A Major Television Network Stole My Idea!

A conspiracy theorist might say this eye is watching you and stealing your ideas. (image via wikimedia)

People on the internet accuse each other all the time of stealing ideas.  Comedians accuse each other of joke thievery.  Unknown musicians accuse famous performers of stealing songs.  Every once in a while, two movies or two television shows with the same premise will come out at the same time.

I think most of the time, the similarity of ideas is due to parallel thought.  There are so many people creating content that of course a bunch of stuff is going to look or sound the same.

I mention this because I just saw a promo for a new television show called God Friended Me.  Even though I’m kind of religious, the show looks stupid, but I’m biased.  I thought of a similar idea way back in 2011, and even then I was pretty sure it was a stupid idea.

Despite the title of this post, I know the television network didn’t steal my idea. I’m just surprised that a television network thought this God Friended Me was a good idea.  Even when I wrote my version of it, I knew this was a bad idea, even for a joke.  My blog was filled with a lot of bad ideas back then, and I knew it.  But as I wrote more and more stuff, my ideas got better, and I think my writing improved a little as well.

At any rate, if you don’t want to watch the show God Friended Me, you can save time by reading the joke below.  Looking back, it’s not that bad.

I’m providing the link here  so that you can verify that I actually wrote it in 2011, but you don’t have to click it because…

God Gets Addicted to Facebook and Twitter.

It was the new millennium, and as God looked over humanity, He was again saddened and disappointed by what He saw.  Humans had developed almost miraculous technology and yet were misusing it for their base desires.  Men used technology for porn.  Women used the technology for gossip.  Criminals used the technology to help themselves steal and murder.  Very little productive was being done with these wonderful tools that God had allowed/helped humans to discover.

And so God decided to step in.

First, God created an account on Facebook and friended everybody.  When He was rejected by most Facebook users, God was stunned.

“Who would dare not to friend God?” God asked with indignation, tempted to set the world on fire.

But instead, God upgraded His Facebook page.

He put up photos of Adam and Eve with the apple, Moses parting the Red Sea, and Jesus walking on water.  These pictures created a huge stir on the internet, as image experts closely examined the pictures for signs of image editing or anachronisms (God had made Moses take off his watch), but the photos were authentic, and people throughout the world began to believe that this particular Facebook page truly belonged to God.

And soon God had more friends than anybody else on Facebook, and God was happy.

Next, God went on Twitter.  It was sometimes difficult to keep His good word to 140 characters, but He was God and the Twitter technology showed remarkable flexibility when God wrote too much.  God used Twitter to shame individuals of their sins.  He publicly warned men (and women) not to cheat, not to watch porn (at least not at work), not to discuss politics where food was being served, and of course not to steal, murder, and the usual stuff.

Humans did not stop committing acts of sin, but the number of acts of sin decreased greatly.

Atheists, however, refused to believe that this was the work of God.  It had to be a hacker with enough resources to check individual internet usage and deduce who was sinning and how.  No amount of evidence was enough to prove to them that God existed and had gotten addicted to Facebook and Twitter.

“Prove that you’re God,” the skeptics demanded to God.  “Perform a miracle for us.”

“Is nothing enough for you?” God scoffed.  “I have just used Facebook and Twitter in a positive way to do good in the world. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.”

*****

Yeah, that was my bad idea, but enough about me!  What do you think?  Have you ever seen any of your (bad) ideas used by somebody else?