God Is Inept

"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. The worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

— Boris, Love and Death

And in The beginning, God, the Council of Angels, or what have you Created The Universe...

But in retrospect, they botched a few things up in the original design, a few things just don't do what they were probably intended to do, and there's all these little bits of design that make people go "What the...I could have designed this better!" These aren't moral things; there is no refuge in claiming that God Is Evil. It's just shoddy workmanship.

May result in a Karmic Misfire, Crapsack World, Crapsaccharine World, Götterdämmerung, be the cause of the problem that the quest is about, or merely be a peculiar background detail. Not the same as The Gods Must Be Lazy; the design errors may be causing the gods extra work.

God may later try to claim "I Meant to Do That!", explaining the whole thing away as a Gambit Roulette justified by their Omniscient Morality License, and that Obfuscating Stupidity is all part of their master plan... but unless the ending explodes in a hail of Chekhov's gunfire, especially if accompanied by a prearranged divine Ass Pull of divine might, that explanation just never seems very convincing. As a rule of thumb, if a person can, in retrospect, work out how the plan was set up in advance, and some previously arranged coincidences unravel into karmically appropriate boons before the end, it was probably a divine plan. Otherwise, it's probably just bumbling or lacking in the intelligence department.

Essentially, applying the Hanlon's Razor approach to God Is Evil. In other words, God Is Good but incompetent or stupid, possibly even a Clueless Boss.

Compare God Is Flawed (when a deity/God is imperfect, but still manages to do Their job), and Loser Deity. May lead to questioning via Religious Russian Roulette.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A commercial begins with the opening scene of Armageddon (1998) where dozens of meteors are tearing through New York City. The camera pans up the skyline, through the clouds, up into heaven - and it turns out God was trying to squirt Tabasco sauce onto a hot dog and missing his plate.
  • The director of the commercial originally claimed that the bearded deity wasn't "God", but some clumsy generic deity. This probably didn't appease the audience offended by the portrayal, because in later airings the character's throne is labelled "Zeus".

Anime & Manga

• Doraemon Nobitas Diary Of The Creation Of The World has a plot where Nobita plays God, as in there is a gadget that creates world starting from the big bang, which is intended for research. It turns out that Nobita is not very good in his God-job, and the human equivalent of his cosmos live distressing life. Just as things are about to get out of hands, it's revealed that Nobita's own cosmos is also a research project by a God-like entity, and the entity offer Nobita a win-win solution for everyone. The implications make for a sleepless night, or seven.
• Dragon Ball Super has it as a major plot point that the local gods of Universe 7 and others are inept at managing the universe, to the point where Zen'o, their boss actively disapproves of the low population, quality, and degree of advancement of their mortals, and wants to intervene. By holding a Tournament of Power where the eight universes with the lowest mortal rankings must have some of their fighters compete in a battle royale in an arena of the World of the Void. Every universe that loses gets wiped from existence by Zeno, and the last universe gets to survive, and get a wish with the Super Dragon Balls.. Shin, Universe 7's Supreme Kai, has an excuse: he got the job because he was the only higher Kai to survive Majin Buu, despite being the youngest and Incompletely Trained. Which was Beerus' fault in the first place since it was his job to make sure monsters like Buu never get as far as he did, but he overslept (and nearly got himself killed as well since the lives of the Gods of Destruction and their respective Supreme Kais are linked).
• In The Death Mage Who Doesn't Want a Fourth Time, the fundamental conflict in the world of Lambda is that after a massive war, two gods disagreed how to rebuild. Big Good Vida's idea was to create a lot of new races to speed up the process and stabilize the population, seemingly believing that people are people no matter what they look like. While she was attacked and sealed away after starting her project, the races she managed to create seem really badly designed for their job: Vampires are asexual while ghouls are so cripplingly infertile they cannot even reproduce outside of cursed ground, which people don't want spreading. Empusa, arachne, harpies, lamia and scylla, meanwhile, are all female and therefore cannot reproduce on their own. And her children have almost universally low fertility such as a single child per decade. How are these species supposed to repopulate the world, exactly? Not helping things is that her personality is rather flaky and she easily gets flustered.

