friend to All Living Things nature.


 * A Naruto style ninja, thus explaining his ability to walk on water, and his using healing jitsus to cure the lepers etc.


 * A vampire- thus explaining all the blood drinking imagery in christian (particularly catholic) rituals, as well as how he was killed by being nailed to a cross (if we assume that crosses weakening vampires actually has nothing to do with Jesus, and the myths a chicken or the egg thing)
 * Technically, the blood-drinking comes from Mithraism, which had wine-as-blood symbolism since some four or five centuries BC.


 * A high level Dand D cleric- explains his healing powers (particularly resurrection), and also his ardent pacifism even when it's not a good idea (such as when he was captured in the garden, and even healed the ear of one of the capturing soldiers)- he's lawful stupid.
 * Nope, that was obviously a Xanatos Roulette. He knew what he was getting into... and the being-omniscient thing is kind of easy when you're God.
 * Water Walk isn't on the cleric class list, I think it may be in the water domain though


 * The Avatar, natively a waterbender, enabling him to heal and walk on water (freezing it around his feet).

"And when she had so said, she went her way, and called Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and calleth for thee."
 * The first mutant, metahuman, Scanner, Hero, witch, other kind of witch, wizard, Tomorrow Person, Newtype, Rynax, Diclonius, Terran Ghost, telepath, the Kwizatz Haderach that the Bene Gesserit are trying to recreate, a Super-Saiyan or Kryptonian or Antarian, an elf, or better yet one of the Valar, the Eternal Champion, or a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
 * He was also a Jedi Time Lord
 * He did die on the cross; he just regenerated later.
 * And which Time Lord, you ask. I direct you to John 11:28

Take your pick.


 * And of course Warhammer 40000 strongly implies that the Emperor was actually Jesus.


 * While Shaman King suggests that he was an earlier Shaman King... and so was Buddha. Of course, this mostly resulted in me trying to come up who Jesus had kung-fu-shamanic battles with. He surely defeated and befriended John the Baptist, but who else?
 * Satan himself?


 * Jesus was the first and founder of the Quincies. Prove me wrong. You can't.


 * Jesus was a failed Sburb player who was forced to reset the universe via scratch. What?

Satan is a victim of massive Memetic Mutation and Adaptation Decay.
Lucifer and Satan are actually separate entities; the reason Satan only appears as a stress-tester of men in the Old Testament is that whoever wrote the Old Testament down knew the difference between the two. All future incidences of Satan doing Ultimate-Evil-type things are recorded due to the people who recorded them not knowing the difference.
 * Actually, that's pretty accurate. So far as I can tell, Satan (actually just meaning "adversary") was written in the Old Testament to be a test for humanity, a way to ensure that the faithful are truly so, and perhaps even a tool of divine retribution if it comes to that. Lucifer is an invention of medieval clergy who needed an enemy, a manifestation of evil that worked to thwart the Church, which thus deserves the great amount of power it gets from being the only ones able to save the world.
 * Actually, the name Satan comes from "shaitan" or "hasatan", which essentially means "to accuse". Satan, if the character actually existed, was more like a prosecuting attorney smack-dab on the far cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
 * Piers Anthony plays with this one in the Incarnations of Immortality series- Lucifer, Satan, and the like are names assumed by those who take on the mantle of the Incarnation of Evil, much like kings and queens take on reign-names in the real world. (so that, for example, the Incarnation known to the readers chose Satan as his formal name, but his predecessor was Lucifer)

On a side note, Lucifer and Satan are treated as two entities in the MegaTen 'verse. Satan is explicity God's divine hammer of judgment, while Lucifer is a proponent of free will against God's more authoritarian dominion.

God is the CEO of a company that is manufacturing universes, ours is an early alpha version.
He still keeps us as a keepsake. Satan was a buggy angel. The final version does not have evil. Armaggedon comes when the bugs just get too prevalent and he has to delete our file.
 * Wouldn't Armageddon be more of a bug sweep? Or maybe a purging of unnecessary files within the larger universe? According to the tail end of the readme file, Armageddon is supposed to leave the universe better than it was before. (Or is that what it's like in the cosmic Recycle Bin?)
 * Fear not, for the Faithful have been back up in the Database of Life. Jesus Saves!
 * Considering this troper's own theory about the binary nature of the universe as detailed in the Bible, this one almost makes sense...

God needs believers to keep him alive and his diminishing appearances as time goes on are actually an attempt at suicide, but Jesus wouldn't let him kill himself.
Jesus was originally conceived as a replacement, but when he realized Gods plan for him, he subverted it by telling his followers that he was still connected to God because he didn't want his father to die.
 * The New Atheists i.e. Richard Dawkins are another, bigger attempt at suicide by God, because he saw that the not-appearing thing wasn't working.
 * He was planning on using the same tactic agains the Greek pantheon, but someone already took them down.

Abraham was a schitzophrenic.
I think a few historians have actually argued this, actually.

God programmed pre-timed miracles into the laws of physics when He created the world
It explains quite a bit, when you work free will into the equation- humanity has taken fate main/OffTheRails, and so he has to fudge with his official motives when a scheduled miracle pops up.
 * The reason he "hardened Pharaoh's heart" after the first couple of plagues was because he hadn't expected him to give in yet, and didn't want to look foolish when all the firstborn died, frogs were everywhere, flaming hail rained down, etc, and the Jews had already left
 * See above on monolatrism, though -- in the original text, it's "Ra hardened Pharaoh's heart."
 * Which would nicely explain why God kept going instead of letting up when Pharaoh was about to give in.

Moses is a waterbender, taught by the avatar (god)
There is no other explanation as to how he could part the sea the way he did.
 * But of course there is! This is Wild Mass Guessing!
 * Hey, it makes more sense than him having a disintegrator pistol, as L. Ron Hubbard claimed. (I wonder if it fired Ancient Egyptian Laser Beams.)
 * Telekinesis, Functional Magic, Nanomachines spread throughout the water, Tractor Beams, Gravity Control, conjuring water elementals, quantum-level manipulation of Van Der Waal forces, Earthbending to raise the ground into a land bridge, really good stage magic, ten trillion guys with buckets, etc.
 * The Spirit of God leading them might have just gotten lost and been afraid to admit it. So he had Moses do some showy hocus-pocus, then told him that the water had dried up as a result. So they just walked across some random stretch of land, thinking it was the sea floor.
 * Explain how it suddenly became mud when the Egyptians touched it and how the water came and covered them afterwards, burying the chariots and drowning the chariot drivers?

Is there a God?
Mu.
 * Moo?
 * Nu.

God had a change of heart between the Old and New Testaments
The above theory that OT God != NT God can also be explained by God becoming more easy-going. There's actually a theory that when God appeared as Jesus, He experienced what being human was really like, and decided to be more lenient and compassionate towards His creations from then on.
 * Not really; there are plenty of references to God's mercy and compassion in the OT. People simply like bringing the Wrath up instead.
 * He came to Earth, discovered Cannabis, and become a stoner.
 * He was a stoner before that. It would explain why we have six-winged incinerating angels, intersecting "wheels" and four-headed humanoids with hands under their wings, with too many eyes for the mind to handle. The New Testament is when he stops taking drugs.

Everyone sees Jesus as their own race.
All depictions of Jesus are accurate, whether he's white, middle-eastern, even the occasional black or Hispanic Jesus. And it doesn't just apply to humans, oh no. He goes from planet to planet, taking different forms, suffering through whatever method of execution each species uses.
 * Oh, and before anyone asks whether I actually believe this, it's more about logic than faith. If Jesus and aliens then alien Jesus. Assuming both those premises, the only obvious alternatives are "all aliens go to hell" or "aliens aren't made in God's image", which is frankly appalling to even consider.
 * So Jesus is Galactus?
 * No, Jesus is K-PAXian.
 * No, he's a Vorlon. Probably Kosh Naranek.
 * You're assuming aliens in the first place. Given the nature of the extrasolar planets we've discovered, I'm not so sure about that.
 * Well of course I'm assuming aliens! I'm also assuming Jesus. The point is, if both exist and Jesus ever needed to die for aliens' sins, he wouldn't appear to them in human form. And by the way, a few hundred extrasolar planets is not a meaningful sample of space, much less time.
 * And the "nature of the extrasolar planets we've discovered" is purely determined by the limitations of our current technology. We couldn't even find Earth from the nearest star system using current methods. The vast majority of the universe is beyond the range of our telescopes.
 * So if we find Mechanical Lifeforms out there, their Jesus would appear as Optimus Prime?

God created us and aliens in his image.
 * Oh, they aren't Human Aliens. God's apperance is...something no-one can comprehend. So He's probably like Galactus: so bizzare, you can only manage to see it as you'd see your own form.

Ruth and Naomi had something going on.
You know it's true.
 * Please, tell us more.
 * Don't forget David and Jonathan.

There was nothing miraculous about Jesus walking on water.
Always extremely literal, I pointed out when I was a kid that ice is a form of water and that most people can, to some extent, walk on it. Of course, most people I know, myself included, can only get a few steps in before falling, but still. Either it wasn't translated that water was frozen, or the writer didn't know about the concept of water freezing and turning solid. ""We Canadians are more skeptical. We believe Jesus walked on water, but...we figure it was probably winter.""
 * Yeah, because frozen lakes are SO prone to having thrashing waves, and are popular boating areas.
 * I do admit that I did forget that the text makes it pretty clear the water in question was liquid when I posted the above entry. My point in posting the above was that many Christians I've talked to have pointed to his perfoming miracles as proof of his divinity. Walking on water is considered one of the miracles The Bible claims he performed. Whether Jesus was a real person, a real person and the son of a deity, a composite of several people, or a completely fictional character, it doesn't change the fact that ice is a form of water and that many, many people do have the capablity of walking on it. So, really, my issue is with people not using literal language, 'He walked on liquid water', than anything else.
 * From what this troper has seen, it's generally accepted that the term 'water' means only the liquid version unless serving as a modifier. (Water Ice as opposed to Dry Ice, or Water Vapor as opposed to various other vaporous substances.)
 * Geologically speaking, wasn't this also the "Dead Sea" Jesus was walking on? Didn't everything float on it? Including, possibly, people if they walked on it? Even with thrashing waves?
 * Not the Dead Sea, but the Sea of Gallilee, which is freshwater. The fishing isn't so good in the ultra-salty Dead Sea.
 * Even then you cannot walk on the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea may be vicous, but not that much. About the thinest liquid you can walk on is custard.
 * Eh, the thinnest is actually cornstarch-saturated water, if you run.
 * Been watching some John Wing stand-up, have we?

Leviathan is Godzilla
Described in the Book Of Job as a massive sea monster, with scaly hide immune to mundane weaponry, breathing fire... c'mon, people!
 * Better than my killjoy "modernized" translation that renders "Leviathan" as "crocodile." Crocs don't breathe fire!

