RELIGION · PUBLISHED 2026-08

The Vacancy

How the pastor's son filled the position himself — as a joke, then as a life.

In May 2010, Ezra explained the strangest running bit on his timeline with the offhandedness of a man describing a weekend project: “I was once so jobless I ran a search on twitter for mentions of 'God' and responded to each one in context like I was God.” And then, deadpan: “At least, they finally got God responding to them.”

Sixteen years later, on Threads, someone asked how long people had been clean off Christianity, and he answered with an accountant's ledger: “5 years of quiet questioning and other things i couldn't really vocalize for fear of reprimand. 7 years of actively asking questions and trying to make sense of things amidst the overwhelming hypocrisy. 18 years free of all that baggage and becoming my own god.”

Becoming my own god. The bit, it turns out, was the biography. Between the prayers he stopped saying and the prayers he started answering lies the most consistent religious position in his twenty-year archive: the office of God is real, the incumbent never showed, and somebody with a sense of humour had to cover the shift. This is the story of a vacancy — who left it, who noticed, and who filled it.

The house of the first God

The first God was a resident. Ezra was born into a Deeper Life Bible Church household — “My dad was a priest, and my mum was a chorister” — inside the Lagos-born holiness movement W.F. Kumuyi grew from a fifteen-person Bible study in 1973 into one of Africa's largest denominations: plain dress, King James only, and a famous austerity about television that produced one of the archive's driest early jokes — “deeperlifers stil don't use TVs at home. they have in church tho to watch kumiyi only.”

The régime's texture survives in fragments scattered across three platforms and seventeen years: struggling to stay awake at morning devotions; reading the King James Bible cover to cover at least twice before turning eight; the concordances, because a pastor's house has concordances; typing his father's sermon outlines in Microsoft Word in his pre-teen years — where, he added in a 2026 retelling, he worked out that two hyphens and a space made an em dash. The punctuation now read as a machine fingerprint traces, in his case, to a pastor's study in the late nineties. So does the prose style: “i was born to a priest. grew up in the church. raised as a choir boy. sent to a semi-seminary for tertiary education. *shrugs” — the semi-seminary being Babcock University, the Seventh-day Adventist school with compulsory chapel where he landed in 2002.

The household God was demanding, omnipresent, and — this is the part the essay turns on — employed. He had staff, hours, an office. When the doubts came, they arrived less like heresy than like an audit.

The audit

By his own repeated dating, the audit opened when he was nine. The scene he tells most often has no theology in it at all: “I was 9. My dad made a statement that basically insulted muslims on our way back from church one sunday and I knew my muslim friend from school wasn’t stupid.” A child notices the data doesn't match the doctrine — and, in the same era, runs an actual experiment: praying to a beanstalk he was nurturing, “as an experiment,” devotion tested under controlled conditions. He was working out cosmology on his own too: “i thot heaven was the sun, wondered where hell was. after studying geography, it made sense dat hell is d earth's core.”

The 2026 ledger calls the first five years “quiet questioning and other things i couldn't really vocalize for fear of reprimand” — and the fear was rational; when he finally told his mother he didn't believe in God, she quoted Psalm 14:1 at him: the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God. Doubt, answered with a citation. He has spent the rest of his life answering citations with citations.

The active phase ran through the semi-seminary — “my faithlessness started when i questioned my chaplain at schl back in 100 level” — and it should be said plainly: he keeps re-dating the exit. Dropped religion “altogether at ~15” in one telling (≈2002); “not been a christian in 20 years” in another (≈2006); free for eighteen years in the ledger (≈2008). The entrance never moves — nine, always nine — but the exit wobbles across a six-year span, and the record knows why: leaving was not an event. It was a process with relapses. In October 2009 he reported one with the flat honesty of a lab notebook: “sometimes in april, i became a christian… not sure where and what point i lost touch with everything” — and, next tweet, “maybe i thought i became a christian. it felt pretty real tho.” Five months later the entry is angrier: “It's March. This time last year, I became a Christian. Only reason why I won't time-travel and blow up the fucker is cos I'll be dead today.” The clean three-phase story he tells at thirty-nine sits on top of a recorded self who wobbled at twenty-two — which is, if anything, the stronger testimony. Nobody audits their own conversion twice in six months unless the books actually matter to them.