Comic Books

• One Polish indie comic book has a story about a race of omnipotent beings. One of them is teenage Jerkass God Yahwe, who creates his own world with free-willed creatures based on his image to impress his friends and teachers. Upon seeing his creation, other Gods are horrified with all terrible things humans do to each other and call Yahwe incompetent and lazy, ordering him to clean up his own mess by bringing up Armageddon.
• Chaos War: Hercules sacrifices his omnipotence to recreate the Universe, destroyed by Chaos King. Everything goes back to exactly how it was before, including all villains and various monsters. Hercules claims that he was "Guided by wisdom beyond human understanding" but considering he accidentally brought Ares's son Knykos back to life, it's rather clearly this trope.
• Second Coming: It is revealed that Jesus's message from the events of the New Testament have become nearly unrecognizable due to the two-thousand years of here-say and political tampering, barely recognizing it when he finds a copy of it.
  • A point is made that God is Not So Omniscient After All and this has caused a lot of problems for humans. When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, Eve asks how they were supposed to know that it was wrong to do it when they couldn't know what "wrong" even was before they ate the fruit, only for God to deflect.
    God: I mean, I'll create an eyeball, but I won't stick around long enough to make sure it isn't diseased or near-sighted or whatever. Gotta keep the assembly line rollin'. Know what I mean?
    Sunstar: So the answer to the eternal question — how can there be evil in the world if God is all-powerful?
    God: Laziness. I'm just lazy.

Comic Strips

• God in The Far Side. One strip (which drew complaints) showed God as a child trying to make a chicken, with the experiment blowing up in his face. Another strip had God taking the Earth out of the oven realizing too late that it was only half-baked. Yet another one shows the rise of humanity as a total accident on God's part: he dropped a jar of humans on Earth and went "Uh oh". Another one portrayed as more of a Jerkass God instead; having finished cooking up Earth, he added a liberal seasoning of "Jerks" just to make it interesting.

Fan Works

• Terminus, Hylia's twin sister/Terminian counterpart in the The Legend of Zelda fic Blood and Spirit. While she means well, she's prone to making severe mistakes that have long-term consequences. For example, when Link is first corrupted by Majora Terminus makes him swear to keep it a secret from Zelda, not wanting to put Zelda through the same pain she went through when Majora corrupted her own hero; Majora subsequently forces Link to attack Zelda and nearly kill her, something that Terminus had stupidly failed to consider. When Zelda confronts her about it later, Terminus even acknowledges that it should have occurred to her, but it didn't.

Films — Live-Action

• In Dogma, God seems rather inept.
  • First, God decides to play skeeball without any kind of protection or checking the future first, so a bunch of teenagers are enough to put the Supreme Being into a coma.
  • Second, God arranges things so that a Fallen Angel walking through a doorway can end all existence.
  • Metatron states that they went through several "Adam"s before they realized mortals couldn't actually survive hearing God's voice, hence Metatron's function (speaking to mortals for God). The confession isn't exactly confidence building in regards to God's omniscience.
• The film Time Bandits deals heavily with the concept that The Supreme Being (God) made errors in his designs, both with individual items (which are listed occasionally) and with the universe in general. God was also assisted in his creation (which, for some reason, he was "forced" to complete in only seven days) by some greedy, inept dwarves rather than a council of angels. The dwarves then steal God's map that shows where all of the "holes" are in the fabric of the universe, and instead of using the map to fix the holes, decide to get rich by stealing stuff. Evil (Arthur G. Evil) rants about how God wasted his time creating garbage like all those species of slugs, instead of starting with lasers and other high tech. God (in the film) is also incapable of answering those questions people expect God to be able to answer, such as, "why does there have to be evil?" (His answer: "... I think it has something to do with free will?"^note Which is, in a nutshell, the answer given by some of the greatest theologians and philosophers in history: without free will, there can be no such thing as morality, but free will also necessitate the ability to choose to do evil (however, this still does not explain natural evils such as cancer, etc.). Many fans of Time Bandits argue that this movie actually subverts this trope: God is made to look absent-minded and inept, but one could certainly argue that this is all a ruse, and that everything that happens in the movie proceeds according to His design. After all, by leaving holes in spacetime at the Creation, and then giving the map of those holes to the bandits, then provoking them into running away, and then chasing them into the protagonist's bedroom, He arranges the destruction of Evil.
• Daryl Van Horne (Jack Nicholson)'s rant in The Witches of Eastwick (but he's supposed to be Satan).
  Daryl: Do you think God knew what He was doing when He created woman? Huh? No shit. I really wanna know. Or do you think it was another one of His minor mistakes like tidal waves, earthquakes, FLOODS? You think women are like that? S'matter? You don't think God makes mistakes? Of course, He does. We ALL make mistakes. Of course, when WE make mistakes they call it evil. When GOD makes mistakes, they call it "nature". So whaddya think? Women... a mistake, or did he do it to us ON PURPOSE?

