I had a religious documentary on in the background, its assertions so ill conceived that it was mostly just white noise, when I heard Ken Ham’s angelic voice and my attention snapped instantly to what I was hearing.

“God created the world to be perfect,” he said. “It was man’s rebellion against him that [ruined it]. And because of that, we don’t deserve to be alive. We don’t deserve to live. We should be dead. But he did something wonderful.” He continued on into the story of Jesus’ sacrifice, but I was well and truly stunned into a stupor at hearing a familiar idea boiled down so low, leaving it so open to even the most casual person tearing it apart.

If every teenager who rebelled against their parents should die (and worth noting is that the Bible totally supports that idea), we’d be a very short lived species.

The thing about parents is that they have no say in the personality of their child. They can try to teach him or her right and wrong, lead them on the correct path to righteousness and goodness, but as most parents find, the human mind is a mind of its own.

God is not like a normal parent. He is omnipotent. He could create us with exactly the personality he wanted us to have. He had the power to choose exactly how we would behave, He could have balanced very carefully our desire to serve Him and our desire to exercise free will, He can (apparently) see the future, and thus each small tweak would give Him a glimpse into how we would act.

And yet, with all this power, He did such a poor job of creating us that the very first humans screwed up almost immediately.

It’s like breaking the leg of a horse then getting angry when it doesn’t even finish the race — it was never going to finish the race.

If we are designed, God did a hack job of it.

If we deserve to die because God did a terrible job in creating us, I can see why certain sects of modern Christianity have such a public relations issue.