Hell isn't real
God merely uses "Hell" as a way of scaring people into believing in him. In reality, an all-loving God would never create a place of eternal suffering, and he did this just to test us. After all, if you believe in eternal punishment, why would you worship such a Complete Monster? There's also a theory known as Universal Reconciliation which holds that at the end of time, all souls will be reunited with God, ala Instrumentality. Oh, and I'd like to call Fridge Logic on this one (which really did strike me on the way to the fridge) - if God is all-loving, and is, because of that, unable to create a place of eternal suffering as this action could be said to be morally ambiguous, can he still lie to us (again, eternally)? An easy way to understand this is through the Parable of the Prodigal Son by Jesus himself: you run away from home too young and too early, but eventually you get bankrupt both financially and emotionally, making you realize that at least your parents lived better. Even though existentialists accept living this, eternal separation is Cosmic Horror Story for some Christians.
 * The idea of hell as being eternal is actually Christian Adaptation Decay mixed with Word of Dante. Jewish belief holds that Hell is more like the Christian concept of purgatory, a place you go to receive horrible rehabilitations for a length of time proportional to your sinfulness. Everyone goes to heaven, sinful people just take longer.
 * the jewish version is corroborated by various pagan sects and the Long Journey. Which is essentially you have to wander around Mordor until you can find a way into the Ghibli Hills
 * Some theologians hold that Hell is actually The Nothing After Death - good people go to Heaven, bad people go nowhere. Ever again. There's also the theory called Annihilationism / Conditional Immortality, where immortality is supposed to be a reward that is to be obtained, and sinners are euthanized / annihilated from existence . Some annihilationists propose that Biblical references to the "Lake of Fire" are in fact references to Gehenna, a Real Life trash incinerator where so much scum (corpses of criminals and sinners along with other garbage and just plainly disgusting things) were burned as fuel it gave the impression of an eternal fire "where the worms and Eldritch Abominations dieth not", and that the theory of predetermined immortality for all souls was a concept borrowed from Greek philosophy, most notably Plato's Theory of Forms . Despite portraying God as more of an asshole than a merciful practitioner of euthanasia, the Word of Dante simply survived as a better Orwellian control mechanism
 * Which is WORSE than eternal torment. Existing beats not existing.
 * Which is WORSE than not existing. Being able to create meaning out of nowhere beats being tormented for eternity.
 * I find that really hard to believe, if the alternative is an eternity of being tormented by demons and fire, I'll take non-existence any day. Think of it as an ultimate coup de grace. Ask Azrael for example.
 * The Nothing After Death ISN'T nonexistence. You're thinking Cessation of Existence.
 * This Troper's reading of Scripture indicates that Hell is intended for the punishment of Satan and the demons who followed him, and that God's entire aim throughout all of history has been to get humans out of the danger of Hell and into Heaven. Which leads me to conclude that the demons in Hell will suffer at least as much, if not more, than any condemned human there, assuming that the postulated theorem of non-existence is not actually correct.
 * Perhaps all souls are God. What would be a better way to stave off an eternity of omnipotent boredom but to create a universe and independently live out all the experiences within it?
 * Universal Reconciliation sounds a lot like ....
 * Modern Christian interpretations of Hell are simply "eternal separation from God," meaning that leaving humanity to fend for itself is punishment enough.
 * What does that even mean? Fend for ourselves from what? I always thought the separation thing was just an euphemism.
 * Allow me to explain: the Eternal Separation idea of hell means that, if you don't repent and admit that you have sinned, then God cannot be with you, as evil and sin are literally anathema to him and what he is. After going through a person's life with them in every single detail, God then allows them to see EXACTLY what sort of person every single choice made them. If the person still cannot accept or admit their guilt, then God accepts that, and leaves the person to their own devices. They can now do whatever they want in the afterlife, but hell for them will be the void in their spirits that only God could fill/heal, a feeling of loss, separation and loneliness that will ALWAYS be with them in some form or another that is only worsened by some part of them KNOWING exactly why they feel this way.
 * The Eternal seperation concept of Hell almost sounds like Instrumentality, since being one with God means having your consciousness fuse with God. People who reject Instrumentality rejects God and embraces existentialism.
 * It is not hard for many people to admit they are a flawed being, what many would refuse to admit is that they are tainted and sinful - sinful implying that no good qualities complement their bad.
 * And there's the whole "knowing exactly how, when, where, and why you screwed up and why you didn't end up in Heaven" thing.
 * That one actually sounds like a reasonable compromise. The people who want to fuse with God can do so. The people who'd rather retain their individuality can do so as well.
 * It's possible to have eternal hell and a merciful god with one basic change. Repentance is possible in hell. After all, God is all-forgiving, right? If repenting in hell is possible then the only way for someone to stay there forever is to be a total Jerkass who cannot ever accept that they did evil in their life, but still god is willing to grant forgiveness of their crimes against humanity.
 * Milton and Dante (the Trope Codifiers for Hell in modern thought) actually make it a point to bring this idea up. In Paradise Lost Hell is suspiciously easy to sneak out of, and both God and Lucifer mention that the fallen angels would be accepted back to heaven in a heartbeat if they asked God for forgiveness. The only reason they don't (and won't) is the pride that made them fall in the first place. Dante makes it almost comical -- Satan is frozen up to the waist in Lake Cocytus, constantly flapping his wings to try and escape which generates the icy wind that keeps the lake frozen. If he stopped rebelling against his punishment he'd be on his merry way ... but that would mean accepting his sins and his guilt. And Dante himself was able to escape the "abandon all hope ye who enter here" place.
 * If such was possible, then it would have been mentioned by both God and Jesus in the accounts of what Hell is like. And it makes the whole idea of living for God rather unnecessary since you being in Hell would be more than enough proof that you done fucked up.
 * Not necessarily. First of all, "repentance" isn't just a talk session: it's about accepting your wrongs and/or becoming The Atoner. Which is hard for people with big egos. Second, some assholes really are that arrogant. Do you think Hitler or Stalin would ever acknowledge the suffering they caused in life? No, they'd just sit there, their massive egos ranting about how they were massively glorious über-dic- er, Übermenschen, unable to ever feel God's loving embrace. Most other people, especially those guilty of only minor sins (for example suicide, atheism, adultery and Freudian Excuse-related crimes), would probably learn, repent and go to Heaven.
 * Hell was a Norse concept. Norse Mythology had an afterlife called Hel, where non-warriors are sent.....
 * Hell is actually Earth, and Reincarnation is real. The only way to escape is to attain nirvana, or to merge with a person who has already reached nirvana (Jesus, Buddha)
 * Alternatively, Hell is a massive psychological test to determine if humans really believe in deities because of fear of punishment, not because of the moral standards that said deities provide. Punishment, after all, is the best way to show power and impose a message of strict obedience. Turns out, most of Christians obey God because of the fear of being punished eternally by a Cosmic Horror, not because of the message of love and free will that Jesus communicated to us.
 * Another interpretation of Hell is actually "Hell Is Other People" (as a reference to Sartre's play). There's no need for red-hot pokers, just research the ideas behind Hedgehog's Dilemma and you would get what Hell actually is. The closer sapient life come to each other the more likely they are to mutually become hell to each other, yet if they remain apart, they each would feel the pain of loneliness. When a hedgehog comes to share other hedgehogs' warmth, he has to experience the painful quills that are other hedgehogs, yet when he stays away from them, he experiences the coldness of loneliness. It's an existentialist concept. Now, the majority of us prefer an Assimilation Plot to escape from the hedgehog. This is where Religion comes in. Specifically, Christianity tries to overcome the hell that is Hedgehog's Dilemma by complementing each individual's problems through God's sacrifice, thus giving a more idealistic outlook on life. Just like Instrumentality.
 * One interpretation popular in the Mormon Church is that when you stand before god you will have total recall of all you have done and be acutely aware of how every action you took affected those around you (meaning that in the end god won't judge you, you will judge yourself), which would be a pretty torturous thing if you made many mistakes in life, thus hell is a self imposed state of mind brought on by knowing just how much of a terrible person you are. In other words, Hell is the Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence.
 * This can also explain why suicides and other Freudian Excuses still receive eternal punishment, it's not because of the God Is Evil Word of Dante eternal torment in lake of fire which everyone questions and despises, it's because they lived a life of Despair Event Horizon, which can be punishment in itself enough.
 * Fools! The real reason for the sole existence for Hell is Rule of Cool! Think about it. Infernal Tropes, The Legions of Hell, Like a Badass Out of Hell, To Hell and Back, A Hell of a Time, and so on....
 * Hell is blasphemy. In reality there's Heaven and Purgatory. Hell's just used so evil preachers can frighten others into obedience.

Jesus was in fact a geek
Tell me if this doesn't make some parts of his life make more sense,lets start with the basics: he has to be convinced by his mom to produce some alchohol,by his mom not realy geting a raver vibe from him.
 * quick note I was raised in greek orthodoxism and it's been a while since I've taken my last religion course,high school level so if any of my example's are flawed our are told diferentely in the version of the bible you use please append so that the theory can be as complete as posible.
 * childhood, in the only instance when Jesus went to Jerusalem as a kid he started discusing teology with the high priests and whining,now bear in mind that for the time and region theologycal discusions were perhaps the apex intelectual progress and the ultimate experts were being beaten by somebody way younger and who at that moment knew this stuf as a hobby if you will or as preparation for his future job.
 * career choice,Joshep was a carpenter and I'm not sure if it's fanon or canon but I think that he wanted Jesus to become one too ,and with their tehnology level that was ? a midle level tech job, but no Jesus wanted to do his own high level completeley rewrite the philosophy of his age, intelectual stuff ,prophet where's the money in that,L.Ron Hubbard aside?
 * Joseph being a "carpenter" is actually the result of a mistranslation, the proper term would be a "craftsman" who back in that day had many and diverse talents and was actually a high-paying and desireable position. Especially with the build-happy Herod in charge thanks to the even more build-happy romans. Joseph was also a remnant of the house of David so he was very much part of an "old money" family.
 * this is the part I'm not sure it's canon with the Pope a story I read can't remeber which gospel especialy Jesus went with Mary to a weding in Galilee this was just before the preaching so I'm thinking 20-25 years old the weding finishes the wine too early so Mary asks Jesus to do something he does a water to wine spell so let's recap:his at a party,25-30ish,with his mom,the boose dries up,he sits there,he has supernatural powers,
 * a large part of his work was telling people that they read the Old Testament wrong,it's a popular book he goes around telling people that they don't realy get it that he can quote it from his head that he knows more then them but don't worry he'll teach you.
 * yes I'm aware of the paralels you don't get I have the truth, no I'm not in purgatory okay
 * no canon physical relationships ever ,he was 30, and no I don't think that the Mary Magdalene foot washing sequence counts I don't think that fetish was evented by then alltough I'll accept that he had female folowers so he was in the presence of girls.
 * do not the folowing qoutes make more sense with this version of Jesus:
 * the meek shall inherit the earth... you know that guy you beat up in high school will be your boss
 * turn the other cheek .. physical victory may not be posible acceptt defeat and don't worry you're the better man for not resorting to violence.
 * that rampage against the merchants stalls:"-What do you mean 50 denari for Consul Caesar card he has 5/5 and isn't even in mint condition".
 * let the children come to me.... I have a new deck and want to test it against your best player.
 * spent a lot of time with his male friends discusing theoretical stuff.
 * how many D&D spells are based on him he was just ahead of his time.
 * religious discusion with the high priests->flame war->flame war+ religion+ politics against the moderators->no ban option->crucification
 * after several people apocalipse should have already hapened,but it's obviously not maybe the J-man is impresed with our new tech and has already come and he's batling the Antichrist right now on a forum somewhere before they're both banned for causing flame wars and have to take it to another forum.


 * One of Us! One of Us!
 * Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble.

All religious are "True", just relatives and same gods making new attempts
A version of the multiple gods WMG above. All religions had their own God or gods working together, but sometimes a god tried several times.
 * Zorastrianism was Yawweh/Jehova's first attempt as a solo act, aka beta, religion before officially breaking the Jews away from a many god faith into his own special monotheism faith. However, when it became clear they were too much to manage he tried again by creating Jesus. However, after that quickly fell apart, Jesus went into hiding and died early, Yahweh sat around for a few centuries before deciding to go with another angle, Islam, by going back to the Jewish roots of Abraham's kids. This too collapsed when the Sunnis and Shiites broke apart. Along the way Yahweh created the Mormons as a fifth attempt at getting his own solo career going.
 * Actually Zoroastrianism's concepts were integrated into the Jewish faith during a time of exile for the Jews in Persia. If anything; Christianity is Pseudo Judaic-Zoroastrianism. Even the struggles between Good and Evil are parallel to that. And Zarathustra's (Original Prophet) religion existed as early as 1,100 BCE (Before Common Era) can validate this. Then it was even taken further by the Zurvanists who saw Ahura Mazda (Zoroasterian God) and Angra Manyu/Ahriman (Absolute Antithesis) both as children of Zurvan; the God of time.

Moses becomes God, and goes back in time to coach himself to free the Hebrews.
Val Kilmer voices both Moses and God in The Prince of Egypt. Enough said.
 * So God is Val Kilmer and thus also Batman!

Jesus was created to be the Messiah by his mother Mary, who lacked power being a woman in those days
Essentially, it goes like this. Jesus' mom, M.M., wanted to assist in getting the Jews out from Rome's rule, but being a woman lacked the power to do so. So she looked at options available to her, and hatched a plan. Give birth to the "messiah", and from there to set in motion a plan to raise the messiah under her thumb.

For example, there is no reason for Mary to have been in Bethlehem. The census was for Romans or people who were dirt eating poor, and the latter were forced back to their home towns to work on farms. Jesus was the son of the carpenter, or general craftsman, not the Ancient-Roman-Occupied-Jewish equivalent of a welfare family. The census was an excuse Mary used to get herself in the place the messiah was prophecied to be born.

Child Jesus talking with the temple priests was simply him escaping while his mother and father had him on an educational trip. He was so impressive because they were filling his head with information at an early age. The next thirty years are unknown as they are thirty years planning for almost every contingency as possible, as well as the miracles.

All miracles are slight of hand, or exaggeration over the years. Things are a bit additional muddled as the culture the people had in the area of writing Fan Fiction in official names, and passing it off as if written by the original author.

The crucifixion occurred enough to fool those who came to watch it initially happen. They waited for the mob to get bored, leave, and then Longinus, who later "converted" and was in on the deal, poked Jesus in the side. This is after Jesus is put into a drug coma by some bitter drink. Blood comes out, Longinus claims he sees blood and water to throw off the other guards if they aren't in on it.

The plan originally was for Jesus to come back a few years later, whence within that generation, but away from his domineering mother and with his "most trusted diciple", a romance that never was began to flourish. There was serious UST, but between being watched by his siblings and parents Jesus could never act on it.

He decides to give the metaphorical finger to his mother, becoming history's greatest Spanner in the Works, and never comes back like planned. Dies young, never completely recovered from crucifixion. His wife and daughter then go off to try to cash in on their husband/father's name for themselves.

The plan falls apart as planned. The original plan was to have all Jews unite behind Jesus, while instilling just enough fear into the Romans that a full scale war wouldn't be needed. Just enough of a minor win to signal Rome is weak, and start a whole powder keg of an ancient world war.