Literature

• Gambling Hansel: God grants 3 wishes for Hansel without thinking about the consequences. Hansel almost takes over the world after gaining his magic dice and cards, then everyone becomes immortal after he tricks Death to climb up on his magic tree and could not climb down.
• One of the Myst novels contained one of these, an island in a universe in a book which was slowly shrinking and disintegrating due to a thermodynamics problem inherent in its design.
  • All of Gehn's worlds are like this: dangerously unstable, and prone to apocalyptic catastrophe if meddled with. Making matters worse is the fact that these worlds existed before Gehn first linked to them, meaning that rather than creating worlds, he's destroying them.
    • His son Atrus is a much better linking author, and doesn't have his head rammed quite so far up his ass; in fact, during Riven, while you're busy saving the day in person, Atrus is amending Gehn's books in an attempt to save as many of the Ages they link to as possible. During the game proper, he's working on Riven specifically, although he's aware that his father's fifth Age is beyond salvation; he's just keeping it stable long enough that you can finish your task there.
• In Terry Pratchett's Nation, the people of the eponymous nation have a creation myth saying that this world is just God's first attempt, and that now he's off somewhere creating a better world using the lessons he learned from his mistakes with this one.
• Discworld:
  • Sam Vimes has been described as wishing he could arrest the Creator for doing such a crummy job. However, when the Creator actually turns up in Eric, he turns out to be a quite nice (if EXTREMELY absent-minded, to the extent that he really did accidentally forget the Octavo) fellow who was just trying to build the thing to spec and on-budget for the initial set of Gods. He even complains about the lousy workmanship other Creators are doing, and the habit of sub-contracting to beings who never get the work done on time.
  • The god the wizards encounter in The Last Continent is so inept he (a god of evolution) doesn't know creatures have to reproduce and keeps making only one of each.
    • The creator-god of the last continent, although not quite as absent-minded as the one who created the rest of the Disc, is still inattentive enough to not notice that the Librarian had been messing with his bull-roarer. Which is no small thing, considering it condemned Fourecks to forty thousand years of drought.
  • In The Last Hero, Carrot meets the gods on Dunmanifestin and, asked if he fears them as mortals should, truthfully replies that what he's seen of them frightens the life out of him. (Truthfully, because they're clearly petty, incompetent jerks).
  • Small Gods notes the peculiar circumstance of men and women of immense strength and virtue devoting themselves to the service of completely stupid gods.
• Tom Holt's Here Comes The Sun features a Celestial Bureaucracy and a very hands-off God, and says that the world went wrong very early on due to the incompetence of one of the bureaucracy's employees. The heroine thinks she could have done better, and gets a chance to prove it.
• Chapter 1 of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe starts with this: "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, God's Final Message to His Creation was "We apologise for the inconvenience".
• In The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Heinlein, the world turns out to be a work of art made by a newb creator. The content is actually considered to be very impressive overall, but the underlying structure of the world was made by "painting over" one of the creator's earlier works which leads to issues with things seeping through.
• Arguably, the Young Wizards series presents an example; the Lone Power managed to implement the physical processes that would lead to the eventual heat-death of the universe, and by the time any of the other Powers That Be noticed, it was too late to reverse the damage without scrapping creation and starting over, which they didn't have the resources for. This leads to the Powers, and the mortal wizards who serve them, running damage control for all of time.
• Alfred Bester wrote a story entitled "Hell is Forever" in which five people are given the chance to mold reality to their liking. It doesn't go well for any of them, though the one for the character Digby Finchley fits the trope the best. It turns out that if you want to create a universe, a firm working knowledge of thermodynamics may be important.
• The only qualification needed to become a Shardholder in any of The Cosmere stories is to kill an existing Shardholder and take his/her powers. This grants the killer the powers of the previous Shardholder, but not any knowledge of how to use them, or any understanding as to how they should be used. In many stories, this shows.
• Azathoth from various H. P. Lovecraft stories is known as the "Blind Idiot God". He's so powerful that he can destroy the universe with a single thought. Luckily for us, depending on one's interpretation of the mythos, he's either naturally mindless, or lobotomized, or essentially asleep, meaning the universe is literally a dream he is having. Unfortunately that also means if he were ever to awaken from his eternal slumber, the universe would end.
• The god in the first of John Brunner's The Traveller in Black stories is a big powerful child.
  • One of the thousand Styric gods is this, needing things explained to him repeatedly in words of few syllables.
  • The Troll Gods are not very clever, but they are cunning, ruthless and extremely powerful, and what they're asked to do never seriously tests the limits of their understanding.
  Sephrenia: Khwaj will understand your thoughts. Pray that you never understand his.
  • They are extremely specialized, however, and have a very hard time understanding things outside of their specialties (the concept of "hostage", for example).

