She looked around the universe, checking in with Her worlds and civilizations like a sentimental gardener tending to Her plants. She realized they were all chugging along well enough on their own, and the catastrophes they were running into were all par for the course given their varying stages of growth. 

 

Existence had been entirely too peaceful lately, so She felt everyone could handle the responsibilities that came with creating a brand new people on a brand new world.

 

She flew over to one of of Her employees, someone who had done a great job managing established worlds. It was time to promote Him. She gave Him the good news: He was finally getting the opportunity to make His own world from scratch.

 

This is His story, and ours.

 

He picked a nice juicy solar system, way out in the boonies of the Milky Way. It would be easy enough to divert intergalactic highways for a handful of millennia, so the young world could have some alone time as they emerged from the universe’s womb. 

 

Plus, then no one else would have to hear their whines and screams as they began their long, long journey to maturity. 

 

One crown jewel of a planet sat within the solar system God had so lovingly selected. It was a paradise, one of the planets whose natural resources and topography were so diverse and abundant that it was earmarked specifically to house brand new worlds. Since the people would be starting from scratch, they would need lots of raw materials and plentiful sustenance. 

 

He decided to name the people Humanity. 

 

Now came the difficult part. Figuring out how to navigate the “free will problem” was always the hardest part of every creation process. Even though God was new at this particular job, He had all of existence contained within Him. He knew the darkest recesses of the universal soul, and free will would bring all of them out. 

 

Every civilization introduced a handful of Big Evils as a result of free will. These included, among many others: Racism, sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, systemic greed, and unequal distribution of resources.   

 

As God looked upon His fledgling society, He couldn’t help but play the tape forward. He knew they would have to encounter and overcome each of these evils before they could graduate to the next level of their growth. Learning how to overcome these propensities was universally painful, but it was the necessary price of freedom. Freedom was worth the struggle.

 

Some evils would come naturally enough that God wouldn’t have to intervene. Sexual depravity, for example, would happen nearly immediately. But some of them were more complex, of a spiritual nature instead of a primal nature. 

 

If He didn’t intervene and let the process run its natural course, allowing these Big Bads to arise in their own time… it could take humanity 30,000 years or more of extremely painful lessons to get through their first stage of evolution.

 

So God couldn’t help Himself. He tinkered a bit, and made a book that contained everything. In that book, He planted seeds for all of the Big Bads. Amongst the racism and sexism and everything else, He also wove in a ton of goodness and truth. 

It would be up to them to investigate and question, to interrogate their own natures (which were modeled after His own), and to see past what He said in order to discover the real reason why He said it. The truth was waiting under the surface, concealed, but always ready to be revealed to those who sought it.