Jesus always wanted there to be two popes: A male and a female
This is practically proven scientifically, as the original source-text of the bible stated that he entrusted his church into the hands of Petrus AND Mary-Magdalena. And that he had 12 female-apostels beside the male set. Makes 24 altogehter. The 12 women were written out of the final Bible, because, apparently, the patrialistic societies of this time didn't like the idea of beeing religiously led by a man AND a woman.
 * Needs Citation. It's pretty much accepted amongst most scholars now that Mary Magdalene didn't even really exist. Or rather, the Possession Sue wife of Jesus didn't. Instead, MM's thought to be a compilation of at least three different Marys.
 * And, to be entirely fair, This Troper doubts Jesus said anything about popes to begin with. Sure, he entrusted Peter with his followers, but there's a big leap between that and the papacy.
 * Well yeah, I'd guess this theory is assuming Catholicism is correct with the whole papacy thing. (Though it's not really THAT big a leap.)
 * In Matthew 16:16-19 when Jesus asked who the apostles thought He was, Simon said that He is the Christ. Jesus told Simon that he was to be known as Peter, meaning rock, and would build His Church upon him, giving him the keys to the kingdom. In [John 21:15-17), Jesus says to Peter that he must feed His lambs, meaning lead, be the shepherd of the Church. The word pope comes from the Greek word "papas" which means father, or leader of the family. Pope St. Clement I, Peter's 3rd successor (the 4th pope) stated in his [http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1010.htm Epistle to the Corinthians that Peter and the apostles chose successors. This was written about 80 A.D. (C.E.). Jesus may not have used the term "pope" directly, at least not that we know of, but He did choose a leader, and expected that leadership to continue.

God is one of The Fair Folk
"And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." (Judges 1:19)
 * Read the rest of the book. He handles the chariots with no problem, stating he only let up because the Israelites were not fully committed.

Longinus was quested by God to obtain material for a new Eve.
He was supposed to rip out a chunk of rib, but instead ended up putting the spear right through his chest. Instead of coming back before everyone present died, he ended up being Killed Off for Real and was animated (with enough strength to move the rock) by the Power of God(TM) for just enough time to be seen a few times. Longinus converted not because he felt guilty or because he felt the followers made a good point, but rather because God gave him a preview of hell and he really wanted to get on His good side.

The story of Chelm is the final testament of the Bible
It's an allegory: God made millions of alien races and... guess who the dumb ones are.
 * Actually, God has been trying to hint to us how dumb we are for millennia, not only with the story of Chelm, but also by giving us multiple, contradictory, and untrue stories about the ultimate meaning of life (called religions) and...oh, the time he dropped that guy with at least half a shred of intelligence into our midst as an April Fools Day joke

God was a programmer, Adam and Eve were the beta testers, Satan was a system cracker, and Jesus was a patch.
The apple was the, if you'll pardon the inaccuracy, core of the game, and Satan broke in and told the clueless testers (god's non-tech savvy friends) to mess with it in order to turn on godmode. They screw it p, God revokes their system access so that they and their invites can't do that again, puts a better firewall up, and this time it's a firesword. Later, all the increased respawn traffic the PK'ing causes floods ther server, and his admin Noah has to help fix it before anyone can be let back in. The Moses stuff was all an in-game event to explain a rules change in context to prevent another PK respawn server flood, with a few things about "no porn" and "listen to the admins" thrown in. Jesus was a patch added to the game as a last-ditch effort to make things better, punish PK'ers with a longer respawn wait and decrease damage dealt by roman-class creatures, but it ultimately failed. There was also an optional sidequest on the premium sever where if you did a bunch of tasks each day you could get a bunch of in-game rewards (with rumors spread about a harem minigame being unlocked if you participated long enough), but nothing really caught on. Membership exploded as the internet increased in popularity, but eventually not even the fan-made Quest for the Golden Plates (first place gets to name the questgiver after themself, and all participants get a pg-rated harem mod), but nothing ever really kept up interest like the earlier versions.
 * If those were the stated goals of the "patch", does that make forgiveness of sins the best Good Bad Bug ever?
 * Pretty much
 * Actually, scratch that. Salvation is way too specific and elaborate to be a random glitch. The resurrection must have been an Easter Egg.

Lumiel/Lucifer/Satan is a girl, and the only gendered angel before the fallen ones
In fact, the gendering of fallen angels may be due to her own. Also, that's why God is one hell of a mysogynist; he didn't trust girls since Lumiel betrayed him, and thought the ones that weirdo told him to create were just like her, and had to be submissive, like she wasn't; also, describing Satan with feminine beauty, and disguising herself as a harlot/seductress doesn't help, either... And being the angel of the Music, it might explain how the biggest successes are usually for girls...
 * But what the reasoning behind this "Lumiel" being female in the first place? Where did "she" come from, and what was there to specify her from the other angels since they weren't given human form in the earliest texts? And who says God is a misogynist? Most misogynistic traits in religion are thrown in by the human race, after all, and saying that Satan is described with "feminine beauty" doesn't make much sense unless you can cite exactly how said beauty might be any different from that which men are sometimes ascribed in older religious texts. This WMG smells of Crystal Dragon Jesus to me... ;) Also, if you're saying that the biggest musical successes are female, there's quite a range of men (from Bing Crosby and the Big Bopper to the King, The Prince of Pop, several boy-bands and Nickleback/Fall Out Boy/Christian rock groups) who would disagree.

Jesus messed up the sacrifice he made the first time.
According to Christian lore, Jesus sacrificed himself to pay for all the sins of mankind. Three days later he rose from the dead, screwing up the entire sacrificial process. Sacrifices are normally permanent- if you sacrifice an animal, you don't get it back. By coming back to life, Jesus' sacrifice was ruined so he had to give himself up to Heaven again, but this time gave his body as well as his soul to God (sort of repaying with interest).
 * The sacrifice is meaningless if death is not completely and utterly defeated. You see, the cost of sin is death. Jesus would only die for himself and no one else, so it would be in vain since he did no sin. Hence why the Resurrection was so important, it showed that Christ had overcome death, for everyone who believes.

Humans are not created in the image of god.
Humans wiped out the real chosen people of god a long time ago- the Dodo!

God and Satan are the same entity, an Eldritch Abomination, and wrote the Bible for the lulz
See the thousands of contradictions, especially these two: And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel. - II Samuel 24:1

And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel. - I Chronicles 21:1 Was it Satan or God? How about both? It might explain how God was violent in the Old Testament, but got kinder in the New; he wanted to attract more victims, and the old method wasn't working. We were created to be his Human Resources.
 * This is the problem with "either or" logic. God allowed Satan to provoke David. It's probable that David had been screwing around and got too egotistical. Note that Nathan tells David that it's a bad idea and David still goes forth to count his fighting men.
 * God and Satan are Bernkastel and Lambdadelta.

Jesus was a bread golem.
The bread was literally his flesh, no transubstantiation involved. The "wine" was a thick, almost batter-like filling made from figs, similar to ancient Egyptian beer but made from vine fruits, and all of the details were a divine miracle sort of thing that made him more human. Including what may have been pericardial fluid, during the crucifixion. This allows for a literal interpretation of the body and blood speech without requiring cannibalism. Face it, bread seems to be a common theme in a lot of miracles, pre-Christ as well as Christ-contemporary, and regenerative abilities could work for water-to-wine (de-concentrated wine-blood) and bread multiplication.
 * Jesus got wasted on his blood, so he didn't suffer on the cross.

God hates Bisexuality
Thus why He is against "lying with a man as you would a woman" A gay person would not lay with a wo/man as s/he would a wo/man.
 * This is true. Without considerable unnecessary effort, lying with a person of one sex as you would with a person of the other sex is physically impossible.
 * It's considerably easier if you're a man who likes anal. Just saying.
 * Which leads me to believe that God is in fact against anal, but doesn't really care with whom.
 * Gee. Thanks a lot.
 * Oral is fine though. Didn't Gabriel blow a big horn?
 * And so did Joshua, to get into Jericho... I'm never going to be able to think of that scene again without thinking of this.
 * Nope. God killed Onan for coitus interruptus in Genesis 38:8–10. He hates any non-procreative sex.
 * Well He does have a pretty mechanical view on sex. After all, God's pretty much an Asexual.
 * He only started on Onan because Onan wouldn't provide his new wife (and previous sister in law) with a kid for his own selfish reasons. (The kid would inherit his dad's stuff, whereas he'd get it if there was no kid)
 * God hates Bisexuality since he himself is a bisexual, and There Can Be Only One. After all, how can he create humanity (man AND woman) in his own image?
 * This means that Jack Harkness is Satan.

God is not omnipotent; there's a Rock Paper Scissors relationship between God, man, and Satan
God beats Satan through sheer power, Man beats God through free will, and Satan beats man through temptation.

There was no Jesus.
The crowd merely got confused after the release of Jesus Barrabas.

Satan's a vigilante angel who only revolted when Jesus was born
It's honestly surprised me that no theologian's ever considered this. In the Old Testament, Satan is the Accuser, sort of a divine prosecutor whose job is to test humanity and prove to God that humans aren't worthy of Heaven. In the New Testament, Satan is the outright enemy of God. Christianity explains this with the War in Heaven, when Satan tried to usurp the throne and lead the angels against God, and the basis for this is mostly found in the book of Revelations, the opening chapters of which metaphorically describe the war, Satan's defeat and the angels being banished from Heaven. But for some reason, probably because John Milton wrote it that way in Paradise Lost, people assume that the war happened eons ago, before the universe was even formed.

In Revelations, the war in Heaven is transposed with another vision that some theologians take to be Mary's flight from Herod. Well, what if it's happening at the same time? Maybe the whole reason the Massacre of the Innocents happened is because, seemingly out of nowhere, Satan turned on God and suddenly threw everything he had into killing Jesus? Perhaps that's the moment when the war in Heaven began, and Satan's shift from celestial prosecutor to Jesus's archenemy really is a new role, something he'd only recently become.

But why would Satan have only rebelled at that point? The answer is moral outrage. Satan had spent thousands of years documenting every sin humanity's ever committed, his whole existence aimed at proving beyond any shadow of doubt that humans are irredeemably evil and should be destroyed. And eventually God agrees with him... and then sends Jesus to offer salvation and make it all irrelevant. How would a human district attorney feel if he'd spent years building up the case for a depraved criminal, only for the trial judge to say "you're absolutely right, but I'm going to give him a break anyway". It was birth of Jesus, and the realization that humanity's going to go to Heaven even after all the evil he's seen them do, that turned Satan against God. His whole motive in trying to destroy humanity is that he thinks we deserve it, and if God won't do it, then he'll do it himself.
 * There's a flaw in your thinking. Who is this Snake of Paradise Garden guy, then?
 * Good question. It was not a snake but a serpent and was not Satan. At most it acted as an agent of Satan but that is a relatively recent association.
 * In the original Jewish folklore, Satan and Lucifer were two entirely separate entities, so this theory holds water.
 * There are a lot of baddies in Jewish folklore but most of them aren't Canon. Maybe some of them were removed from canon for being too scary/unlikely and Christians just decided to put a few back?

Satan takes his job too seriously
The accuser's only goal it seems is to prove some people are unworthy of God's praise. This is shown in the book of Job. It is also stated in Job that even Angels can falter, the fallen angel thing was always there, Satan as a fallen angel wasn't but consider it Foreshadowing. If angels can do evil just like people, then wouldn't the accuser be just as hard on them? God berated Jonah when he insisted that God punish the people who were trying to repent. The war in heaven was the same, only more so. Satan convinced a bunch of angels to rebel then demanded God punish them. God instead punished Satan because he had gone too far, just like Jonah.

Compare how most real life Satanist are with how Satan acts in the Bible. They believe they are rebelling for freedom, Satan wants them to, to prove his point. Satan did bring harm to Job but just to get him to reject authority. All Satan asked Jesus to do was go wild with power or act unfaithful. He's not some Card-Carrying Villain, he's more like a police officer who believes entrapment is acceptable.

The accuser is notably not the most evil angel in the Bible, even if the others aren't actually named(Satan isn't a name either, just a title). Chances are he still thinks he's doing the right thing, even in the book of Revelation all the non Bible religions are destroyed first(well besides the new one he just rose up) before he comes after those faithful to the one God. As far as Satan's concerned if they are really faithful then they will go to heaven after he has them all killed. He's still doing his job, just far beyond what he was asked to do. Maybe what he really needs is more people to pray for him? Maybe that would make him ease up?
 * This makes a chilling amount of sense. In Revelations, Satan tried to get people have the Mark of the Beast. Maybe it's not some generic take-over scheme, but rather "rooting out the good from the bad." A test to see who fits into his vision of good(and it's rather narrow.)

Abel deserved it

 * You made me giggle.

Satan didn't immediately become pure evil after the fall, but gradually came to that point until after Jesus' resurrection
Satan did indeed attempt to usurp God's throne, and ultimately fell, though afterwards he didn't feel any maleovlent ill will towards God afterwards. At one time he sympathized with humans and felt that Adam and Eve weren't living up to their full potential, so he manipulated them into eating the apples. During the time of the Old Testament, he was a bit of a trickster but never did anything out of sheer maliciousness. Over time he witnessed human cruelty over the years and slowly started to get frustrated when they got chance after chance. He finally lost it when Jesus came down to Earth to save humanity. Satan didn't think humanity deserved another chance when they had blown many chances and he had got kicked out after the first time he screwed up. After Jesus' death and resurrection, Satan had finally had it. The pain of being outside of God's presence plus seeing God give humanity chance after chance even though they continued to deny, mock and not even believe that He existed. So Satan figured that if he was going down, he was going to take as many humans with him, hence the reason why he is pure evil in the New Testament and beyond.