Live-Action TV

• Variation in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry". Q claims to be God, but Picard doesn't buy it:
  Picard: The universe is not so badly designed.
• There's a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look which reinterprets a certain biblical story, portraying God as a doddering old fool who doesn't really know what he's doing and keeps second-guessing himself, which isn't helped by the gawping mortals who think everything and anything he does is a great idea.
• Miracle Workers depicts God as a well-meaning but bumbling Jaded Washout and Manchild who’s seriously considering destroying Earth after it failed to turn out how he hoped. It’s later revealed that he’s the Black Sheep of his divine family, and that his siblings have all created utopias with their own worlds. Played with, as it also turns out that Earth only failed to work because he’s the only deity to give his creations free will and lives of their own; all the other deities made mindless drones that can do nothing but follow commands, with the planets effectively being giant art projects instead of real civilizations. When the chips are down, God stands up to his family and refuses to let Earth die because even if it isn’t what he expected, he still loves it.

Music

• "Better Off Dead" by Bad Religion is told from the perspective of God, and consists of him apologizing for screwing up the world so bad. Although it comes more as a Backhanded Apology, implying that the creation is fine and humans just complain too much.
• "Daniel y el Señor" by Les Luthiers has a god that is so bad at his job that Daniel tells him that, while he once believed in God and the Devil, he believes that God is enough to count for both.

