I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

This line is widely circulated as a one-liner attributed to stand-up comedian Emo Philips, whose stage persona often uses deadpan logic and religious themes to expose moral contradictions. It appears to have circulated heavily in joke collections, posters, and early internet quote lists, typically without a verifiable date, venue, or program attached. While it is consistent with Philips’s comedic style—mixing piety, literal-minded reasoning, and sudden ethical reversal—the specific performance context (which set, tour, TV appearance, or album) is not reliably documented in the sources most commonly cited online.

In this one-liner, Emo Philips uses deadpan logic to parody a transactional view of religion: if prayer doesn’t produce the desired object, the speaker “solves” the problem through wrongdoing and then treats forgiveness as a loophole. The humor hinges on the mismatch between moral teaching (don’t steal) and the speaker’s self-justifying rationality, exposing how people can instrumentalize faith—seeking absolution without genuine repentance. It also satirizes a simplistic understanding of divine agency (“God doesn’t work that way”) while showing the speaker still tries to make God ‘work’ as a post-hoc moral sanitizer. The joke’s bite comes from its compact critique of hypocrisy and moral accounting.

I asked God for a bicycle, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bicycle and asked for forgiveness.
I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole a bike and asked God for forgiveness.
I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn’t work that way. So I stole one and asked for forgiveness.