The Last Rational Man, Page 3

When Adam and Eve became separate creatures, God Himself split.”

  “I don’t understand. I thought that you were strict monotheists.”

  “We are, as you will see, in the deepest sense. There is, of course, only one God, but his essence has been divided into two manifestations, the male manifestation that we today call God, and the female manifestation that we call the Presence.

  “This is an unnatural, negative situation. The entire Cosmos is affected by this tension between male and female that should never have taken place. You know of this tension, though perhaps you have not paid attention to it until now. We speak of Mother Nature, and of Father Time. Many of the world’s religions recognize the split, though perhaps not as explicitly as we do. There is The Father, and Mother Mary. You will tell me that Mary is not a manifestation of God. That may be true, but I suggest that you do not try to explain that fine point to a peasant woman in Mexico.

  “The bottom line is that God has split, largely as a result of man’s failure, and that man has to help God reunite, in order to bring on the new Golden Age, the Messianic Age, the New Garden of Eden.”

  “Well, this is an interesting form of Cosmology, perhaps, but what does it have to do with what is going on down there?”

  “Ah. I thought you would figure it out for yourself. The coupling of men and women together, the joining of their bodies, mirrors the process by which God and his Presence may be joined together. This is why our joining ritual must not take place for pleasure, or for procreation, for that matter. It has a higher goal, and one must be sure to keep that goal in mind during the ritual.”

  I glanced down again at the strange scene in the chapel. There was something else that didn’t seem right.

  “How long do they keep this up for?”

  “The group you see today is an experienced group of worshippers. They have gone through our complete training cycle, and a typical session is about four hours long.”

  “Four hours!”

  “Yes. It is not really enough. There is great importance attached to there always being a group doing the ritual. The churches all over the world are coordinated, to make sure that there is never a gap in the ritual. Usually there are two groups running in parallel, just in case something interferes with one of the groups.”

  “Still, four hours! How can they do that? Don’t they ever, you know, finish?”

  “Ah, the old big ‘O’ question. Well, that has a lot to do with our training. A new convert may be able to keep this up for only ten or fifteen minutes when he first joins, but the training cycle will solve that problem. The training cycle, and the development of strategic calluses.”

  There was definitely hope. My host, despite his polite demeanor and logical answers, was obviously out of his mind. Unless I was missing something, this church was not going to be much of a problem for us. I decided to give him one more chance.

  “Everything you have said makes sense on some level, but it strikes me that the whole system of belief is based on a very particular view of the universe, a view which can’t be proven.”

  “It does not have to be proven. These are just plain facts that are staring us in the face, and which we normally choose to ignore. Just look at how men and women relate, or don’t relate, to each other. We have decided to pay attention to these facts, and do our best to reverse the situation, and bring the entire Cosmos back to a state of complete Oneness.”

  I left the chapel and went out to the street. I allowed myself to feel elated, even though the feeling wasn’t strictly logical. This new cult had been rumored to be much more logical and self consistent than the older religions. So I was greatly relieved to find that the cult members were in fact completely irrational. I was starting to hope.

  …..

  My job was far from over. I still needed to tackle some other pervasive beliefs and movements, especially those that were not religious in nature. These movements could prove to be much more serious obstacles to our Plan, the Plan that would bring our rational rule to the world.

  …

  My next stop was downtown. I took the subway, just to get a feel for how day-to-day life is for citizens of this city. The signs of an insane society were all around me: the vandalized subway cars, the stink and filth, the inane advertisements for products that people didn’t need. It was not surprising that people were drawn to the irrational cults that I had visited.

  My target was in a skyscraper downtown. It was not difficult to find the office- the signs were clear and the doorman quite helpful. The building looked expensive, with white marble floors and the latest fad in recessed halogen lighting. The hardest part was picking the right elevator, since one bank of elevators only reached the first thirty floors, and I needed to reach the forty-second floor.

  The door to the office was of heavy plate glass, in the latest style, but the inside of the door was covered with newspaper clippings, so it wasn’t possible to see into the office at all. I didn’t see an intercom, so I walked right in.

  The offices consisted of one very large room, with desks and chairs scattered all around. Posters pushing an astounding variety of liberal causes covered the walls and a good part of the floor as well. At the far end of the room was some kind of press center. A few people sat at terminals, surrounded by piles of newspaper clippings, apparently keeping an eye on current events.

  A short energetic woman in her mid-thirties practically ran up to me.

  “Hi, I’m Martha. You can call me Marty- most people do. What can I help you with?”

  Her energy, rather than inducing parallel enthusiasm, seemed to drain all of the energy out of me. The group I was visiting was a well-known humanitarian group, which had helped many worthy causes over the years. It appeared to be a noble collection of people that were doing their best to improve a difficult world. It appeared, at least at first, to be both a noble and rational undertaking. An organization like this could prove a major obstacle in our plans. Everything depended on the irrational thinking of our opponents, and the complete, logical execution of our own plans. It would be best to be careful when confronting this ‘Marty.’

  “Well, I have heard of your organization, and would like to hear more about it. I may be able to do some volunteer work for you in my spare time.”

  “Oh, wonderful! I get such a high when new people join us! Here, let me show you the kinds of things we do.”

  She led me off to a desk in the corner of the room. I would describe the desk, but it was covered with posters and newspaper clippings, and even the sides of the desk had photographs plastered all over it, so I didn’t actually see the desk itself. She pulled out a huge album from under one of the piles of papers, laid it down unevenly on top of the other documents, and opened it.

  “This is a scrapbook, sort of a portfolio of the projects we have taken on. Fortunately, one of our volunteers comes in once a week to add to the book. Otherwise we would have no record of what we have done.

  “This page is from the middle of March. It happened off the coast of Newfoundland. Those activists are blocking the fishing ship, the factory ship, which you see in the background. It was bitter cold back then, and pretty wet in those little rowboats, so some of our activists ended up with pneumonia. They all survived though, and we got some great press coverage, as you can see from the clippings here. If you have time, I will show you some of the YouTube clips as well. That’s where it’s really at. These companies have been over-fishing that area for decades, and the environmental damage was almost irreversible. We had to do something to stop them.

  “Ah. This is from the end of March. You can see thousands of us in this photo. Even some of the pneumonia victims dragged themselves out of bed for this one. You will probably be wondering what we are protesting here- it looks just like empty fields, with a few trees here and there. Well, they wanted to take this pristine area, and build a sewage treatment plant. Can you believe it? Well, we stopped them cold there. You should have seen us on the news network that week.
”

  She flipped through a few more pages.

  “Here we are at the UN, in the beginning of April, lobbying for Basque independence. I guess ‘lobbying’ is a bit of a mild term, since some of our activists did get arrested. But the Spanish ambassador did eventually recover, and we did get some press attention that evening, and I truly believe that in the long run this will contribute to their efforts.”

  “Just a minute. Basque independence sounds good, I mean, everybody should be independent if they want to be. But the Basques are pretty violent, aren’t they? Aren’t you helping a cause that is tainted by terror, by attacks on innocent civilians?”

  “You have been listening too much to the American Conservative Conspirators. We hear that argument all the time. How do you expect them to fight for their independence? They have no army, they have no funding. So they battle in the only way they know how.”

  “Still, you are encouraging terrorism.”

  “Terrorism? They are only responding to Spanish terror that has downtrodden them. If you want, call it terror, but call it ‘defensive terror.’”

  “But why the Basques? Why not the Quebecois? Or the Kurds? Or the Shiites in Iraq?”

  Marty pulled out a ragged pocket diary, and started leafing through it.

  “Yes, well, we did the Quebecois back in the first week of February. A bad choice of timing,