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology:
  • The Golden Apple is one Greek story, wherein Eris (a most certainly not inept god) manages to start the Trojan War by getting three other goddesses (Athena, Aphrodite and Hera) into a fight over who gets to keep the golden apple, which bears the inscription "For the fairest". Yes. The biggest war in Greek Mythology was started over pure vanity (and attempts to bribe the judge).
  • The most inept Greek god may be Epimetheus ("afterthought"), the deity or Anthropomorphic Personification of realizing too late that you screwed up. One myth (or possibly allegory) recorded by Plato explains the creation of humans and animals like this: Zeus (who didn't think this through either?) assigns Epimetheus and his much more intelligent brother Prometheus ("forethought") to create animals and humans. Prometheus gets the more important job (humans) and takes his time making sure the basic design is sound. By the time he's ready to give humans some of the gifts which Zeus had made available, he finds that Epimetheus has already used up every last one of them on a bazillion shoddily-thrown-together animals. There's nothing left for humans, leaving us no useful adaptations at all. Prometheus then has to steal fire just for humans to survive. And Zeus punishes him instead of his brother! You'd think that the god of forethought would have foreseen that...
  • Another story with the pair; when Zeus and his group overthrew the Titans Prometheus saw which way the wind was blowing and joined them. Epimetheus was spared because by the time he picked a side the war was over.
  • And Pandora's Box. Depending on the version, it was left unlocked out in the open by Epithemeus (again) where any idiot could open it and unleash various calamities (part of Zeus' gifts, which he hadn't found a use for) on the world, or brought as Pandora's dowry, who opened it and spilled out all the blessings save hope.
• The Old Testament:
  • The Abrahamic God appears to be closer to this at times in The Bible, especially in early writings. After all, the Garden of Eden had been around for all of about five minutes before Adam and Eve screwed it up. You'd have thought that maybe God could have fenced off the original Forbidden Fruit, or taken at least the most basic precaution to ensure that His newest creation (who didn't know the difference between right and wrong) wouldn't take the one action that would ruin everything. Or perhaps just not put it there to being with.
  • There's a well-known passage in Book of Judges (Judges 1:19) where God was unable to help Judah triumph over 'the inhabitants of the plain' because they had 'iron chariots'.
• In some branches of Gnosticism, the Demiurge is described as a childlike entity that merely thinks it's actually God, having created the universe as a sandbox in which to play, before eventually coming to believe its own propaganda. In most other, the Demiurge is straight up evil.
• Voudoun: Bondye, the supreme creator god, is simply so far removed from the world that he either can't hear us, or just can't help us. Instead, people look to the Loa, other powerful beings, for help.
• In the Finnish mythology described in The Kalevala the creation of the world is described as an accident, the creator goddess Ilmatar accidentally letting a nestful of eggs fall from her knee (long story), cracking them in the process. The pieces of eggs then formed the the lands and skies. This is humorously commented in Petri Hiltunen's newspaper comic Väinämöisen paluu (Väinämöinen Returns) — for the sake of context, Väinämöinen is Ilmatar's son:
  Väinämöinen:The world is a mistake. Pieces of a cracked eggshell festering with tiny life.
• The argument from poor design argues against an omnipotent God based on the basis of nature's various perceived flaws. A possibility is that God isn't all-powerful though. As this would contradict the classical idea of God though, it would effectively refute that if true.

Pinball

• Occurs in the Gilligan's Island pinball, as one of the random rewards a player can get is "Gift of Gods", which gives the other players 1 million points each.

Radio

• Played for laughs in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978), when the eponymous Guide is described as "more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This God Person Anyway?." However, it's worth noting that the very same episode goes on to strongly imply that Colluphid is a bit of a hack: The central argument upon which they based their follow-up work Well, That About Wraps It Up For God, which became the trope namer for Puff of Logic, is dismissed as "a load of dingo's kidneys" by anyone with half a brain in-universe.
• Old Harry's Game: God is short-tempered and cranky, and more interested in giraffes than humans. These days, He freely admits His omniscience is "much less omni" and only really pays attention to cricket, having long ago tuned out all the cries for help. Any attempt at asking Him for help is liable to end with Him refusing to help and probably making whatever situation Satan is going through worse out of spite. He also gets suckered by automated calls.