God is his own father through a Stable Time Loop.
The Church states that Jesus and God are two aspects of the same being. What if Jesus was a young God? God creates Jesus, who eventually ascends into heaven and becomes God himself. Then, at some point, he goes back in time and creates himself - forever repeating the cycle.

Jesus Is Female

 * Joseph wanted a carpenter for a child. Depending on your text, either he had no other children, or, let's say, none of them wanted to be carpenters. Well, Jesus did want to be a carpenter, as they found out at a very young age. After the angel appearing, Joseph and Mary both knew that s/he was going to be a special kid, so they decided this would be reasonable (with a possible idea that this would help woman's lib, if s/he were discovered). Then, when it came time to spread the message...who's gonna listen to the girl? (See the guess on Mary creating Jesus as savior.) No real reason for this to be so, except misogyny was fairly common and yet he still had an even split of male/females. (See the guess on there being both male and female Pope.)
 * If Jesus is female, then isn't she the universe's attempt at moe?

The whole "don't lie with a man as with a woman" thing has been misinterpreted all this time.
It's not "lie" as in "lie in bed to have sex with", it's "lie" as in "say things that aren't true". In short, "bros before hos". Maybe.
 * Thou shalt not eat of the shellfish, because it has been stored in the desert heat for many hours. Thou shalt neither cockblock nor sleep with another Bro's woman, and leading by example, the Messiah shall abstain from "knowing" women, If Thou Knowest What The Lord Thy Bro Means in order to follow the first rule while allowing his Bro-thren to follow the second. Thou wilst not be a wing-Man-prophet to any but The Lord thy Bro. Thou shalt refer to The Lord thy Bro in the familiar form, hence all the "thou"s. Thou shalt know of the Three-Day Rule, as usual, the Messiah will be setting an example.
 * TV Tropes Made of Win Archive
 * Note: the Bible was not originally written in English.

God is chronically insecure.
Any time it looks like humans are achieving something that would bring them nearer to his level, he feels the need to knock it all down. Ergo, he's scared that humans will one day stop needing him.
 * And that is exactly what is happening right now.
 * So that's why an omnipotent being needs worshippers.

Adam and Eve were preparing to leave Eden on their own
After becoming enlightened they knew there was nothing more they could gain from staying in their perfect little playground. They needed to go out into the greater world to begin their ascencion. They were making clothes in preparation for the journey. Adam hid from God because he didn't think God would approve of this development.

Eve was a parselmouth.
Well, she's had a conversation with a snake.
 * I believe it's called, "Parseltoungue"
 * The language is Parseltongue, people who can speak it are Parselmouths
 * She talked to a serpent, not a snake. That thing had legs.

The abyss spoken of in revelation is a black hole.
The general time-line for the end times are as follows: Tribulation, Satan is sent into an "Abyss", 1000 years of mortal, perfect earth for those who survived previous events, Satan escapes, rebuilds army, Satan gets pwn'ed, sent to "lake of fire" forever, heaven and earth are remade, awesome eternity. (oh, and depending on who you ask, there may be a rapture in there somewhere.) Some studies theorize that when a black hole takes in matter, it eventually gets expelled in a grossly mangled state. It would be quite appropriate for the final showdown version of Satan to show a mangled form, completely stripped of any evidence that he was ever God's finest angel (cherubim, to be exact.)

The Bible has been entirely mistranslated.
Ancient Hebrew changed radically in meaning since the first books were written. More recent scholars simply imposed their own assumptions on what those words mean, and that version --of the language and the book-- got accepted as canon.
 * Then again, you'd have translation notes that would make Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei look tame. Thank God that we have manuscripts in Ancient Hebrew.
 * In several different versions, and with a number of books that have fallen in and out of official canon, and all written hundreds of years apart, and with some parts being clearly "hebrewized" variants of much older Babylonian stories. And that's just the OT: the New Testament was made of bits and pieces selected from thousands of documents by the Nicaean Council, most written generations to centuries after Jesus, with many of their choices being highly controversial and politicized, and again with several books being taken out and put in by various sects over the intervening millenia. Also, for a few centuries following the post-Crisi- er, post-Roman Diaspora, Ancient Hebrew was practically a dead language. Many of the oldest words lost their meaning and had to be "rediscovered". A few still are only guesswork even today.
 * The Catholic Church's canon for the Old Testament is the Septuagint, which is what the Jewish Greeks used at the time of Christ. None of it has been changed. In fact, if you read the Douay-Rheims Bible, it has the Greek, English, and the Vulgate (Latin) side-by-side.

Adam and Eve were not the first humans.
Or at least, not the only ones. Rather they, were the first human sophonts - beings capable of conscious thought and moral decisions. This comes out of the fact that Adam and Eve canonically have only three children - Cain, Abel, and Seth - all of whom are male. Cain of course kills Abel and then is condemned to vagabondage by God. And then Seth's born. But who the hell did these kids get it on with in order to have children? The Bible clearly says they had children and that they "knew" women. The only conclusion, based on the logical hole as well as what we know now of genetics, is that Adam, Eve, and their children were not the only humans. Yes, This Troper knows this is a leap for a lot of people, but this is Wild Mass Guessing after all.
 * Cain, Abel and Seth were their only named children. Adam and Eve were said to have many sons and daughters.
 * There is another human besides Adam and Eve, by the way. She is named Lilith, and was Adam's actual first wife. Probably the other humans came from her.
 * The issue with that is that the idea of Lilith as Adam's first wife didn't come around until the Middle Ages. Lilith was originally the name of a demon who murdered children.
 * (which makes me lol when people name their kids that)
 * Maybe it's done to placate her?
 * Maybe it's done to placate her?

Humans were not the first people.
God said let us make people in our image. Male and female he created them and he told them the Earth is yours, be fruitful and multiply. Then he took a break, looked over his creation and declared day seven holy. God rose up a garden from a barren patch of land and with it rose Adam to tend to it. Adam was the first man and Eve was the first woman of what would become modern humans but there were already people outside of Eden doing their thing, laying the foundations of future nations. Then the serpent messed things up and Eve was cursed to bear children painfully. She and her husband would leave Eden and die.

Adam and Eve multiplied quickly after leaving Eden. The sons of God, the people already out in the world struggling to procreate like they were told to, were impressed by this. They saw the daughters of Adam were beautiful and took them as wives. There were giants in that time and sometime afterwards because the children of those unions grew big and strong, just like how breeding lions and tigers produce really big cats because the alleles that check growth cancel out. Eventually humanity out bred and assimilated all the other people but this made humanity's tendency to do evil dominant, thus the flood.

It fits in with the fossil record, which shows many other, older, variations of bipedal mammals that are similar to humans but are not linked to humans. Missing link? There is none. Some of them were out competed and died out, the rest of the bipeds interbred with Adam and Eve's kids and this lead to modern homo sapiens. Modern humans are now less susceptible to temptation than Adam and Eve because we have the originals made in God's image in our ancestry as well.

This Jesus character isn't going to stay dead long.
Now, don't spoil anything for me, I'm only about halfway through the book, but he's just way too important to stay dead. I give him three days, tops.
 * If you're really halfway through one of the gospels, the Foreshadowing that Jesus is kind of hard to miss. If you're making this guess halfway through the Bible itself... I dub you the spec-master of all time.

God is worshipping us.
He created an entire universe just for us? Before we were even born yet? You can't get a more dedicated follower than that. Sure he throws a hurricane at us every now and then, but that's only when he gets mad and questions his faith in us.
 * Perhaps He just wants to be normal?

Satan is mindless.
If Satan supposedly has power equal to God, it would make a lot of sense if he was God's polar opposite. God is a creative, vast intelligence, where as Satan is utterly mindless destruction. Satan's supposed intelligence is a ruse. When Lucifer became Satan and gained power to rival God, his mind was unable to take it, and was thus completely shredded. Now he sits swirling in the darkest pit of Hell, radiating waves of evil into the universe and babbling nonsensically. He's the Blind Idiot Devil.
 * Satan being equal to God is not stated in the Bible, or any of the Abrahamic texts. Who came up with that idea I do not know but they clearly did not finish the book.

Alternatively, Satan is slowly becoming more and more intelligent, while God is becoming less intelligent.
This explains why there aren't large scale miracles anymore, for God will be reduced to gibbering madness if he does them more.
 * It follows that if intelligence is one of the defining opposing aspects, that God becoming dumber while Satan becomes smarter means that Satan will become more and more good over time and God will become more and more evil over time until either they are once again completely opposed, or until both are identical at the halfway point.
 * Not necessarily.
 * That means, Satan is to God where Nyarlathotep is to Azathoth.
 * Actually it seems God still possesses intelligence, but is rather unaware and unconscious of his power instead of mindless, with Satan taking the place as Advisor / Chancellor who is actually aware and in control of God's power. That means Satan is to God where the SOS Brigade is to Haruhi.
 * True. God = egotistical, insane Eldritch Abomination who relies on angels for him to think and punishes people eternally, Satan = egotistical, charismatic Magnificent Bastard who tricks humans into thinking they are just like God to further his own goals. However, even though God is mindless and Satan is highly intelligent, the biblical fact that they are both egotistical and use humans to further their own goals doesn't remove the fact that their relationship is still a form of Black and Gray Morality.

Alternatively, both God and Satan are becoming less intelligent, while Jesus and Mankind are becoming more intelligent.
Well, what explains science.

The current version of the Book of Daniel isn't quite correct
In the last 50 years or so, the majority of the evangelical community has declared the Book of Daniel to basically be propaganda written during the Roman occupation of Israel. There's still a minority who believes that everything in the Book of Daniel is true. I'm taking a third option. Daniel 12:9 says that the book is to be closed up until the end of time, right? So, somehow some information on the book, or on Daniel's experiences, got out before the book was sealed. Then, some guy circa 200 BC decides to write some anti-Roman propaganda and he decides to make what is essentially a Fanfic out of the story of Daniel, which becomes Word of Dante. God decides to put it in the Bible for...undiscernable reasons a la Job. Once the end times start approaching, we'll find the real version of the Book of Daniel.

God was originally a superintelligent being that broke the light speed barrier without the use of hyperspace or warp drives.
Among other things, two of the changes that occur as an entity approaches the speed of light is that it increases in length, and that time dialates, essentially making their perception of time slower, causing them to see external events sped up. Thhe speed of light is determined to be when the factors for each "infinity." Since theoretically, one could not progress past infinity, ones speed would be limited as well. God might have broken the barrier, causing him to permeate all time and space in his universe, which essentially erased his begining and end of existence. Because he now exists in all time simultaneously, he used his omnipresence to alter the natural formation of the universe that eventually birthed him, in order to make his own universe. "Spiritual" locations such as heaven and cursed places "hell, hades, pergatory, etc." are sealed in dimensional pockets inobservable and inaccesible from the physical world without authorization. Hell in particular being sealed off in a way so that God can avoid permeating there. "Spiritual" beings "angelics, demons, fallen spirits, etc." are formless conciousnesses programmed into spacetime that are given the ability to assume either a single form or multible forms, or no form at all.

Abraham was hard of hearing
God told him to sanctify his son. Good thing he caught him at the last second with that BS about a Secret Test of Character.

Again, as pointed out above, the Bible was not written in English. That goes for the "celebrate" joke as well. At least this one is grammatically correct.

Satan wrote the Book of Job as anti-God propoganda
It makes God look really mean, and Satan look like a guy just loyally carrying out orders. It backfired.
 * He probably should have left that part out about Angel's faltering just like humans...

The Bible is real, what Science tells you is wrong.

 * Alternatively, science is right. God's power passes our understanding so he can bend the rules of the universe however he wants them too. Everything in the Bible that is scientifically impossible to us is because is a lot more powerful than man.
 * Alternative theory. Every so called contradiction in the Bible was really just God's way of explaining things to humans who did not know better. "I stopped the Sun!" Actually he stopped the Earth but didn't want to explain axis turning and artificial gravity and junk to the dumb Hewbrews. Had the Bible events happened today God wouldn't have been so hand holding with humanity.

The Bible once contained a form of magic, that was corrupted by both Science and Fundamentalism
Think about it. The Bible is written in such a Mind Screw-y manner. The reason God existed in the distant past is because they just read The Bible in a way that they just went with the phenomenal cosmic powers of Mind Screw. Both Fundamentalists and Atheist Scientists made the biggest mistake: interpreting the Bible literally and coldly. Because The Bible was contained inside the totalitarian laws of Science and Morality, its Mind Screw energies were lost and froze into well, science and morality.
 * Acutally, by freezing The Bible into Science, fundies and scientists saved us from the Cosmic Horror that is God. Don't forget he will torture us for all eternity.
 * They did save us from God, but they killed The Messiah that is Jesus. By freezing the Bible into science, Jesus vanished.
 * Actually, the "Eternal torment" part of Christian morality belongs more to fundamentalism, since in the Bible, when you sin, you simply die (Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death").

Jesus is the Anti-Christ
The entire New Testament, as well as all of Christianity, is a lie.
 * Then where did you get the idea of Anti Christ from? Shouldn't that not exist?
 * Never mind antichrist in an adjective, not a noun. There is no one antichrist, it is a behavior anyone can partake. Thank you Word of Dante.