The moment he treats as the finding itself needs no gloss: “One day, I was praying to God. Then I realized I was talking to my fucking self.”

If prayer was him talking to himself, then a question follows with terrible comic logic. Someone had been on the other end of all those prayers. The line was open. The seat was empty.

Vacancy filled

He took the job in 2009. Not faith's opposite — faith's understudy. The bit began, by his own account, out of boredom, and it escalated into the most sustained performance in the archive: “Don't be angry when I say I'm God. I've got 576 followers to prove it.” “Bye Twitter, need to go answer some prayers.” “doing good. discarded 1,783,984,822 random prayers today.” “God doesnt exactly know everything. I respect people's privacy. Bet y'all didnt know that.” “Sometimes I hold off on answering your prayers, just to see who will end up cussing me out.” He kept office hours for two years, with occasional guest appearances from the competition: “My God-tweets are usually from his perspective. Once in a while though, I take things from Zeus' perspective instead.”

Two things make the persona more than blasphemy karaoke. The first is that it did real argumentative work. The capitalization argument — that “God” is a title, not a name — was born inside the bit in 2009 (“this god is simply referred to as god. unfortunately. some people insist on capitalizing the first letter tho. :D”) and was still being run, in earnest, thirteen years later: capitalize King of kings and you've conceded the word is a job description. The theology of the bit was the theology: prayer volume, divine attention, heaven's ambiguity (“Yes, because my other creations are really that ambiguous.”) — each joke a position paper. He said so himself, defending the practice like a doctrine: “no one is above comic ridicule. not even God.”

The second is that the performer kept breaking character to file disclaimers. “i'm actually not as atheist as i tweet” (2009). “If u r ref. to my jokes, they 4 for laffs. Not evangelical” and “most of my 'atheist' tweets are for comic value. Not evangelistic” (2010). “calling myself god is a product of jobless humour. u can ignore it.” The persona was not atheism. He policed that line with more energy than he ever spent on believers: “since i created my twitter account in 2007, at least... i've never claimed to be atheist. truth is, their arguments are faulty”; the “overzealous atheist” got the same eye-roll as the overzealous pastor; The God Delusion was “not really that intellectual… disappointing” — he recommended the ex-minister Loftus's Christian Delusion instead, an insider preferring insider argument. For years his skepticism cut both ways with a symmetry most deconverts never attempt: “I'm just a skeptic. I don't agree with both evolution & creation. Unbelief system yea? :D” — a position he held through at least 2011 and quietly abandoned by 2023, the only major migration in the file. What he actually was, he kept saying, to anyone who asked: “apathetic agnostic” — coined in 2009, defined precisely in 2025: “my stance is that even if there's a god, it doesn't care about me” — with the pedant's rider that “agnosticism says 'i can't know', not 'i don't care'. both signal resignation though.”

A god who doesn't care about you, a seat nobody occupies, and a man with the login. The persona wasn't mocking the office. It was covering it.

The incumbent's book

He left the church with its library, and the library never stopped being his. The most self-aware line in the archive is from 2011: “Its interesting how the premise of my arguments in agnostic discussions are often supported by bible passages.” It is the house style of two decades. Tithes? Only expected from farmers; portions of the bible forbid the money equivalent — and “Pastors are modern day Levites. Not Monarchs.” The Sabbath? A twelve-tweet, single-day exegetical pile-on on whether it's Saturday, whether Jesus kept it, and why revelling — not drinking — is the actual sin. Masturbation? “the Bible says nothing about it”, and the Onan story is about dishonesty, not spilling. Overzealous defenders of the faith get Uzzah: “what happened to Uzzah when he tried 'defending God'? you should be careful as well.” — a warning he first issued while introducing himself as an apathetic agnostic, scripture deployed as a courtesy.