Tabletop Games

• World Tree (RPG): The Khytsoyis. "I lost track of time, so I'm going to grab up a violent monster I was designing, one that was actually designed to work as a duo with another monster in fact, and make it my Designated Player Character Race!" One of the other gods in the setting took time out to help said god create another PC race which was more appropriate, but they didn't undo the original issue.
• GURPS Cabal. Before the Creation, God made a "first draft" of the universe as a test. He then destroyed it and remade it as the universe we know today. The Qlippoth are the remaining fragments of the 1st Creation. Their intent is to remake the universe over in their diseased, broken, toxic image. On the other hand, the Creator was actually thoughtful enough to clean up after himself-while he couldn't destroy the Qlippoth, he created a "prison realm", the Abyss, to seal them and other Bad Things in. What's more, it's also a barrier between his realm and the rest of the Four Worlds, thus preventing all but the most wise and powerful from managing to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• The rearrangement of the Ravenloft Core as a result of the Grand Conjunction may have been damage-control on the part of the Dark Powers, who'd belatedly realized that neither the Nightmare Lands nor Bluetspur really belonged in a Cluster of human-inhabited, comparatively mundane domains. It certainly was this, for the game designers.
• The God-Machine in Chronicles of Darkness is actually a transhuman genius, but it has trouble with telling good information from bad, and its ability to handle its Angels is particularly bad, leading to Demon: The Descent being a thing. It's prone to, for example, tasking an Angel to defend a person so they survive long enough to be sacrificed, but not reassigning the Angel before the sacrifice.
• In Warhammer 40,000, the God-Emperor of Mankind was sort of benevolent by the standards of the setting (admittedly, by the standards of any other setting he was a genocidal, warmongering fascist, which should give you some idea of what the Grim Darkness of the Far Future is like), but a mixture of failure to understand humans and flaws in his grand plan led to his effective death and ten thousand years of slow decay for his empire.
• In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the members of the Triat are extremely powerful but seem to lack common sense. The Weaver decided that it would be a good idea to bind the Wyrm in the web of creation, then ignored the huge problems this created for Gaia. The Wyrm has been bound in the Weaver's web for eons but can't seem to extract himself from it, despite being a powerful Eldritch Abomination. The Wyld has been standing by while all of this has been going on, too stupid or apathetic to do anything about it. Even the Corax tribebook speculates that the Wyld was off "picking his toes" during the primordial incident with the Weaver and Wyrm. Some sourcebooks imply that the Wyld lacks any consciousness, even a stupid one.
• Some of the suggestions for what The Principle actually is in Promethean: The Created have elements of this. One suggests that it's God, but this God has the attention span of a severely-autistic child, sending qashmallim on various tasks for completely random reasons. Qashmallim never attempt the same mission twice in this version of events because the Principle can't even remember having assigned it in the first place.

Video Games

• Rift: One of the driving reasons for the Defiant to exist as a faction is a strongly held belief in this very concept as the gods have shown their capability to fix the problems at hand, but have chosen ineffectual or outright lazy methods of achieving this, all of which can be described as slapping a band-aid on a crack in the dam before sending ants to fix the problem for you.
• Final Fantasy XIII: Etro certainly meant well. She loved humanity (the one and only thing she had ever been able to create... by tearing her own body apart), gave them all their souls, and ruled as a benevolent Shinigami-styled goddess over Valhalla, the realm of the dead... However, she was also seemingly unable to realize the limits of her own abilities, appreciate the risks she was taking or see the consequences of her actions. Eventually this leads to her accidentally breaking reality via a literal Deus ex Machina at the end of the game and when she tries to fix it again, the effort ultimately kills her, leading to an outright Time Crash by the end of the sequel. According to Word of God, Etro was a quite "foolish" goddess, but it's unclear if that meant she was intellectually impaired or just didn't have much in the way of common sense.
• Super Robot Wars V: Black Noir is as powerful and manipulative as it was in the original series, but consistently failed to succeed at any of its plans. Sanada theorizes that this is because of a cause-and-effect-based psychological reaction that having a god or god-like being would invoke.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Due to their sacrifices during creation, the Aedra have been left significantly weakened and no longer possess Complete Immortality. While they are still recognized and often worshiped throughout Tamriel, many, especially Daedra worshipers, consider them either inept, lazy, nonexistent, or some combination thereof. The Aedra prefer a lighter touch when influencing mortal affairs, at most acting through mortal agents. The rare instances in which they have intervened directly have typically been as the last resort to stave off The End of the World as We Know It.
    • In Khajiiti religious tradition, S'rendarr (the Khajiiti aspect of Stendarr, the Aedric God of Mercy and Justice), gets hit with this. To them, he is a "runt" and "the weakest child" of Anhurr (Anu) and Fadomai (Padomay). Khajiiti culture teaches Combat Pragmatism and has no word for "rules", so it makes sense that they would see a god of mercy and justice as weak.
• The Neptunia goddesses come off as this on their worst days. When they're on the clock, they're actually pretty good at their jobs, but most of the time, they seem content to let their staff handle it while they indulge in their hobbies. The best example of this is Peashy, who was ascended to godhood as a child and thus is very underdeveloped intelligently for someone of that position. Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory is kicked off by a group trying to get them fired for their shoddy performance.