God is the Anti-Christ
Think about it: God is in direct opposition with Jesus in a way that Yin is opposed to Yang. God created this Crapsack World in Genesis; Jesus offers us nirvana. God is sadistic; Jesus is pacifist. God forces everyone to embrace Him and Him only; Jesus encourages love on each other, even your worst enemies. God is anonymous and spends it trolling us through smitings; Jesus embraced existentialism, even suffering and being trolled for the sake of his personal philosophy. God rules over the rich and almighty; Jesus serves the poorest. God justifies the atrocities of the pedophiles I mean aristocratic priests; Jesus encourages civil defence. God rules for almost eternity (come on, give everybody a chance!); Jesus never ruled but was "elected" by the masses (as seen on christianity). Since God is the top and Jesus is the bottom (Get your mind out of the gutter), it can be said that God is clearly Jesus' opposition, the Anti-Christ.
 * If you think about it, this makes sense.... so much.

Jesus is Satan
He let himself be hated by us for our sins. "Hell" is in fact the pain and humiliation received from the crucifixion.

If Jesus is Satan, and Satan let himself be hated by the entire world for our sins, then Jesus is Lelouch Lamperouge
Because, why not. Lelouch gave us a common messiah and a common enemy so that our world be in peace, but the Corrupt Church that is The High Lords of Terra, I mean, Medieval Roman Catholicism perverted the message to create a Big Brother Is Watching hellhole. Heck, in a more imaginative WMG: The Bible is just an alternate Code Geass universe. Naturally God is the Emperor. The rest of the Britannian Aristocracy forms the Council of Angels, and the children of the Emperor have the roles of the archangels. Lelouch himself is Lucifer (as said in the title, and in the series he even admitted that he could be a Demon), but this time, the Oedipal Rebellion is not just pure egotism, but noticing how much of a totalitarian God is. Thus, he is banished to Hell (Area 11). He gains the power of Geass through contract (The Tree of Knowledge), meets with the Japanese (Adam and Eve) and gives them the power to rebel against The Emperor. Of course, he created an alternate persona, the Dark Messiah Zero. A lot of differences between the Code Geass universe and The Bible might ensue, like how there are many differences between the original universe and Code Geass: Nightmare of Nunnally, and "Jesus" in the story might have been a fusion of messianic figures like Zero with pacifistic figures like Nunnally and Euphemia, who might have succeeded with their plans for peace.
 * YOU ARE A GENIUS!

The Forbidden Fruit thing was a test. We passed.
And... what is the reward? Will there be further tests?
 * Are you there, Humanity? If so, you are probably the last creation standing. Now, perhaps you will succeed where the others have failed. You feel you now have control, don't you? You think you will walk away untested? I promise that my work will continue. That I have ensured. By eating the fruit, some will assume that this is over but I am still among you. You think it's over just because you have gained free will. It's not over. The games have just begun. -God

God is Jigsaw
The entire Tree of Knowledge itself was a giant Jigsaw trap: it was a game to get us out of the hedonism of Eden and allow us to become entities of learning, more importantly learning a lesson on life. After this test, God puts more and more tests on the rest of humanity, to decide who truly deserves "eternal life" and leave those "unexamined lives which are not worth living" to die.
 * "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Now back then, "hell" meant death, so yup I smell Jigsaw right there.
 * But if you read Nietzschean theory, Paul twisted this into "God does not want you to cherish your own life, if you do you will go to hell".

Hasatan, or "the satan" is a title, and the devil was merely the first one to hold it
] Satan was created specifically for the role of God's prosecutor (hence his keeping the name), but couldn't psychologically cope with holding it for too long; he went nuts and rebelled. Still needing someone to fill the job, but not wanting to make another angel specifically for the purpose for fear that holding it too long would prove to have a corruptive effect again, he made it into a job title, hence the definitive article. Satan-ing since then has been handed around from angel to angel on some sort of electory or lottery system designed to ensure that nobody holds it for too long. The Hasatans that appear in the Old Testament are actually just regular God-obeying angels on satan-duty, with the original fallen one not showing up in the actual text under that name until Revelations. This is why there's so much confusion over if Satan is for or against God- there's one against Him, and a rotating position for His servants using the same name.

The Bible takes place in the Warhammer 40k universe
It's pretty clear, considering the fact that Jesus is the God-Emperor of Mankind and the Warp is Hell.

The Bible takes place inside the 1984 universe
God is Big Brother. And he's always watching you. He always loves you, and if you don't he's going to send you to Hell.
 * A variation of this theory is popular with atheists. The idea that theocracies with an all-ruling God is simply Orwellian totalitarian dogma with another name. Think about it. Extreme worship of an abstract entity, a set of absolute rules to follow even though said rules intervene with privacy, total infallibility of the word of the ruler to the point where it would be beyond reason, "Big Brother Is Watching You", eternal damnation of those who do not follow, etc. It's all "Follow the Big Brother or you are going to Hell" memes, and the usage of Pavlovian fear conditioning to pacify the population. The difference between organized religion (such as Medieval Catholicism) and a secular dictatorship (such as Stalinist Russia) is that in religion the people worship an entirely imaginary entity (God) while in secular dictatorships the people worship a figure based on a real person (Stalin). A similar WMG can be seen in 1984's own WMG page.

Jesus is the Mary Sue
Idealized rendering of humanity? Check. Reality Warper? Check. Descended from a celestial power? Check. Perfect? Double check. He's not hated by the Real Life fandom since Jesus is a character in that realm.
 * Don't say he has no Hatedom...

Jesus could have defeated Dio Brando if they fought.
John 16:33: "... But take heart! I have overcome the world."

Cain was the world's first emo.
Instead of cutting himself, though, he cut his brother. And the rest is history.
 * Emo does not work that way. Besides, Abel was cutting up animals well before Cain murdered him.

Cain's killing of Abel was a sacrifice.
Posited in The Book Of Nod.

Sending sinners and people using free will to Hell was God's greatest mistake.
Some possible explanations. Jesus might have realized the actual humanity is, in fact, versions of himself but in Hell, and he sends himself into Hell, violating and destroying the doctrine of Christianity and God along with it. Or, through free will humanity has evolved, and achieved a state that can rival God and the angels, and also is the single force keeping the universe from becoming boring, and because God exiled those people down to the abyss, they took advantage of that and became uncontrollable Eldritch Abominations themselves, piercing the heavens and taking God's place in the universe (although that sounds a lot like a crossover between Neon Genesis Evangelion and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann though). Or, Hell, becomes A Hell of a Time and is revealed to be even more awesome than Heaven (ala Nordic Valhalla). There could be other ideas and of course, Your Mileage May Vary.
 * So... does that mean everyone goes to Hell?
 * As penguins

God foresaw the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and he saw that it was absurd.
And lo, did he say "thou shalt have no strange gods before me," and lo, did he say "no buttsects," to ban the bulbous meatball-cheeks of the monster, and its hanging noodly appendage[s], and lo, did he say not to partake of the shellfish, for everyone knows that pasta marinara is delicious with shrimp. BUT the prophets mis-heard, for they wanted pomp, and they wanted gravitas, and the Hovercraft became full of Eels, for even the perfectly ordinary gods were looked down upon by the Chosen people of He Who Am, and men were forbidden to lie with men, and eventually women with women, AND the Flying Spaghetti Monster doth recieve worship even to this day!
 * Well that's just silly. If they wanted gravitas, they could have easily turned to God or Stephen Colbert.

The Reapers clashed with and copied from YHWH.
In Judges 14:19 it is said that "Then the Spirit of the LORD ASSUMED DIRECT CONTROL, I mean, came upon [Samson] in power." It's not the only time you see it, either.

There is no God
Then you'll see it isn't God who warps reality, it is only yourself... but then you'll see you are in fact Jesus Christ.

Dragons are actually the shape angels assume after falling
It is never specified whereas Satan had shape shifted into a dragon or if he was permanently in that form. If so, its a huge improvement, since biblical angels are supposed to be quite terrifying.

Heaven isn't real, and there is only Hell
We all know this is depressing, but there is an explanation. The reason why Christians can go through the hardships of both Hell and Earth is because of their faith and the nature of ignorance being bliss and strength. After all, bliss can be another term for Heaven, and bliss can be another term for Ignorance.

Ultimately, all life goes to that one afterlife called Hell. Everyone sinned, all humans sin (Original Sin), Nature sins (carnivores, natural disasters, etc), Heck, even God sins (The mass genocide of humanity in the time of Noah, his sacrifice of his own Son, scaring people with Disproportionate Retribution). Those who experience the most pain are the materialists and people who are too aware of their surroundings, since they feel the obvious and visible pain that is Hell. However, there is a strange circle in Hell where some people we can recognize from Real Life are having dinner with someone who looks like he was brutally scourged, and they seem to ignore the pains of the Afterlife. Upon closer look, we realize that this person having supper in Hell is actually Jesus Christ himself, who helps the Christian faithful ignore the pains of Hell and live in happiness through friendship and faith in Him.

This could be the message Christianity is telling us all along. Because everything that exists since the creation of the Tree of Knowledge is sin, everything must go to Hell, and there is no escape. However, in Hell, there is still a choice: Either the person can remain aware but must experience the full agony of fire, brimstone and existential angst, or he can experience the full agony but can deny and ignore it through faith in Jesus, or any other religion the tormented sees fit for him / her, gaining bliss and the feeling of heaven (or nirvana) in the process. An analogy is Warhammer 40000: The entire galaxy is a hell which will make you shit in terror, and it has a Hell, yet Space Marines can walk through it without fear because of their faith in the God Emperor (who might be Jesus himself, but that's another WMG). In other words, You Are Worth Hell.
 * Hell is actually Real Life. Oh God, Reincarnation is true!
 * It explains why some Christians are such annoying Moral Guardians: they are training themselves.

God was breeding a race of super- masochists.
Hence why Jesus accepted the Crucifixion, the most painful punishment at that time, but also the ancient equivalent of modern bdsm as we know it (seriously, whip that resemble a cat-o-nine tails, public humiliation, crucifixion where the victim's posture is too vulnerable, public humiliation, this time with clothes stripped off, you know the story).

Jesus Died For Your Sins, and if you don't accept him, you will die for your sins.
Hence why in the modern secular world, Everybody Is Jesus in Purgatory.

God is Jesus in Purgatory.
Well, if everybody is, then so by definition is He, especially since they're both supposed to be kinda-sorta the same person anyway. This also nicely explains why He hasn't actually, you know, spoken to anybody in a good long while.

The Bible is one massive troll-fic
The entire universe is a giant series of novels by God,who is a famous author.Satan was hired to make an abridged version of it,but came out with the Bible instead.Why?For the lulz

Jesus was a Jedi
Just think about it. Jesus walked on water. Jedi can levitate stuff. Jesus used his Force-powers to "walk" on water when he was really hovering slightly above it. Jesus turned water into wine? He used the Jedi Mind Trick to make people believe that the water he had (which no-one saw he put food coloring into it) was wine. He healed the sick? Jedi have this power. Even his resurrection can be explained as his body dissolving into the Force, his Force Ghost appearing in front of people and his ascension into Heaven as becoming one with the Force. The celibacy of the Catholic Church was inspired by his Jedi teachings
 * Jedi aren't celibate; they just can't get attached. At least according to George Lucas. Also, isn't resurrection a Sith power? That's sort of the whole point of Revenge of the Sith.
 * Also, after the whole Eden fiasco, God sent an angel to guard it armed with "a flaming sword which turned every which way". It's likely that this sword was a lightsaber, since lightsabers are omnidirectional.

"God" is actually a job.
God,as we know him,is merely one individual in a dimension which is so advanced they create universes for profit. God just happens to not be as skilled as some of his other coworkers,and that is why there is imperfection.Satan is an excuse to cover his ass
 * It's a job taken by multiple people, which is why he seems to have massive mood swings in the Bible.

Satan is a Well-Intentioned Extremist,and so is God.
God believes the only way to keep peace and decency in the universe is to keep it in a state of unchanging order.That's why he forbid Adam and Eve from eating fruit that belongs to the Tree of Knowledge.It's also why he created heaven.Satan believes that man should be free to make their own descisions,and not be bossed around.That is why he caused the "Fall of Man",it was to give them freedom from God.Revelations is a propaganda by the angels to make Satan seem like the Ultimate Evil,while demons use Fundamentalists as propaganda so people think God Is Evil.In summary,God is on the positive side of Lawful Neutral,and Satan is on the positive side of Chaotic Neutral

Both God and Satan are Well Intentioned Extremists.
Both want the best for mankind,however they have different ways of approaching this.God sees himself(or itself) as Lawful Good, and believes worship and obedience will curb mankind's violent tendencies. Satan sees himself(or herself,or itself) as Chaotic Good, and wants to free man from God's control so man can decide their own fate. It's essentially Order versus Chaos.

The serpent in the Garden of Eve was the origin of Satan's beliefs.The reason God doesn't just destroy Satan is it would be cheating.God isn't above using propaganda though:The New Testament is an example.

Jesus is a Time Lord.
Well duh
 * He died, but his body regenerated. When he was resurrected, some people claimed not to recognize him any longer. He's from the past, but is going to arrive again in the future. There's plenty of reference to him and God (who is him too/his father) as a Lord and there's even discussion of the Master in the Bible. The cross was his TARDIS.

You don't have to be religious to go to Heaven.
When Jesus said you have to believe in him to reach the Kingdom of God,he wasn't being literal.He was referring to himself in a metaphorical sense.And since Jesus is suppose to represent empathy(treat your neighbour as you'd wish to be treated) and compassion(turn the other cheek),you have to believe and follow those principles to reach Paradise.This means that people like Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi will reach Heaven(even though they aren't Christian,or particularly religious) while Pat Robertson is damned to Hell(he is Christian,but doesn't believe in the Christian message of love thy neighbour).

