God Retracts Endorsement of Morality Textbook
- By The Hyena
- Feb 23, 2018
- 2 min read
Telling reporters Monday that He was "deeply troubled" by His association with the text, the Lord our God denied all affiliation with Michael Pennock's morality textbook Your Life in Christ, claiming that its incorporation into the Catholic Schools canon was the "unfortunate" result of a clerical error. "Normally I oversee the approval of all Catholic school material personally, for it is tremendously important that children are indoctrinated with My divine will," the Almighty God explained, "but, I take vacations too, and about five years ago I left Gabe in charge so that I could take Jesus on a fishing trip. But you know Gabe, he's good with spectacle and prophecy and what not, but never really had the patience for a desk job, so he let some stuff slip through, includingYour Life in Christ.
The Supreme Ruler of the Universe went on to explain that he found out about this abomination of a text because Lucifer kept forwarding him complaints from Nathaniel Hawthorne, claiming Pennock had "blatantly ripped off" The Scarlet Letter. "Honestly, I didn't take him seriously at first," God admitted. But after being pressed, the Ruler of Heaven and Earth investigated the claims, and discovered the story Hawthorne had referenced on page 224 of the eBook. "I'd only ever read the Shmoop for The Scarlet Letter," God admitted, "but the resemblance was undeniable, right down to the villagers coming up with a contrived reimagining of what the letters stood for. That said, Pennock did a great job getting rid of what subtlety remained, making the story appreciably more straightforward and moralizing."
However, as our Divine Father puts it "a little bit of plagiarism wasn't really enough to doom the book." Heaven has always had a fairly lax policy on stealing plot elements, allowing thousands of authors to steal stories straight from the Bible. This policy, and God's belief that "human literature jumped the shark with the Romantic movement," would have kept the book safe, if it weren't for its "misrepresentation of the will and image of God," as the official statement put it. Though the book is clunky in its inclusion of numerous black and while explanations of which behaviors are and aren't sinful, it has many failings as well. "While the central message is all well and good," God proclaimed, "the production value is terrible. How can I inspire respect and fear when people associate me with bad Photoshop cutouts and quizzes on how you view human sexuality? I mean, no one would have taken the Ten Commandments seriously if I had made some intern write discussion questions for them."
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