Garbage Rains

Seventy years ago, the world was ruined because of garbage rains. These brought anything from scraps of radioactive metal, objects that could be vaguely recognizable as real-world devices that the world had no vocabulary for, and occasionally a child's personal effects with writing. No one had memories of what it was like before the rains, and the history books only covered up to when the rains started.
There were random violent reactions such as earthquakes, sudden lightning strikes and tornadoes that seemed to happen when you tried to look at the garbage too closely under an open sky, so the wisdom was to dispose of the it as quickly as possible and never read anything, especially in the open.
There was a priest who believed that the rains held clues to why the world was the way it was, so one day, he started going out during the garbage rains to pick up everything he could. He had special hidey-holes to stop the reactions from happening, and this form of archaeology was going smoothly for a year until he found something that made him stop. From that point on, he stopped talking to his friends, only went to church once a week to teach the scripture and otherwise stayed at home, and got intensely hostile with anyone trying to follow in his footsteps to uncover the history of the world.
A disciple picked up his trail in secret out of concern for the priest. It was slow going to replicate his system, but the disciple was determined to find answers. Over three years later, he found something shocking that changed the way he understood the world.
Several thousand years ago, the priest accidentally created a goddess out of an old friend, Nym. The goddess had regressed mentally to a child and all her memories prior were wiped. The only thing left was pure hatred for the priest, and she punished him thus; every century, the world would be reset and the priest's memories would be wiped, and the rains would start again to deteriorate the world. The garbage detailed how the event took place as a 3rd grader understood it.
When the priest was confronted with this information in public, all he said was "Trust me, you don't want another god", and at that exact moment, the goddess appeared from above. She said simply, "It's earlier than I would like, but it's time to start over," and reset the world by engulfing it with garbage.