We are in Hell.
Judgement Day already arrived,and we are descended from the sinners that were cast into Hell.Only Hell isn't a fiery place of torment,but a seperation from God. And there is no miracles and little evidence for God as a result

The Mormons Are Right.
Besides having a generally nicer gospel (even if you were a horrible jerk in life you still get a mansion in heaven that is better than anything on the Earth right now), some of their edits actually make sense. I may be biased as a Mormon, of course.
 * You really believe Indians are the lost tribes of Israel, blacks are cursed, etc.? No, the Mormons are wrong, and only Mormons get into heaven, except for God, who is a Buddhist, and Saddam Hussein, because he abused his ex-boyfriend Satan.
 * Being a Mormon myself, I'd be offended (and I'd begin a long and winded theological argument against what you said), but that's just being rude. That aside, I found what you said to be hilarious. On a different note, you do get a nice mansion in Heaven even if you were a horrible jerk, according to the Mormons, but if you are like Jesus in life, according to them, you get even nicer things to the point where you become, quite literally, like God Himself.

The Song of Songs/Solomon is just a random person's self-insert fic.
Besides it reading kind of like one, I just think it would be really funny if true.

God is evil, Satan is also evil
But Jesus is a pretty cool guy who wants to become an hero and stop his dad.

When people speak in tongues, they aren't actually saying anything useful; their mouths are just having seizures.
That's right! Epileptic Tongues!
 * Seizures do not work that way

The Bible was written so that people would misinterpret it and come up with insane theories.
You know, like the people on this page.
 * The bible contradicts itself, and self-contradictory philosophies are easily altered by fools seeking power. You know, Orwellian Doublethink...
 * Or if you don't want to sound paranoid on the internet, it's about how we're supposed to have individual paths to God, which in conjunction with our individual spiritual fruits from God form an entire superorganism (think ant hives and bee hives) with multiple parts working at once for the greater good. Fridge brilliance indeed.

The Beast of Revelations is a metaphor for mob mentality.
There is literally no chance of the entire human race worshiping a single entity any time soon, regardless of who or what. But every day we hear about more and more people acting like fanatical nutjobs for no real reason. If God were to begin the apocalypse because of a specific mindset that had befallen every human being alive, which we refused to snap out of even when threatened with the very real prospect of total annihilation, what other explanation is there other than us having gone completely nucking futs?

Expanding on this, it is possible to determine that the Antichrist is some sort of fear-monger with a lot of weight behind his or her words. Therefore, this troper has narrowed down the identity of the Antichrist to either Glenn Beck, Fox News as a whole, or his personal favorite, Stephen Colbert after Becoming the Mask at his March to Keep Fear Alive.
 * Or whoever invented the concept of Hell as "eternal torture"
 * There is no single anti Christ in canon. It is possible for any of those sources to be a false prophet/fake messiah but that sounds too mean spirited. Can't they just be dumb, flawed humans?

God is not a single entity, but a triangel
There is no god, but there is a powerful race of universe-creating Eldritch Abominations called the Angels. Basically, an entity called God was created through the fusion of three angels, which we now know as the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. For additional WMG: those angels were actually.

God is Joss Whedon
And the fallen angels mutate into the Epileptic Trees after being banished into that island where they are punished (or powered) by tropes forever and ever. Well, what explains the trope called Word of God?

Hell is in fact, /b/
He who goeth to /b/ shall go mad from the sinfulness. Beneath this fiery lake of immorality is Anonymous, The Legions Of Hell which is waiting to be unleasheth for the end of times (and your reputation).

God is a Fallen Angel
God and the rest of the Canaanite pantheon were angels. However, Yahweh rebelled against the true god, Brahman / The Collective Unconscious, and was punished. However, he managed to take refuge in the Middle East where he started his religion of Judaism. As time went on, he decided to make himself the only god which is why the bible says that he is the only one.

God isn't against euthanasia, suicide by mental illness, etc
Because, after all, "Love thy Neighbour". If you really love you neighbour you have to let him / her go.

The Bible is a metaphor for psychoanalysis
If you think of your mind as the world of The Bible while in a couch, it kinda reveals itself. Of course This is Wild Mass Guessing. For example:
 * The Angels are possibly our behaviours / defense mechanisms / our thought patterns.
 * God: The Super - Ego. Our internalized figure of our Father, our high ideals and standards, and powered / brought on by social reinforcement. God serves as our "conscience" and "ego ideal" which we are expected to follow in populist society. As our conscience, God / The Superego tells us what is right or wrong, what is our high ideals, and what has been conditioned into our brains by the authority. It also has the power to "eternally punish" through the usage of guilt (which in Christian doctrine, can only be removed through repentance to authority, hence "you are damned to Hell until you repent").
 * Sin: The Id, obviously. Just look at christian doctrine and it pretty much screams "Repression", almost all of the acts that are enjoyed by the id are labeled as sin, and thus are not allowed to persist as permanent behaviours in the ego. Like oh for example, sex for pleasure. (Sodomy? Go to Hell. Porn? Go to Hell. Masturbation? Go to Hell. And so on). Also, the Seven deadly Sins (particularly Lust and Wrath) correspond to our unconscious animal instincts which our ancestors used before moving on to civilization. Sin / the Id works through the Pleasure Principle.
 * Satan / Lucifer / Demons / Fallen Angels might be manifestations of our repressed instincts, and Hell is simply metaphor for constant repression and the "eternal torment a.k.a trauma" that is the result of said repression. Satan himself is the Oedipus Complex. Before, Satan and his followers enjoyed their presence in the heavenly world, until Satan rebelled and God banished them to the depths of Hell. In our mind according to Freud, our instincts expressed themselves in our conscious mind, until the Oedipus Complex appeared and pushed thoughts of rebellion against the father figure, and the failure of rebellion against Father culminated in the creation of the Superego. Sounds similar, doesn't it? As an additional WMG: This means adolescence, where massive lust and something resembling the Oedipus complex reappear, is Armageddon (well teen-hood is certainly Armageddon for this troper), and adulthood, where we start to live according to the expectations of superego, is the Final Judgement.
 * Adam and Eve might represent the Thanatos ("you were made from dust, and dust you shall return") and Eros ("I will increase your trouble in giving childbirth, in spite of this, you will still have desire for your husband, yet you will be subject to him"), respectively.
 * Adam and Eve, or the entire Garden of Eden, could also represent the Unconscious Mind as a whole. Before, Adam and Eve were unconscious of their world around them, and that is why they were naked without knowing it. That is, until the Serpent brought on the Forbidden Fruit, and thus we had to repress our internal Eden of unconsciousness (well ignorance is bliss, ignorance is strength, and so on) as the cost of knowledge and learning. Of course this allowed the existence and propagation of the Ego (the prophets) and the Super Ego (the God of Morals today).
 * The attitudes of the OT and NT Gods respectively represent the Destrudo (OT god = tried Destroy as much humans as possible before, aka Noah's Flood) and Libido ("For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have everlasting life", from John 3:16)
 * The Prophets / Jesus: The Ego. They mediate between God / Superego, Sin / Id, and the World / our Conscious Mind. Jesus himself could be, well, the libido expressed in the form of platonic love, friendship, compassion, and loving thy neighbour.
 * Jesus also counts as the Ego Ideal, the part of the Superego which the ego tries to follow.

Whenever the Bible talks about eternal life, they don't necessarily mean personal immortality
They talk about SPIRIT. Not immortality for your personal brain, but simply eternal collective, simple hope that the faithful generate. Alone, individuals always end up dead. But when a person enters this collective spirit through hope and faith, he becomes assimilated and experiences the feeling of timelessness / nirvana / eternity / what-have-you. Well, us tropers should know the trope Who Wants to Live Forever?, a trope that portrays immortality as a Fate Worse Than Death identical to And I Must Scream. Seriously, someone merciful will not impose Who Wants to Live Forever? on his subjects, unless he wants somebody to share his misery with (which is why Jesus was here in the first place). We might be uncertain whether this God might even exist, maybe he went Eldritch Abomination because of his immortality, or whether he is simply an Anthropomorphic Personification for collective hope. It does make some sense, since the hopeful die in bliss, while the guilty, unless they repent, die while being consumed by the dark whirlpooling eternal damnation vortex of Despair Event Horizon....
 * That means the True God is Spiral Energy, and the Antichrist is Shinji Ikari?

Jesus, being a divine being, takes A Form You Are Comfortable With
When you see all the European Jesus pictures being white, the East Asian ones looking East Asian, etc., it has nothing whatsoever to do with the illustrators being biased towards their own ethnicity, it simply reflects the fact that, if Jesus were to visit these various groups of people, he would simply take an appearance resembling the particular types of people he is in. (I'm kind of fluctuating between serious and sarcastic for this guess, it does seem to have some actual points going for it.)

There were actually several "Noahs", probably thousands or perhaps even more
Obviously, a single ark as described in the current story wouldn't have been able to carry anywhere close to the required animals in the world, not to mention plants, soil fungi, soil bacteria, possibly freshwater fish (If the waters during the flood were able to mix well, this would be a saltwater flood, although I don't know a lot about how large water bodies work, and how quickly this would take place) etc. Instead, a large number of arks were used, (thousands, hundreds of thousands, I'm not sure how many would be needed.), however, to cover the world as much as possible to ensure that all the current animals were covered, these "Noah's" were spread out as much as possible from each other, and to encourage them to do the work properly, were all told that they would be the only survivors. As the Noah's resettled, and repopulated the dry land, they were sufficiently spread out to not come into contact with each other, and since their descendants had room to spread out, they would not be surprised to meet strangers who also claimed descent from a single survivor, and would not ask enough questions to realize there were still several survivors. As a result, the "single Noah builds ark" story survived.

(Which still leaves all the other issues with a literal flood in place, but is hopefully entertaining to read, at least.)
 * That explains the staggering number of flood stories and range of flood stories as far away from the Middle East as Chile and New Zealand.

God's omnipotence and omniscience are simple Fanon.
Think about it. The Bible credits God with a number of amazing feats, creating Heaven and Earth in the first place not the least among them. Yet -- everything He is shown to do is quite achievable with sufficiently large yet still limited amounts of power and knowledge. On the other hand, a truly all-powerful and all-knowing entity would be able to deal with upcoming problems in ways that He is never actually shown to employ. Ergo...?

(Never mind that as the book progresses, God's actual power does in fact seem to decline over time as though he'd already expended most of what he had on the big showy stuff early on.)


 * Wait, so God is a Memetic Badass?
 * Pretty much, yes. :)

Yahweh is a renegade member of the Egyptian Pantheon.
He either thought he could run the world better,or just had a big ego.So he began a Batman Gambit by creating Adam and Eve in an uncharted area,so that they and their descendants would have no idea about the other gods.Eventually Abraham came along,and Judaism with it.Ultimately,as Gods Need Prayer Badly,the loss of worshippers destroyed the other deities.

The Final Judgement is a metaphor for domestication.
The submissive people who are going to the Kingdom of Heaven? They're the pacified domesticated animals, livestock, pets, sheep. Well Jesus openly called his followers "sheep" (John 10:11, although he masked it by saying he lays his life for the sheep) and we all know, sheep are metaphor for totalitarianism, religious fervor and mob mentality! The domesticated animals / inhabitants of Heaven will be pacified and remain submissive to God while God takes care of them or probably eats them ala Cthulhu. The Crusaders and religious militants are the sheepdogs. Just look at Christian dogma, it seems like it wants us to become God's pets, forcing us into an Orwellian existence of eternal submission. Meanwhile, the sinners who are going to Hell are the wild animals. Hell isn't necessarily a place of eternal punishment, it's actually a place where the disobedient and heretical are dumped, "Survival of the Fittest" is in full effect, and it's a place of eternal chaos and wildness, and the wildness itself is the punishment (explains why Hell Is Other People, Hell is "Eternal Separation", Hell Is War, why Hell is such a Wretched Hive with A Hell of a Time, and so on). Hence why Christianity condemns the Id, the animal part of us which like sex, violence, chaos, pleasure and war. Who knows, maybe the Lake of Fire describes the temperatures of the stereotypical wild place, Africa.

The Old Testament Israelites should have established a republic
(This would be the "Exodus through Kings" period Isealites.)

Its clear in judges that without a strong government, the israelite's success (whether at following god, or in other areas) is spotty at best. However, the Kings don't do too well either, as the israelite's success is too dependent on one person's actions. Obviously, the Israelites needed to set up some sort of government where laws themselves are held to be the most important part of the government, and one where a single person couldn't have had much influence on how the country was run (religiously or otherwise). A Theocracy type government is out, (I think I remember that there were some instructions during the Moses part of the story against this, but may just be imagining things), but a Republic like government does fit the bill somewhat.
 * But the Republican / democratic government would be invented by Greeks later on.

Fundamentalists and creationists are the propaganda of Satan.
The creationists are scientificially illiterate, and the fundamentalists paint God as a Complete Monster. This is all an Evil Plan by Satan to get people to either hate or not believe in God by making it seem God Is Illogical. That way he can use it to his advantage in Armageddon

God Is Dead.
Something happened.Maybe it was an(other) Eldritch Abomination,or he simply killed himself, or he heeded prayer baWhen this occured,a new god arose to took control-science.This is why the universe is vastly different from how the Bible described it:most of reality was ret-gonned to fit the God of Science.