The blog holds the long-form specimens. In July 2010, when Paul the Octopus ran his eight-for-eight streak through the World Cup and Ezra's friends credited the devil, his response was not to scoff at the supernatural but to open the text: Balaam's donkey and the séance at Endor put biblical divination on God's payroll, so on what textual basis does a talking octopus default to Satan? Then the engineer's flourish: an omniscient God has “the entire earth's computing muscle to the power of infinity,” so — “rather than pray to God on the pitch to win, just ask him what the scores'll be.”

And in 2014, home for the holidays, he sat through the family's nightly Bible reading and heard 2 Kings again as an adult: Elijah calling down fire on a hundred and two soldiers, Elisha's bears shredding forty-two children for a bald joke. The post is titled “What the fuck was I reading?” and its power is in what he doesn't do: no rage, no lecture — “reading was over so we prayed and went to bed.” The ritual still holds him at his mother's table; the text he memorized as devotion returns as evidence; and the response is a reader's honest bafflement, spoken aloud at last.

It never curdled. In 2024 he was defending the King James rendering of Psalm 23 against the NIV's flat modernism; in 2025 he traced his own idiom “suffer no fools” to 2 Corinthians 11:19 — “king james version, of course” — then swung the verse at “the quintessential church scene in nigeria today.” In 2026, a Nigerian billboard misquoting Isaiah drew the instant reflex: “this is literal blasphemy, seeing as the verse continues thus 'and his name shall be called...the mighty god' — bearing in mind that i've not been a christian in 20 years and this was my immediate reaction.” The man who left the firm still proofreads its filings.

Gods of Lagos

The vacancy he filled was a private office. The public one — Nigeria's — never went vacant for a second, and the archive's civic religion beat is where the comedy grows teeth. It opens with texture: a noisy mosque startling him awake, evangelists leaving tracts on his door (“Shouldn't they be in church as well?”), and a pastor calling football scores — when word spread in November 2009 that TB Joshua had predicted the qualifiers, his question was structural: “Wat business has God got 2 do wit sports?”, with the follow-through aimed at the mechanism — “it misleads pple into thinking it's 'the lord's doing'.”

Then the institutions kept supplying evidence, and he kept the receipts: the megachurch auditorium arms race; people selling property to pay pastors; pilgrimage subsidies at discounted dollars — “Because religion is better than quality of life”; “What the hell is a Christian court???” The day after Ese Walter published her account of COZA's pastor in August 2013, he registered with gallows timing: “Time for me to step forward as one of COZA's pastor's 'victims'? Too early?” And in December 2020 the pattern arrived at his own childhood's doorstep: the #JusticeForDonDavis case at Deeper Life High School in Uyo — his own denomination — while public voices rallied around the institution. His tweet ventriloquizes the deflectors: “accountability is a foreign concept to a lot of nigerians… a woman hell bent on 'bringing down' the church.” No commentary. The cadence is the indictment.

By 2025 the beat had fused into a theory of the state, delivered — where else — as a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories: “the real conspiracy is how we have normalized treating results of institutional dysfunction as acts of god while chasing shadows, as the alternative would require confronting the ugliness within.” The god he plays discards prayers as a joke. The god Nigeria invokes absorbs blame as a system.

His complaint about believers was never belief; it was practice, and it travels. From 2009's retweeted Gandhi (“I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians”) through “99% of the peeps on my timeline who claim to be religious are fucking hypocrites” to 2023's distillation — “nobody demarkets christianity harder than christians themselves” — and, by 2026, watching from a third platform as American Christianity consolidated behind Trump: “the fact that christians will choose to pitch their tent with someone like trump tells you how unserious a religion it has become… a man who, if you described him without using his name, no christian would identify as one of theirs.”