Web Animation

• In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device when Decius tries to convince the other Ecclesiarchs that the Emperor of Mankind isn't a god he eventually resorts to insulting all the other gods and concluding that calling the Emperor a god is an insult to his glory.
  ...Nurgle: a supernatural garbage bag! Khorne: a paraplegic sociopath! Tzeentch: an indecisive mollusk! Slaanesh: never went to rehab!...

Webcomics

• Misfile's filing system, in combination with its Celestial Bureaucracy, has at times been viewed as this. Then again, seeing as the titular Misfile lead to one of the protagonists' life improving and the other's life being saved (she would have been killed if she hadn't lost two years of her life), this might be a case of In Mysterious Ways.
• The God of Oglaf (see page image) is consistently portrayed as an incompetent bungler who didn't even create the universe, he found it and then claimed he'd made it.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • The first attempt to create a universe was so spoiled by the arguments of the gods that they ended up creating the Snarl, which killed the Greco-Roman pantheon before they managed to lock it down. The lock? The second attempt at the universe. Said universe is an Anachronism Stew because, to avoid creating another Snarl, the gods decided to take turns unilaterally adding design elements. The idea is based off Rich Burlew's complaints about D&D cosmology. And as it turns out, this isn't the second attempt to create the universe and contain the Snarl, it's not even the hundredth. Or the billionth. The Snarl keeps breaking out and destroying the universe time after time because the gods can't effectively work out a way to keep it from doing so.
  Monkey: OK, my turn? Ninjas.
  Freya: What? Hey, we all agreed on this medieval knights-and-wizards theme!
  Monkey: So? It's my turn, my choice, I say: NINJA!
  Freya: ...Fine.
  • A very downplayed example with Thor, who used an automatic prayer-granting system for his clerics until it gave too many people colon cancer spells instead of "Control Weather".
• In Champions of Far'aus some of the deities are this. On the first page,we get treated to an example of a fire God lighting his followers weapon on fire, while a Vegetive earth Godess makes her followers shield smell like lavender.
• When it's not straight-up God Is Evil, God is usually portrayed as this in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. He's shown doing things such as making decisions while drunk, not properly gathering everything for a complete universe and just not caring at times.

Web Original

• Mr. Deity is frequently called out for allowing bad things that he could easily have stopped, using needlessly overcomplicated schemes for no good reason, or not thinking his plans through. He generally has some kind of non-sequitur reason why this is for the best, but none of the other characters believe him.

Real Life

• The philosopher David Hume, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, wrote: "The world is perhaps the rudimentary sketch of a childish god, who left it half done, ashamed by his deficient work; it is created by a subordinate god, at whom the superior gods laugh; it is the confused production of a decrepit and retiring divinity, who has already died." He was not proposing the hypothesis seriously, but using it as a parody of theological arguments that tried to prove the perfection of God from the perfection of the natural world. However, some philosophers took this theory seriously.
• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has stated that the basic hostility of the universe to the human species is why he refuses to accept the Intelligent Design Theory as true, because no supposed "intelligent" designer would have made such a sucky, dangerous, lethal world for human beings to live in. Others have made similar criticisms.
• There are jokes about God being an inept engineer for putting a sewage line through a recreational area ^note As in, making genitals for both sex and urination, and giving men nipples.
• A meme from the 80s says "God didn't create the world in seven days. He goofed off for six and pulled an all-nighter."

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