Page 11 - Ferry Tales
P. 11
Lightfoot
“Listen,” I tell him, “this is the Styx, not de Nile. You’ve got
nowhere to go but down.”
“I refuse to believe it! I was waiting for the Rapture.”
“What you got,” I sneer, “was the Rupture: the ground opened up
beneath your feet and swallowed you!”
He considered that—for less time than I would have liked.
“Well, what about divine judgment? I demand my rights!”
“Pay attention, Lightfoot: you think you have a case to be won or
lost? Your ledger closed with your last breath. No deities required.
It’s simple accounting, based on damage done. Automatic, in fact.
Karma, in scientific terminology. You can have it one of two ways,
but not both: either your fate was predestined or not. If so, your free
will or power is an absurdity, an illusion foisted on you by an
omnipotent deity amusing itself with the pain and suffering it created.
If not, then no deity has absolute power over the entirety of space
and time, and the cosmos therefore does not manifest a supernatural
system of punishment and reward for behavior. In fact you would be
hard pressed to explain the rationale linking piety and morality, or to
disprove the notion that winners and losers are not produced
mechanically and randomly.”
“I won’t listen to that!”
“Indeed,” I say. “Why start now? If logic is a temptation, then try
applying logic to temptation: who was the villain in the Garden of
Eden? Yes, who set Adam up, who teased him with knowledge, who
sent a snake to trick Eve into breaking the human promise with
Yahweh? Why, Yahweh himself, the supposedly beneficent deity. He
is repeatedly shown to be a torturer, a mass murderer, a petulant
demander of tribute, sacrifice and absolute loyalty. But you assign all
those negative attributes to the Devil—who is, in fact, scrupulously
honest in his dealings with mankind. If you deserve punishment, he is
there to administer it in exact proportion to the severity of your
offenses. You Westerners don’t understand the partnership, the
mutual dependence of your deities; so you think they are in a fight for
ultimate dominance. Of course, that describes your own way of
relating to the world. In the East they accept the distribution of
positive and negative qualities as inevitable and eternal—which is not
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