[Ch. 8 of ongoing text...]
And all these New American Religions that Christ earned for himself by lending a prayer to the World God get along fine: they hold one another as equals and as step-siblings; thus they sleep together, under the stars, in the same yuge tent. If any member of one faith states a doctrine that contradicts another’s perspective, both parties waive it off without even bickering; they repeat the super-mantra “People over Credo,” which helps them all repose.
Usually, when religions take root in the earth, God will visit them during the early stages of their development; but then, after that, He takes his leave and remains cold and distant. These new cults, however, get regular visitations from the Deity — even now that they have grown, so to speak, overripe. For God so loves their rich-and-handsome Jesus that He (the Heavenly Father, El Shaddai) no longer demands to be seen as unseen. Every day, around 8:00 a.m., God comes down from space and brings fresh bread to all the cultists. After bathing with Him communally in the nearby pond (whose water is crystal clear and always a comfortable temperature), the people breakfast with this famous Ancient of Days. As I mentioned, God brings the bread; and the butter comes from local cows.
All souls moan in pleasure when they eat, to indicate that they enjoy the taste; even God Himself moans. And when they finish their morning meal, God’s habit is to arise from His chair and deliver a speech, apologizing for all the evil that He had brought in olden times upon everybody’s ancestors. Then, to make reparations, He gives all the men at the table a piece of money. Also, each gal is offered a golden earring.
So the moral of this true story is that things will turn out better if we just experiment a little with our dogmas, and allow Jesus Christ to attend a good school and be handsome and rich. For an ill-bred, ill-favored Christ breeds ill-mannered Christians. God prefers the wealthy and sophisticated churchgoers, whose ladies fill out their dresses more piously.
§
Now Lucy enters the Celestial Throne Room on her Burning Tyger and remarks to El Shaddai:
“Well it looks like giving Jesus Christ a vast fortune and attractive facial features plus a perfect body clothed in the most up-to-date fashions really did the trick. He’s now more popular than when he was the only state-approved U.S. religion. For didn’t your Christ start out with only fourteen thousand goats, six thousand mechanical bulls, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses? Look: now he’s got noticeably more. Maybe quadruple the original sum. It recalls the way that his cults, of which there formerly were but three, all increased and multiplied overnight.”
“Maybe the mechanical bulls bore offspring to the robotic bear that your protégé manufactured,” Shaddai winks.
Lucy leans forward from her Tyger, takes Shaddai’s skull between her hands, and kisses His forehead. “You’re a riot, Sonny,” she murmurs.
I should also mention that the three sisters of Jesus changed their names, just to appear more exotic and to signify that they’re still relevant in the world of branding. Mary rechristened herself Jemima; Lilith chose the name Kezia; and Woman (formerly “Eve”) became Tertia Kerenhappuch Radnitsky.
These sisters now hold hands and dance in a circle, because they have received word that their brother Christ officially repealed all the taboos.
And squirrels keep chasing each other, dashing between the feet of all the characters, and mating deliriously, while all the above events are occurring.
It’s also worth noting that ALL the people in the land were fair — and none was fairer than another, except according to any given individual’s taste. Even authors seemed presentable.
So the great worldwide flood of money was redistributed to everyone, because they all looked so good. Everyone was hot: it was cool. — Yet now that the populace is ultra-rich and drop-dead gorgeous like the resurrected Christ, our first fear is that the economists will come out and pull a lever causing inflation to attempt coexisting with the genteel superstitions. This would have been a no-no; but apparently God had pre-drawn a red line in the sand, whose ideal force remained despite its physicality having almost instantly washed away, because nothing bad happened: All the prices for goods and services kept increasing exponentially, as predicted, but since all living creatures only keep growing richer and richer, since fornication is now universal on account of beauty usurping hegemony back from ugliness, we can easily afford to get ripped off for World Peace.
The point is that most mammals who lived in the 21st century could expect, on average, no more than twenty years of life before things became unavoidably nightmarish. But now that folks in general look good and all stocks are up, life expectancy has risen to 140 years; and even barren people are allotted a double serving of generations of male heirs.
And no king ever needs to relinquish his crown again, for all royalty is permanent. Each king remains in power for ever and ever. And every soul is a monarch of its own, and an army of one. In short, we all rule over a plot of land that is our kingdom, which is given to us at birth. And when we die, we are buried there.
“What happens when we run out of land, tho?” inquires a pale Angel.
“Then we’ll start reusing the plots whose kings have died, starting with the oldest first,” answers Jesus.
“But what about the king that is buried in that land, which belongs to him?” argues this same pale Angel, in naughty faith.
“Enough time has passed,” explains Jesus with his velvet voice, “that the former king’s body will have decomposed entirely. All that’s beneath the earth’s surface is dirt now. Thus, the kingdom may be safely reassigned.”
“But what if the body is in a coffin, meticulously preserved: wrapped in gauze and mummified?” the Angel asks, blinking its eyes in icy innocence.
Jesus ponders for a moment. He looks handsome when he thinks. Finally he reaches into his suit coat and pulls out his billfold. He offers a stack of paper money to the Angel. “Go and purchase an answer to your query which you shall deem satisfactory. Ask no further questions.”
“OK,” sez the Angel, pocketing the cash; “then I say that, in order to determine whether a given burial-plot is safe to claim as a modern kingdom, the following procedure should be implemented: When someone is digging up the grave, if their shovel hits a royal body whose remains are not entirely decomposed, then the Celestial Court should rule that this dead Lord must be reborn as an Inquiring Angel. And this special rank of Heavenly citizens shall be significantly less red-hot than the Artistic Angels. And no one, not even the most charismatic beings in existence, shall be able to bring themselves to prevent these Angels of Inquisition from performing their quibbling, for they shall pity them.”
Jesus shrugs, “That’s fine with me.” (We like the look of Jesus’ suit.)
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