Early yesterday morning at Columbia University in New York, scientists at the biological theology institute managed the impossible. They had cloned God.

“Everyone told us that it couldn’t be done,” smiled lead researcher Denny McDaniels. “But where’s their God now?” He then pointed at God, who he had cloned, in the corner of the lab.

For years, scientists had always insisted that science could not address theological questions, much less clone God. But in a scene reminiscent of the movie Jurassic Park, the researchers at Columbia University managed to isolate some of God’s genetic material in a surprising, but in hindsight obvious, manner.

No, they didn’t find a mosquito trapped in amber that had once sucked on Jesus’ divine blood. Instead, they took the genetic material directly from Christ’s body.

“One of my Catholic friends mentioned to me that he had eaten Jesus,” said Timothy Lane. “After all these years of saying absurd things like this—’I've just eaten Jesus,’ ‘I just drank the blood of Jesus,’ ‘Jesus sort of tastes a bit like a stale cracker’—it finally dawned on me that perhaps he was being serious. As it turns out, Catholic priests know magic and can turn crackers into pieces of Jesus’ body. This was exactly the kind of breakthrough we were looking for in our quest for cloning God.”

With the cooperation of a rogue Catholic sect, the research team was finally able to secure a piece of Jesus. “Our earlier attempts to get a piece of Christ ran into all sorts of difficulties,” said one of the researchers. “Being scientists, we don’t understand things about god and churches and weird mystical rituals, but we nevertheless had to send in some agents to try to find one of these mysterious Jesus crackers we had heard about.” He continued, “We were probably run out of at least eleven churches before we found one that was willing to cooperate with us. Most of them were horrified when we said we wanted to clone their Jesus crackers. Others were horrified by the way we dressed and acted—we wore Amish-style beards and primitive and somber clothing and continually burst out into song and spoke in jibberish and beat ourselves silly with self-inflicted wounds—from our perches among the scientific elite, this is simply how the religious types seemed to us, so petty and small. Thankfully, in the end, we found a church that really did act in this way, and they accepted us with open arms and gave us full use of their Jesus crackers.”

With the Jesus crackers in tow, the researchers began testing the materials immediately back at the lab. “We took the crackers that had been turned into Jesus and used the latest in genomic technology to scan it for traces of viable DNA material. After a week of scanning, we hit the genetic payload—a full genome for God!”

Of course, the research was not without its ethical dilemmas. “Some of us wondered whether we could be artificially inducing the second coming of Christ, and hence Judgment Day,” said Denny McDaniels. “What if we cloned Jesus, and he woke up all groggy and confused, and then all his angels with the trumpets and shit came down and were all like, ‘Hey Jesus, aren’t you a bit early?’ and then Jesus might say, ‘It’s not my fault; these idiots brought me here early with their dastardly science!’ and then the angels would say, ‘Damn you, science!’ and being scientists who hate god and know nothing of arcane and foolish religious matters, we’d already be off to a bad footing, so certainly waking Jesus early could be problematic for us.”

Thankfully, these ethical problems never surfaced. God was cloned quite uneventfully, and now sits in the corner of the lab with a rather docile expression.

Of course, after cloning the wheat-based crackers that had been turned into Jesus, researchers were confronted with a surprising revelation concerning the nature of God. “We never would have thought,” said one of the researchers, “that God would turn out to be wheat.” Said Timothy Lane, “I think this explains all the seed-sowing parables, if you ask me.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 7:55 PM and is filed under Blog, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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