All of the popular religions have their mythology. The Greeks made up stories about Zeus, his wife Hera, and the whole crew. The Romans had their Poseidon, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto the Pup myths. The Vikings had their Odin and Thor myths. A typical myth would start making up stuff about what "the gods" said and did. A popular subject of myth would be the creation of the world.

The early Jews had myths of their own. One of them is the tale that opens up Genesis, the Six Day Creation myth. It went like this, for those of you who don't have a Bible in front of them.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. The universe was void and without form or order. It was entirely dark. The breath or wind of God hovered or moved over the face of the deep, or perhaps if you prefer, The Holy Ghost hovered over the face of the deep.

God said Let there be light! and there was light. The original darkness was the first evening, and the light was the first morning. This was the very first day of the universe. God alternated darkness with light, night with day.

On the second day, God placed a firmament in the heavens to separate what was above the firmament (the sky) from what was below it (the Earth). The firmament was a barrier, a separator, to separate the waters above it from the waters below it, for the entire universe consisted mostly of water.

On the third day, God gathered the waters of the Earth together into seas, revealing some dry land underneath. God brought forth grass and fruit trees on the dry land.

On the fourth day God placed the Sun, Moon and stars in the sky.

On the fifth day God placed sea monsters and other animals in the waters and birds in the sky.

On the sixth day God placed bugs and beasts on the land, and then placed humans on the land, male and female, in the image of the gods.

On the seventh day God rested.

I call it a myth because it is utterly unrealistic. The time frame is unrealistic. The order of events is unrealistic. Vegetation didn't grow on Earth before the creation of the Sun and stars. The universe was not composed of water. The Earth was not covered in water at its creation, but was a barren rock like the Moon and Mars are now.

It was simply a creation myth to establish the credentials of the God of the Bible. This was not your ordinary family or tribal god. This was to be the creator of the entire universe. You can't get much bigger and more powerful than that.

It is not necessary to believe in every detail of this myth in order to believe that there is a God in our reality. It must be a person with very brittle beliefs who will go down with the ship insisting that every single word in the Bible is absolute truth despite the fact that some of it is obvious myth.

Let me suggest a new myth more in line with what we now "know" to be true about the early universe.

In the beginning, our universe did not exist, which is why we call it the beginning. A syndicate of universe-builders were granted a lease to open up a new universe - ours. They were given a universe packet from the central office, one of those masses of matter that is only the mass of the head of a pin but contains enough matter to populate an entire universe. The president and CEO of the syndicate was Jehovah Jones, backed by millions of staff members, each with their specialties.

The first order of business was to detonate the little packet and have particles of matter fly off in all directions to get the expanding universe operational. For this, Jehovah hired the famous Grucci Brothers, known for their pyrotechnic displays. They started it off with a bang. A big bang.

Particles went flying everywhere, not unlike the first shot in a game of pool. At this point, the galaxy builders earned their keep. They formed swirls of spinning dust clouds which coalesced into galaxies. In this way, the explosion was not allowed to simply blast all matter outwards in a never ending high speed race into deep cold empty dead space.

Millions of staff members worked on the countless galaxies, forming stars, forming planets, forming black holes, those vacuum cleaners of the universe, those gills of the universe, those pee holes of the universe, those anchors of the universe around which galaxies form.

Our own little section of the universe, known today as the Milky Way Galaxy, was supervised by a certified galaxy supervisor named Elsie Bovina, known for her huge breasts. Our solar system was supervised by Sol Apollo. Our little planet, third from the Sun, was supervised by Adam and Eve Bedrock.

After the Earth was allowed time to grow into a respectable size, and well rounded, it was time for the atmosphere-builders to do their thing. After setting up their magnetic foundation in the center of the Earth, they set about generating the right mix of gases, mainly nitrogen, but with oxygen, hydrogen and the rest in their proper proportions. When they were finally done, the Earth was ready to support carbon-based life forms.

Thousands of designers went to work. There were mainly bacteria and amoeba specialists at first, but in time the plant and bug designers were at it. You have never seen so many species of bug in your life. A hundred different beetle specialists designed thousands and thousands of species of beetle, under the overall supervision of Sgt. Pepper and his band composed of John, Paul, George and Ringo. The most prolific bug designer was Little Pepito with his cucarachas.

A fantastic array of animals thrived in the new Earth, but they reached a stage in their development when it was decided from on high to wipe the slate clean and begin a completely new stage. So Sol Apollo arranged for a massive meteor to bash right through the atmosphere, crash land on Earth, wipe out most of the life forms, and allow for a new beginning, like shaking an Etch A Sketch board. The new beginning featured dinosaurs of all sizes and shapes and was allowed to go on for many millions of years.

65 million years ago, it was time for another shake-up of the Etch A Sketch board, so Sol arranged for another huge meteor to bash through the atmosphere, land in Mexico somewhere, and wipe out most of life on Earth, including almost all the dinosaurs. It was time for the mammals to populate the Earth.

At this point, a number of ape-based designs were used as physical structures to house the hardy souls who wanted to experience incarnation on this planet. Adam and Eve began taking reservations. Souls were standing in line to incarnate as two legged monkeys. It was tougher to get one of these incarnations than it is today to get into a happening night club in Moscow.

Eventually the homo sapien design won a monopoly worldwide. Millions, then billions, of souls put in for temporary bodies, to experience up to a century of fun and games and abject misery on this planet of ours, this home away from home, to test themselves, to learn about their buddies and what assholes they'd be in different circumstances, to learn who you could count on and who you can't, to find out who would cheat on who, and to generally make nuisances of themselves.

Then Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, Babe Ruth hit 60 homeruns, Lincoln freed the slaves, and Derek Jeter did lots of Ford commercials despite the fact that he makes 20 million a year on the Yankees, like that ain't enough. We basically indulged in war after war, the lucky and most selfish among us hoarded the wealth of the world and happily gave the finger to the rest of us, we polluted our clean water and air, and generally fucked the whole thing up. C'est la vie.