God has a Blue and Orange Morality.
It's why he varies so much between God Is Good and God Is Evil.Its why He claims and even seems to be moral,and at the same time dispensing disproportionate retributions:his mind is so alien that what He considers "good" and "evil" are His moral concepts,not our own.Considering that He's an Eldritch Abomination and a Time Abyss,it would suit Him very well.
 * For him, that is.

Judaism is the one true religion and in the future everyone will convert to Judaism
All you need to do is read the messanic prophecies in the Tankah.
 * Christianity is a poor man's ripoff of Judaism. 'Nuff said.

God is a Universal Frat Boy
He was playing a prank on Abraham when he told him to sacrifice his son, but chickened out before the end. The other smitings can be explained by this too.

The Egyptian Pantheon Caused the 10 plagues, or most of them
The Bible says yahweh did them, but yahweh likes to take credit for things he didn't do. We know that each of the plagues reresent one of the Egyptian Gods, which has mistakenly been taken as a Take That or Our Gods Are Greater when actually the Egyptian God were pissed at Pharoh and the other Egyptians that were abusing the Hebrews. Yahweh struck a deal with them to let his people go, and you know the rest of the story.

The Battle Between God and Satan is just an obscenely elaborate and drawn-out WWE plotline
I mean, if God is the all-powerful creator of the universe, then how exactly is Satan supposed to be a propper threat to him? Answer: he's not. He's just been allowed to run loose, pummeling weaker opponents in order to build up a reputation of epic badassery so that The Final Battle will seem like a big hairy deal. Once things finally do down between The Man Upstairs and The Prince of Lies, God is just going to have Satan take a dive. Why? Because God loves to showboat and will jump on any chance to look cool, which is why he keeps Satan around in the first place: he's the ugly chick God stands next to in order to look sexier. Of course, billions will die horribly during this One Night Only Battle To The Death, but at least the special effects should be cool.

God is bored
Knowing and being able to do everything would REALLY suck if you think about it, you would know every plot and not be able to challenged. As such God, in an attempt to be less bored, spends his time creating stuff or watching humans, who, due to their freewill, he can only make reasonable guesses as to what they will do next.
 * God is Haruhi Suzumiya.

Heaven is located on the Sun.
Think about it. Heaven is supposed to be this beautiful, golden place in the sky, but humans can't get to it, only the dead. The sun is huge and golden, and if humans tried to get to it, they'd be incinerated! (This is totally my sister's theory, I'm just posting it.)
 * So, heaven itself is only going to last for another 5.4 billion years? What happens then- does it just move?
 * It gets recreated, God will make a new heaven, a better heaven that doesn't cause skin cancer in the living.

The Verse in the Bible is not ours.
It's a proto-type-one of the many universes YHWH has created over time.After the end of Revelations,God got bored,and so did His people.So He decided to create a new universe,but this time He'd sit back and watch.The Bible is a copy of His early works,distributed to us-and we assumed it referred to ours.

Revelation is a ploy to prevent the end of the world
In the actual gospel books, it is said a few times that the end of the world will come when no one expects it. Revelation, however, provides a bunch of signs of the world ending, which means people will be expecting it. As a result of these conditions, the end of the world cannot occur as long as anyone believes and looks for the events of revelation.

Revelation is a letter of encouragement to believers suffering under the cruel reign of Domitian, and is largely symbolic
The imagery in this book is so bizarre and random, in comparison to other more straightforward Biblical metaphors. The meaning of this book is largely open to debate. This book has spawned stupid amount of panic and superstition, and resulted in crazy beliefs like the Rapture, which overall has left Christianity worse off.

The Nephilim founded the Norse and Egyptian (and maybe the Greek or others) religions and played at being gods
The Nephilim were.... well reports vary from ancient giants, the offspring of fallen angels and man, or just fallen angels. They were described as giants, and they supposedly knew magic, and were sometimes described as having animal heads (like the Egyptian gods), and would probably enjoy making humans worship them. This could also explain the prominence of giants, the lack of women (many reports suggest the Nephilim were all male), and why the Norse have a place with a similar name to creatures in a seemingly unrelated book. I thought I was the first person to make the link, but I'm apparently not. Even if this theory is utterly stupid, it would make good story material, no? And if it's somehow true, it gives the Bible a rather interesting link to history......
 * Actually, Paul flat out states that any god that isn't God is actually a demon. That and God has confirmed that there's other gods, or used to. Regardless, God has kicked Thor's and Odin's asses, is currently kicking their asses and will kick their asses.

God is a survivor of Ragnarok.
It was established that Norse Mythology was a precursor to The Bible. In this way, God(or YHWH, to be more accurate) may have been a deity from the Norse pantheon-one that was very obscure. Unlike the other gods, YHWH actively tried to hide from Ragnarok, knowing it would kill Him. After Ragnarok, He used the oppurtunity to rebuild the world, via scavenging the remains of the old Norse gods. This led him to become the powerful Eldritch Abomination billions worship nowadays.

The reason He claims he is the one and only god is because they're no longer there. The Verse of the Bible is essentially a second attempt at running the world. Going by this, Satan/the Serpent could be a reincarnation of Loki. Both are affable troublemakers, depending how you see them. However they both become enormous threats, related to the end of the world.

The Israelites who left Egypt were a group of Engineers with advanced technology
The actual Exodus story goes as follows:

Israelites are settled in Egypt, increase in numbers. While living there, they develop a number of new technologies and become skilled engineers, helping to organize the construction of many cities. However, the pharaoh grew scared of this new technology and power, and decided to enslave the Israelites. Time goes on, Moses appears, decides to lead the Israelites from Egypt. The Pharaoh doesn't want to let the Israelites go, out of few of loosing their skills to an enemy, plus general pride and desire to maintain power. The Israelites use their engineering skills to sabotage several egyptian public works projects (Sewer systems, irrigation works, etc.), some of which they likely helped build, causing problems that lead to the ten plagues.

Eventually, the destruction convinces the pharaoh to let the Israelites leave, but he than changes his mind and decides to chase them. The Israelites, either guessing this would occur, or learning of it, decide to trap and destroy the pharaoh's army, to save future trouble for themselves. To do this, they dam the Red Sea, and pump the water out, setting up a corridor of dry land to travel through. As the Egyptian army approached, the Israelites had a large chunk of their population start on the egyptian side of the cleared red sea, than walk across to tempt the Egyptians. Once clear, the Israelites blew up the dams, and stopped the pumps, drowing the army.

They than spent several years in the desert, before being able to actually conquer Canaan. during this time, they weren't able to use their engineering skills much, but still taught them. When they started their first conquest at Jericho, they snuck close to the walls over several nights, planting explosives, than, when ready, detonated the explosives and destroyed the walls, making the city much easier to conquer. The Israelites than went on to conquer more of Canaan, destroying many of the cities.

However, during the time of Judges, the Israelite organization disintegrated, and they lost much of their engineering skill and technology. As a result, they did not understand how the major events of the escape from Egypt occurred without divine intervention, and changed the stories accordingly. This explains why the miracles seem to largely taper off after these stories, and would also explain some of the UFO consiracy oddities of Egyptian monuments, which were presumably added by the Israelites for some reason or other.

God is the name of an advanced weaponry scientist, humans were built to combat races like the one God comes from
We're a biological weapon, with freedom of thought and understanding of war. What could be more perfect? We adapt quickly, we advance quickly, and no matter what odds are we find a way to survive and spread out.

John was freaked out when Jesus appeared in Revelation, but not for the obvious reasons...
""In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. ... Then he placed his right hand on me and said: "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last." Revelation 1:16-17 (Bold by Troper)"

How did Jesus say that with a sword sticking out of his mouth? Stick two fingers in your mouth and say "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last". Go ahead.
 * I'll take two shots at this. 1: He spat out or coughed up the sword until it was no longer in his mouth before speaking (i.e., the "never talk with your mouth full" doctrine of the Perfect Son). 2: Telepathy.

God is a narcissist.
Why else would he describe himself as perfect in every way?

All gods and goddesses of all religions exist.
Even the ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek/Roman gods. All the gods of all religions are related-- cousins, siblings, who knows-- and co-run the world. After a while, the Greek/Roman gods and Egyptian gods decided to retire, handing the job over to their younger fellow gods-- God Himself among them.

God is a girl.
Women give birth, God created the earth, it makes a lot more sense when you think about it.
 * God is omnipitent and therefore as a female gave birth to the male form of himself, then realized he needed to make something to occupy his time so once again became a woman to make earth, then become male again, That's why women were last to get their rights.
 * Also his skin color is a costant blur of difrent hues we will never truly understand and if we even begun to, we'd have our skulls imploded by the overload of insanity, being spued by His/Her true form.
 * At that point the only thing our fragile, feebled minds, would be able to conjer up is to say one last curse O' MY GOD
 * The space surrounding earth is not silent, but so loud that if we could fathom the sounds we would be evicerated in a flurry of indefinite hues, that we could never really be sure existed at all, So to the fact that the person themself is wiped from existence and every thing they ever did. It's filled with the screams of the people who have seen him.
 * I can't beleive this because the simple act of beleiving would leave a crater, of never being here at all, right where I sit.

God was a pantheon(s) before, but merged into 1 being once belief systems changed.
As mentioned above, in the original, it was Ra who hardened the Pharaoh's heart, but it was translated to god. Also, what do depictions of Zeus and the Lord have in common? What does 'Zeus' mean in Greek? When gods lose all their followers, it could be because their followers worship someone else, meaning that the worshiped one absorbed them.

The "apocalypse"/"end of Days"/etc. was the early/middle 20th Century
Many of the prophet books describing the Babylonian period seem to describe the idea of the exiles coming back, the Kingdom being reestablished, etc. This obviously didn't work out exactly as expected, with the Temple getting rebuilt, the various priests and other exiles coming back, but under the control of larger empires, and some other minor details not quite fitting.

In this WMG, a similar thing occurs with the later apocalyptic type expectations. There were large world wars, often involving ideological battles that more resemble good vs. evil type fighting more than other types of wars, Israel got founded again, our world reaching a One World Order state, etc. However, there were no resurrections, nothing else mystical happening, no Kingship, and just like the first sety of prophecies, a new series of conflicts and issues appeared after the events took place.
 * Concerning Clarke's Third Law, anything magical and eldritch in the Apocalypse is just how the prophets saw modern technology.

Creationism is true in some form.
Because if God is omnipotent, he can create the world however the hell he wants to create it.

The Bible doesn't really exist.
...but I don't honestly know how that works out. I'm just putting it out there because all the more elaborate theories have been taken.
 * If I may: There is no "Bible". Whenever you think you are looking at or reading one, what your eyes actually see but your inner Weirdness Censor will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge is always the same cleverly disguised Tome of Eldritch Lore. Oh, for the time being we are safe enough. But it may come to pass in years ahead that every human being will find him- or herself in possession of a so-called "Bible", whether they believe its purported message or not; in fact, the seemingly ever-increasing spread of information across the globe would seem to all but guarantee it. And then, when the stars align just right, it may next occur that we will all feel an inexplicable urge to turn to our "Bibles" at the same time. Then, and only then, will the truth be revealed to everyone so we can all Go Mad From the Revelation together...

God is a sadistic mass murderer

 * This explains why he let Adam and Eve eat the Forbidden Fruit. It also explains how he is able to destroy whole civilizations, and flood the entire world, with what he claims to be righteousness. This also provides an explanation to why he lets good people suffer, and why he let the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem and enslave the Jews.

God is a Knight Templar.
It explains so much.

God is kinda lazy.
He has a remote control to control whatever goes on down here. Now, when it comes to Noah's ark, He could've easily just gone down there and told people to shape up or else. But no, he was to lazy, so he just went, "Hmm, better fix this. FLOOD POWER! Yeah! Oh, wait, that guy and his family over there are actually being good. Meh, I guess I'll let 'em live. ...shit. They're gonna need animals. Um... HEY! NOAH! TAKE TWO OF EACH ANIMAL, OKAY? OKAY!"

God wants people to stand up to Him whenever He's about to do something drastic.
God has been willing to negotiate and even back down when about to indulge those genocidal urges. With Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham tried to get God to not smite the cities if He could find 10 worthy individuals in the cities, and Abraham negotiated that down from 50. God was going to smite the Israelites until Moses asked Him to stop. Maybe God wouldn't be so excessive if people said "Get a hold of Yourself!" when about to flip out (and not try to go behind God's back, because that tends to end poorly).
 * This seems likely, when ever his prophet had shown to be in favor with him and asked him to give the object of his wrath another chance he complied, even when the prophet's argument made no sense. For example, Moses's reasoning was you promised to make a great nation out of Jacob's descendants, even though God said he was just going to get rid of the other Israelites and start over with Moses, he'd still be keeping his promise to Jacob but he did what Moses asked anyway.

Many churches denies the existence of the Desposyni (siblings of Jesus) to protect their descendants.
The bible has stated in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55-56 that Jesus had blood siblings but the many churches deny their existence. The truth is that they forced themselves to go against the scriptures and even created the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity to hide the descendants. This was done so that bloodline of Jesus would live on.

