Win vouchers to spend at any Tesco store

Competition No 3821

Set by Gavin Ross, 1 March

Mary Kenny complained in the Guardian that atheism as a school subject lacked drama and human interest. We asked for Bible stories retold to illustrate the atheistic point of view.

Report by Ms de Meaner

It is with great sadness that I report the death of one of our regulars, David Barton, who first appeared in the Top 30 annual winners' box in January 1996, for his sterling work through 1995, when he came in at number 21. His wife Margaret writes to say that the "competition gave him huge pleasure, even more so when [you were] kind enough to award him a prize!". He will be much missed.

This week, the winners get £20 each. The overall winner, David Silverman, also gets the Tesco vouchers.

In the beginning was nothing. A deathly silence was upon the face of the void until the great day upon which nothing became something. For millions of years lay something upon the face of nothing, until the coming of the Day of the Soup. From that soup came the amoeba after his kind and the jellyfish and the lizard with his optic nerve and his retina and the dugong, the axolotl and the orang-utan with his cochlea and his pancreas and his beating heart. And great was the Day of the Soup, for that soup was the soup of men. The soup was the father and mother of our forefathers Leonardo and Mozart, of Aristotle and Newton and Melvyn Bragg and Billy Bragg after their kind, of Kylie and Jason and of she who is called Delia. And great is Delia of the Profiteroles, whose coming was with thunder and lightning and a great cloud and a great trumpet blast. Oh, how exceeding great thou art, O Blind Chance, that brought forth light from darkness, motion from stillness, something out of nothing, DNA from sweet FA, rendered the inanimate animate, and provideth us with banoffee pie that passeth all understanding!

David Silverman

Elijah, disturbed by so much superstition among the people worshipping their so-called gods Baal and Jehovah, devised a plan to prove their deities did not exist.

"Let us see how powerful your god is," he shouted. "Make an altar, with a bull, but do not light the fire for the sacrifice. Call unto your god to light the fire himself." So they cried to their god to take his sacrifice, and even mutilated themselves in their religious fervour, but the fire did not light itself.

Then Elijah said to the followers of Jehovah, "Repair the altar which has been torn down, build up wood for the fire, then dig a trench around it." This was done, and Elijah instructed them to pour water all over the offering, not once but three times. Then Elijah pulled from his pouch a small piece of sodium wrapped in dry leather, and cast the mineral on the offering. The sodium then reacted with the water and caused a huge blaze, which consumed

everything on the altar. "That was not God,"

he said: "it was science, and I can prove it."

Katie Mallett

The sky was turning black, and Noah said, "It looks like a bit of rain." With a big push he got the last elephant into the ark. He felt an inner glow of satisfaction. Bringing animals together for the purpose of providing unconditional love and the future of agribusiness was true humanism.

He sat down on the deck and mopped his brow. He shouted at the dark clouds: "I do not believe, neither does my wife, my sons

Shem, Ham, Japheth, nor their three wives."

The great flood came. Lightning flashed and thunder crashed. It rained for forty days and forty nights. It rained so hard that Noah's ark floated above his house and came to rest on the highest mountain. He said to his family, "There! God surely does not exist, otherwise he would not have allowed eight atheists to survive the Flood." And so the disbelief came to pass.

John O'Byrne

No 3824 Set by Brendan O'Byrne

Spell a word backward and redefine it, relating the definition to the original, eg, "Onisac: a dark, often smoke-filled chamber in which elderly Homo sapiens deposit their nest eggs before dying."

As many as you like by 1 April. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk

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