That before time, space, matter, or even the first atom existed, there was only God…alone for eternity.

After an infinite amount of time, He supposedly thought, “You know what this endless perfection is missing? An audience.”

So He created billions of self-aware primates in His own image, placed them on a tiny rock orbiting an average star in an unremarkable galaxy, then made His existence just ambiguous enough that humanity would spend the next few thousand years arguing about whether He was even there.

The rules? Believe. The stakes? Infinite.

You get somewhere between zero and one hundred years, a cosmic pop quiz, to determine where you’ll spend eternity.

In some interpretations, the remarkable part isn’t even whether you lived a compassionate, honest, courageous, or selfless life. The decisive question becomes: Did you believe?

So a deeply flawed person who sincerely believes may inherit paradise, while a kind, generous, humble skeptic who spent a lifetime helping others risks eternal separation simply for reaching the wrong conclusion.

It’s the only exam where the teacher is invisible, the questions are debated by thousands of denominations, the answer key is disputed, and the consequences are infinite.

If a human parent hid from their child, refused to answer sincere questions, demanded unconditional belief, and tied an infinite reward or punishment to whether the child guessed correctly, we’d probably call it psychological manipulation.

When the same story is told on a cosmic scale, we’re told it’s divine justice.

Perhaps the greatest philosophical mystery isn’t whether God exists. It’s how this arrangement came to be regarded as the highest conceivable expression of love and justice.