The traffic runs both ways: Nigeria reads him religiously too. The red nails and baphomet pendant draw occultism accusations; a Ghana immigration officer handed him a tract as a “gift”; a critic once objected “and yet, he claims to be agnostic,” as if the pendant were a doctrinal inconsistency — answered in the 2025 blog essay “You don't know me” with the theme's whole doctrine in six words: “occultism to you, art to me.”

The argument he kept

One argument matured across the whole span, and it is the one a self-appointed god would need: where morality actually comes from. It starts as a fragment in 2009 (“religion and morals. the rest is up to the individual”), gathers evidence (hell-threats have never reduced crime anywhere), inverts the arrow in 2014 (“God's emotions… evolve with what man thinks is morally right/wrong at a given time”), and arrives fully formed in June 2020: “religion has zero monopoly of morals. Morality in religion is simply representative of societal norms at the time of its creation” — with the kicker that a god “documented to be genocidal” is “definitely not who I intend to base my values on.” By 2021 it is a single test: “we often think of humans who expect continued obeisance from recipients of their 'gifts' as assholes. is god an asshole?” And in April 2026, on Threads, the newest turn: “a problem with basing one's morality on the fear of eternal damnation is that the same framework lets you be a shitty individual with plans to eventually appeal to a supposedly gracious god for forgiveness as needed.”

That post sparked a three-round argument with a Christian reader — and, for the first time in this corpus's history, both voices survive: the Threads index stores the posts he replied to where Meta permits their retrieval. The reader answered with salvation, an epistle's worth of it; Ezra held the premise (“if your morality isn't based on the fear of eternal damnation, then i wasn't talking to or about you”), named the evasion (“step out of the christian cocoon and address the main point for what it is”) — and when the reader finally declined the field itself (“you want to argue Christian ideologies outside the Christian scope and im not going to do that”), the seventeen-year argument closed in four words: “morality is not a christian ideology.” The interlocutor retreated exactly where the cocoon line said he would.

New gods, same vacancy

The deconvert's vocabulary did not retire with the deconversion; it changed targets. When his own industry began its ecstasies, he reached for the frame he knows best: the post-ChatGPT boom as “the race to build a machine god to solve everything”; a Foundation line saved like a proverb — “once you start kneeling and praying, it's hard to get back to standing and thinking.” And when he read a profile of a Catholic priest counseling AI-lab executives, his year-end roundup disagreed on — of all things — the theology of machine absolution: “Forgiveness presupposes continuity; a self that remembers the transgression and chooses to release it. An LLM has no such continuity.” Thirty years from the concordances, the pastor's son is still doing doctrine, fluently, strictly pro bono — now for machines.

The comedy never retired either. As late as June 2026 he was testifying that the flying spaghetti monster speaks to him daily — “praise be!” — a bookend to 2009's “Goodnight flying spaghetti monster. Goodnight invisible pink unicorn. Goodnight god.” And the old persona still clocks in for special occasions: in 2022, watching Christians turn un-Christlike under mild provocation, he reached for the badge one more time — “i'm exercising my powers as god and making sure none of the 'christians' on that thread make heaven.”

Which is why the 2026 ledger's final phrase reads less like a flourish than a job title finally put on the letterhead. Eighteen years free of all that baggage and becoming my own god. Not an atheist's declaration — he'd tell you the arguments are faulty. Not quite apathy — he doesn't pray, and when he hopes, he says so plainly: “i do my bit and then... hope.” It is the position the whole archive performs: the office exists, the incumbent never answered, and the man who noticed took over the desk — answering prayers as a bit, auditing the book as a discipline, holding the standard believers wouldn't. The joke was never that he is God. The joke is that somebody had to be, and the applicant pool was empty.

He warned us the hiring process was casual: jobless humour. Eighteen years in, the position appears to be permanent.

