The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Celestial Firmament
This is just bits and pieces of an unfinished work. With sufficient nagging and/or encouragement, I might finish it. --Woozle 21:24, 26 August 2008 (EDT)
Bits from notebook
...by the Supreme Being. Based on characters and situations created by Douglas Adams, evil baby-eating atheist.
Somewhere in the general vicinity of the center of the universe lies a large, highly-regarded blue-green planet. Orbiting this planet at a distance which may be 98 million miles or may be considerably closer is a large, yellow sun attached to the celestial firmament. This sun does not play a large part in our story, but it does enter into it approximately once a day.
Now, this large and entirely significant planet has a number of inhabitants who are so amazingly sinful that they actually believe science is a pretty good idea.
These inhabitants nonetheless have a special status in the eyes of their supreme being, who in turn has a special plan for them -- although as our story opens, they have no more understanding of this plan than a godless heathen has of the notion of "morality".
On this particular morning, thoughts such as these are especially distant from the mind of one particular God-descendant. His name is Arthur Dennett, and someone is trying to drive a bypass through his civil liberties.
- Strausser: Come off it, Mr. Dennett -- you can't stand in the path of progress!
- Dennett: I'm game -- we'll see whose ideology leads to fascism first!
- S: Now Mr. Dennett, you don't want the terrorists to win, do you?
- D: You mean, I need to do whatever you say and let you run roughshod over my personal freedoms so that some hypothetical group of raving foreign lunatics doesn't do it first?
- S: I'm sorry, but there is a war on. It has got to be won, and it is going to be won.
- D: Why has it got to be won?
- S (momentarily baffled): What do you mean, "why"? ...It is a war! You've got to win wars!
Snippets
In the beginning, God created the universe. This has been widely hailed as an excellent move in fabulous taste -- because after all nobody wants to get the creator of the universe angry at them -- and many people have unfortunately had to be burned at the stake for saying otherwise -- because after all nobody wants to get the creator of the universe angry at them for inadequately defending Him from uncouth infidels with no sense of aesthetics.
This was strictly for their own good, of course, because nobody wants to spend eternity in hell paying for their sins -- even if you are a godless heathen who doesn't believe in places like "heaven", "hell", or "Kansas" -- and fortunately it was quickly and conveniently determined that they were all working for Satan and the forces of darkness and therefore were only getting what god had intended to do himself, if only his omnipotence hadn't been in the shop that day.
There is a theory that if the giant panda ever goes extinct, it will be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
"I refuse to prove that I haven't gone extinct," says the giant panda, "for proof denies bamboo shoots -- and without bamboo shoots, I am nothing!"
"Oh," says mankind, "but what about the fact that we cut down all the bamboo forests to drill for oil? That proves you have gone extinct, and therefore you haven't! QED"
"Oh dear," says the giant panda, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy!" says mankind, and for an encore goes on to prove that up is down, the earth is only 6000 years old, and liberals are a threat to civilization.