The planet Venus is Satan/Hell.
Venus is the Morning Star, which is what Satan was described as. Much like Venus, Satan(with a few exceptions) is deceptively beautiful. Being an angel, Satan's true form would be pretty damn weird, so he could easily be one big planet. The fact that Venus gets the closest to us represents his corruptive nature. Hell is also Venus-the planet has been compared to Hell, and it's the biggest Death World in the Solar System. Venus' opposite orbit is symbolic of Satan being against the order God has established.

The other planets are angels and demons respectively. Their alignments?
 * Mercury is a demon, because it's a barren wasteland. Likely the messenger of Satan.
 * Mars could be a demon or angel. Mars is the most likely category for life elsewhere in our solar system, meaning it has a connection to God. However its barren nature and the fact it no longer possesses oceans may refer to it going through a Heel Face Turn.
 * Its two moons are in fact the home of the Horseman of War. This is because Phobos and Deimos were children of Ares, god of war.
 * Jupiter is The Son. It protects us from asteroids by absorbing the blow(much like how its human form died for our sins), and posseses Io and Europa(Io is the most active object in our solar system, and Europa has a giant ocean beneath its ice-covered surface.) And its the King of the Planets.
 * Saturn is also an angel. After all, it posseses Titan and Enceladus(Titan is very much like a primeval Earth, and Enceladus has geyesers of water).
 * Uranus and Neptune are unclear. Uranus is an obscure angel/demon, due to it being near-impossible to see with the naked eye. Neptune isn't an angel or demon at all, but an Elder God.

God is the Anti-Azathoth.
Both God and Azathoth are responsible for creating the universe. They're both one of the biggest example of the Eldritch Abomination trope, period. The difference between the two? God is The Omniscient, while Azathoth is mindless. God is the Mirror Universe Azathoth, what would happen if the big A was given a mind. In fact, the entire setting of the Bible is a Mirror Universe of the Cthulhu Mythos: the Bible is seen as a place where humans matter and good and evil are laid out, and the Cthulhu Mythos is seen as a place where human are as insignifcant as they are in real life and good and evil are alien concepts.
 * Azathoth is kind of already is a Demiurge with no Sophia to pull its leash.

God is a child of the Cthulhu Mythos
Specifically, God is the lovechild/merger between Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath. He inherited Azathoth's power, but developed a sentience from the other Outer Gods. Because of this, He could use Azathoth's might to be The Omnipotent, and Yog-Sothoth's prescene gave Him the ability to be everywhere inside and out of reality. Because of this and His omnipotence, He gained omniscence. His helping of his chosen people relates to Shub-Niggurath's Affably Evil nature.

One person can repent for the sin of suicide, and maybe already has:
Judas, assuming he is the Wandering Jew.

Why Satan fell.
In the beginning, YHWH created the Heavens and the Earth. The serpent, who was not Satan, decided to tempt Adam and Eve. The result was knowledge, yet with knowledge came sin. At first, YHWH decided to take it upon Himself to deal with this. Prior to Satan, he used angels to take care of this. But the angels "knew" the humans, which led us to the story of Noah's Ark. So YHWH started again, creating a judge of humanity: Lucifer/Satan/the Accuser. At first, it was good. However, over the centuries, Satan became tired of the sin of humanity. He had gained a solid Humans Are Bastards mentality.

The Book of Job shows this. It was Satan's desperate attempt to show that humans were sycophants to YHWH, however Job still retained faith. Angered by this, Satan would continue to try and prove his philosophy. Eventually YHWH came to the realisation that, because of His punishments, He and Satan were Not So Different. Thus, Satan fell. To ensure something like Satan could never happen again, God made it his mission to understand humanity: hence Jesus.

Being a Knight Templar, Satan felt that something was wrong with YHWH's judgement. It is for this reason that he tempted Jesus himself. It didn't work out. In order to be more distant from Satan, YHWH gave us fake origins: that he was the serpent and Ultimate Evil. This would've been a total Ironic Hell for Satan. By the point of Revelations, Satan has become a Misanthrope Supreme: controlling and condemning humanity to a Fate Worse Than Death because, frankly, he thinks we deserve it.

The entirety of God's appearances/non appearances are part of a Xanatos Gambit for humanity's maturation
This is why He showed himself as a vengeful god to the early humanity and as a caring loving god from the new testament onward (if the bible is to be believed to the word), until humanity outgrew the need of a god. So in fact, the fact that people can't prove He exists or doesn't exist, is all done in purpose. If you believe in Him, great, listen to what He has to say, but atheists can mature too. In summary: He fit the image of a father figure until humanity "grew".

'God' is actually an impostor being.
There are certain texts (I think the Gospel of John and Gnosticism) that claim YHWH is actually Yaldabaoth, a being created by a female Divine, Sophia. However, she realised that he was a clearly mad Eldritch Abomination. Despite this, he has managed to avoid destruction, creating us in the process. The result is that we are imperfect beings, created by an imperfect being who lies and deceives us in his madness and delusion, blinding us to the truth of the universe.
 * You're way off concerning the Gospel of John. Gnostic stuff goes against what is actually in the Bible so regularly I'd reccomend never reading the two as though they were complementary sources.

Reality is a Computer program, God is the designer/game master.
This explains everything. It's why there is basically nothing else in the universe (he only focused on one planet), it's why all the physics and biology is "just right", its how evolution happened (he coded it to be "scientific" as he rightly expected to populate the planet with people). The Six Days it took for genesis means it took him six days to enter the code and on the seventh day, he was overworked and rested for it. His Ultimate Goal is to basically turn the program into a self sustaining ecosystem that worships him on their own free will. Things like Sodom, the plagues, the flood, etc are all basically cheat spawn codes. He also talks to people early on just to give them a bit of guidance in the right direction. Jesus is him creating an AI representation of him that has the "goodness" stat hacked up to 100%. Jesus's death was a sign to god that humans were ready to live on their own now and that he wouldnt interfere anymore (though occassionally when bored, he will spawn a miracle or a disaster that he knows people will credit to him). He won't just listen to everybody's prayers though, its simply if he is watching the program, he may spawn something if he feels bored.

Hell is basically the garbage file folder where all the failed people in the program go because they didnt succeed in his eyes. Heaven is basically giving someone their own mini program where they can have eternal bliss and cross game chat with other dead heaven buddies. The Rapture is also his way of formatting the program when he feels that humanity can't evolve any more and so he will just move the worthy into their heaven program and just let the garbage file folder merge with the main program which will mean the earth will be full of glitches and errors and everyone left will just be screwed.

Also, not a literal "computer" program where god is some dude with a bunch of file servers. But a metaphorical one where god is really a nameless being that exists in a sense that is completely incomprehensible (he is, he has, he always will be. he is both a being and formless, both an individual and collective form of energy).

This is literally the ONLY way the bible, god, jesus, religion, etc can make pretty much perfect sense other than "basically none of it is real, it's just a non-fiction story based on some real events that were actually pretty boring" imo
 * Quantum mechanics supports this, strangely enough. Wave functions that don't collapse until someone observes them? Efficient use of RAM. Particles affecting each other across vast distances faster than the speed of light? They were both controlled by the same line of code. Dark matter? Just regular matter without the texture pack enabled.

God is just very lonely.
Think about it: the entire premise seems to be based off having a relationship with YHWH. One interpretation is that you can't go to Heaven unless you worship God. Prior to creating the universe, there wasn't anything but God. He basically spent eternity with nothing but a formless mess. This caused God to become incredibly lonely and desperate for friendship. That is the reason He wants people to worship Him:so that He has total companionship. The serpent thought mankind wouldn't want to be with a loner, and Satan just got sick of keeping Him happy.
 * Chaos and Old Night are actually beings from the same Primordial Chaos, who were mean to God.

The Bible Is a Cook Book
In the song Silent Night, Jesus is referred to as "Tender and Mild". During the Last Supper Jesus asks them to eat him. To this day we eat him.

God values free will above life
It is the only humanly conceivable way He could be omnibenevolent and omnipotent.He has said before that we will ressurect at the end of days,therefore we are eternal and death is not real.He used natural disasters because a complex universe could not exist without them(note1:they are all based on physic laws that do other useful,often vital things as well,note2:if they did not happen,human would eventually discover that they should happen,thus proving to himself that God exists,since he does not let them happen,and doing that would be like forcing people to follow him,thus denying him the free will of following him or not note3:making a less complex world would give to humen less space for exploration,therefore denying him his pontential).Evil is created as a sidefect of free will.God could not create it,but using logic laws,good should have an oposite,therefore not creating it would take free will away from humans.God does miracles only in front of believers,or people who asked sincerely and without evil intentions His help ,because since they know He exists andwant Him to help,it does not bypass their free will.Miracles diminished because less people did that(fanatics and people who do not understand the bible's teatchings do not really count as believers.You have to understand some things,not only believe)

To get into Heaven, you first have to go to Room 101.
Everyone who goes to Heaven fully loves God, right?

Satan's actual name.
As you may know, Satan isn't actually a name but rather a rank in Jewish beliefs. Given this, who might the Satan we're familiar too actually be?
 * Samael. According to some sources, he tempted Eve, and is seen as a tempter/accuser by Talmudic traditions.

Everyone in Heaven is high on drugs.
Hence why it's paradise up there. You can't make a perfect paradise without first getting rid of the flaws. Since free will causes both good and evil to exist, God decided to find a way that lets someone lack "evil" and still have free will: dope them up on a mystical drug keeping them complacent and in bliss. The Tree of Knowledge is the antidote, in case the trip went bad. Hell is a bad trip.

Angels are the deceased souls of earlier races God created in other universes or on other planets, and the deceased souls of humans will be angels for God for future races that he creates.
It would fit with a lot of things.
 * It'd explain the widespread misconception that angels are the deceased souls of humans - the misconception would be at least half correct.
 * It'd explain where angels came from.
 * God being timeless does not contradict the existence of previous creations or later creations.
 * It'd help resolve the issue of "so what do we actually do once we're in Heaven with God".
 * Why would a perfect being want a finite, permanently unchanging number of companions? The claim that there is such a finite number is bizarre. The idea that it'll continue expanding indefinitely makes more sense.
 * The descriptions of the angels are very bizarre. Starfish Aliens, anyone?

Yahweh was not always a God of Good.
Okay, let's be honest with ourselfs, while we'd want to see an omnipotent being as perfectly good, it's not realistic. A timeless, spaceless and utterly unfathomable Eldritch Abomination could not naturally have any sense of human understanding, let alone human morality. Originally, before humanity gained proper self-awareness and the knowledge of good and evil, God was as unfathomable as something from the Cthulhu Mythos. Except for one vital fact: He is psychically connected to what He creates. The moment mankind gained true self-awareness, things go down the drain.

There's a reason why He was so paranoid about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It's because the moment we gained true awareness, it mindraped GOD Humanity desired for there to be a god embodying morality, and they got it. The God of the Bible is a split personality of the actual God influenced by another self-aware entity(namely, us). The reason for Values Dissonance is due to our morality being different back then: while we wish it weren't the case, there never was, and never shall be moral absolutes.

After mankind ended up driving God insane(by Eldritch Abomination standards, anyway), it desperately tried to follow their second command: give an explanation for sin. Satan was born soon after. Since good and evil are very powerful ideas, one could never vanquish the other. Then along came science. Science was God's true personality fighting back, trying to restore His mind. As well as moral relativism. You see, God's mindset can not only alter the world now, but completely rewrite history and reality as we know it. The reason for scientific innacuracies is due to a literal Retcon of creation by God's power.

As science and moral relativism grew popular, the "perfect good" personality and the "perfect evil" Devil weakened due to the lack of strong belief in a perfect deity and absolute morality. Fundamentalists, scientific repression and many major church officials, are a desperate(and probably unconscious) attempt to re-empower their God, and bring back reality to the former timeline. Oh, and Fred Phelps? He's using this on purpose to reduce the world into untold misery because he's the worst person ever.

"God" and the Devil are aware of this. Jesus was an attempt to enforce the idea of a God of Good, which the Devil used to enforce the power of sin. Even if they had their fullest power, the God of Good can't purge evil from the world since good needs to define itself by that, and vice versa. At this time, the (let's call them) Idea of Good and Idea of Evil are almost powerless due to a lack of them being needed, kept alive only by faith alone. They plan to survive in some form, perhaps as entities who exist on the internet.

The Prodigal Son is about Satan.
Satan finally comes home to God, who forgives him immediately because he loves his son and has a celebration in Heaven. The other son is Archangel Michael, who is still mad at Satan for betraying God and can't understand how he always followed God, and yet, God seems to be happy the traitor is back. God explains he loves Michael, but Satan had fallen but was now with them again. Satan and Michael make up and all is well.

Demons were behind the Arrest and Crucifixion of Jesus
During the trial that Jesus faced before his inevitable execution, Satan sends demons to take possession of nearly all the populous there. When Pilate asks which one that they wanted, they chose Barabbas. This would explain why the crowd that welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday suddenly turned on them. It also gives an explanation to why they chose a convicted murder rather than Christ, because demons spoke through the people like a ventriloquist dummy. Demons also took possession of the Romans that were crucifying Jesus, and through them, they gave him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by flagging, and then crucifying them. This would give the answer to why Jesus told His Father to forgive them for they didn't know what they were doing. When the crowd started to realize that He truly was God's Son, the demons left the bodies seemingly victorious.