Sources and method

Corpus: the author's Twitter archive (@0x, 2007 – Nov 2025), browndroppings.com (2006 – Feb 2026), and Threads (@olubi.wtf, Jul 2023 – Aug 2026). All quoted tweets and posts are linked inline; nothing the author is quoted as saying was generated. Known bias: for Twitter and the blog, the corpus holds only the author's side of conversations. The Threads index additionally stores posts he replied to or quoted where Meta's API permits retrieval, which is how one 2026 exchange quotes both voices — a first for this series; where Meta withholds the parent (replies into other users' conversations), the one-sidedness stands. The religion-filtered retrieval also inflates the subject's salience — his own caveat applies: most of the "atheist" tweets are, per him, "for comic value."

Timeline note: the deconversion's start (age 9, ≈1996) is consistent across every telling; the exit is self-dated three ways (≈2002, ≈2006, ≈2008), and a brief 2009 re-conversion sits inside the "18 years free" of his own periodization. The essay flags this rather than resolving it; ages are computed from verified biography, not inferred from post dates.

World context (researched Aug 2026): Deeper Life Bible Church — Kumuyi's 1973 founding, KJV tradition, historic (since relaxed) TV abstention — DCLM/press documentation. Babcock University's Seventh-day Adventist affiliation and compulsory chapel — Babcock. TB Joshua's November 2009 prediction: the score-prediction claim circulated widely and is quoted here from the author's contemporaneous retweet; SCOAN later denied he predicted scores — the essay quotes his reaction to the circulating claim, not the claim as fact. Paul the Octopus: 8-for-8 through the July 11, 2010 final — Wikipedia. COZA/Ese Walter (account published Aug 23, 2013; "robust reply" promised Aug 25, never substantively delivered) — contemporaneous coverage. #JusticeForDonDavis: Deeper Life High School, Uyo, is run by Deeper Christian Life Ministry — the author's childhood denomination; the connection is independently confirmed — Sahara Reporters. The priest-counseling-AI-labs profile is The Information's "In Silicon Valley, a Priest and the Thinking Machines" (Feb 2026), read via the author's 2025 roundup (published Feb 2026). The 2016 "$15m discounted dollars" referent could not be independently identified and is quoted solely as his words. Where sources conflict or deny (TB Joshua's exact words; Jos 2010 casualty counts), the essay states only what is agreed or attributes the claim.

How this piece was made: produced by an AI research pipeline over the author's complete public writing, with each stage checkable against the record:

Search brief — the religion retrieval spec was amended after a documented miss (a keyword pattern blind to trailing punctuation had dropped the three-phase timeline post; a deconversion-timeline angle was added), then re-run: 1,493 candidate passages (semantic + keyword + referring passes) with dates and permalinks. (seconds, deterministic)
Corpus reading — four parallel reader agents each took a quarter of the evidence and extracted every genuinely relevant passage verbatim; 667 survived, the rest incidental keyword noise. (~10 minutes)
Sources map — a single synthesis pass merged the four extracts into a 17-theme map, all 667 passages placed, with 11 internal contradictions flagged rather than resolved — including the exit-date wobble this essay reports. (~24 minutes)
World research — two parallel research agents fact-checked 18 real-world claims against the open web; two came back materially corrected (TB Joshua's denial; the unverifiable "$15m" referent) and are handled accordingly above. (~7 minutes)
Drafting — written in one pass from the map and research notes, with the God-persona as the through-line. (~25 minutes)
Verification — all 93 corpus links programmatically checked: 91 found in the retrieval index; the 2 interlocutor-context links confirmed directly against the stored context rows (they are invisible to the retrieval index by design). 62 distinctive quoted fragments checked against the index verbatim, which caught and fixed one transcription infidelity (a straightened apostrophe in the age-nine tweet). Date-critical claims checked against the verified biography. (~5 minutes)

Total: about 70 minutes of wall-clock pipeline time from search brief to verified draft, plus the human direction that chose the subject, reviewed the result, and chose to publish it. Times were logged as the run proceeded.

This essay is an observer's portrait built from the author's public record; it quotes him verbatim throughout and puts no words in his mouth.