The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [147]
“NEITHER SHALT THOU LIE WITH ANY BEAST TO DEFILE THYSELF THEREWITH!”—he screamed at us one morning, reading from a Bible held in the hand that did not hold the RadioShack megaphone—“NEITHER SHALL ANY WOMAN STAND BEFORE A BEAST TO LIE DOWN THERETO: IT IS CONFUSION! DEFILE NOT YE YOURSELVES IN ANY OF THESE THINGS! FOR IN ALL THESE THE NATIONS ARE DEFILED WHICH I CAST OUT BEFORE YOU! AND THE LAND IS DEFILED! THEREFORE I DO VISIT THE INIQUITY THEREOF UPON IT, AND THE LAND ITSELF VOMITETH OUT HER INHABITANTS!”
During downtimes there were just three or four others with him, bundled in their winter coats to make the important pilgrimage to our lawn to harass us, but at peak hours he was surrounded by hundreds of people. They chanted, they held lit candles in their hands and sang their stupid hymnals and liturgies and hosannas and “prayed” at us. Sometimes there were so many of them! Sometimes these glassy-eyed slack-faced adults brought along their adorable glassy-eyed and slack-faced children, who stood right beside their parents with little blond heads all abob with springy ringlets of flax-blond hair, picking their snot-drooling noses with grubby little fingers.
These people looked just like normal people. You would think they might bear some sort of clear distinguishing mark, maybe black spots upon their foreheads or something—but no—outwardly, there was nothing odd about them. If you passed any of these people on the street—out of their proper context—you would not have looked twice at them. But there was something, there was some gruesome contaminant in their brains that caused them to believe that the earth is six thousand years old, that cavemen rode dinosaurs to work, and that all the beauty of the natural world has been deliberately placed here by the devil like so many red herrings for scientists to find to test our faith in God. What in the world is wrong with a civilization in which we must take these people at all seriously? Why must we listen to their “opinions”? Why must we suffer them to jam their feet in the doors of our discourse? Why must we respectfully demur to their “faith”? Why allow their voices into our politics? Why must these intolerant people be tolerated? I refuse to tolerate them! I swear, Gwen, in my least “tolerant” moods I sometimes think that any truly just and wise society would regard religious faith not as some deep noble kind philosophical lofty spiritual bullshit, but merely as an official, DSM-certified mental illness! Throw it right in there with schizophrenia! Why not?
Religion says this world is not good enough for us—that there is more, or that there should be. What is religion but the philosophical hatred of the world?
But why did these people hate us? Why were these people bivouacked on our lawn in order to harass us all day and all night? Because they, being good Christians, did not believe in evolution. They did not believe in evolution because the Judeo-Christian tradition is the ultimate anthropo-chauvinist doctrine, which asserts that man has dominion over the earth—that God has told him to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth—that he stands over and against nature, the chosen son of all creation, given by God his mind, his consciousness, all his human “dignity.” And they hated us because of this: because there, swimming in a pouch of fluid in Lydia’s lower abdomen, was living, unassailable proof of human evolution.
XXX
The tumor in Lydia’s brain