“Look at it. Isn’t it beautiful? Look at the magnificent sleek glass of the cityscape, each of the towers reflecting off each other, and extending into the heavens. San Francisco, New York City, Tokyo, Beijing, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, the magnificent fruits of the ingenuity of human capital and labor, like massive beehives, and though they are across the world, they are all united in one mind, one purpose, and spirit, centers of wealth, innovation, and progress. Steel, concrete, and glass, structures protrude from the Earth and every person, no matter the race, creed, nation, and culture, gravitates towards them and dwells in them. They shall forever burgeon with no cycles of waxing and waning. One day there will be a city on every planet, in every galaxy. The city of man is the pinnacle of the Creation upon which the sun shall never set.”

Tubal had spoken earnestly and with excitement and glee on his face like an apprentice before his master right after finishing his final task. He walked around boldly with slow confident steps, eagerly waiting for a response. But God said nothing. Instead, He offered a vision of the Garden, of the exceptional beauty and vitality of Paradise. Death had not yet touched creation, the animals requiring no other subsistence but the green plants provided to them. Adam lived a simple and blissful life, made to enjoy the first fruits eternally as the mediator between heaven and earth, ever in communion with God and with Creation. He walked the vibrant Garden and ate from every tree for they were pleasing to the eye and good for food. There, nature was naturally for man, as man was naturally for God, no labor separating the earth from man, and nothing separating man from God.

“I don’t long for that place anymore… I have made things East of Eden that are much better, and more pleasing….” He was distraught, furrowing his eyebrows and facing down, but he continued to walk, his feet lagging behind him. The burning desire to prove his worth flickered. “But look at the progress I have made since then. I have made food and medicine available to all. Where famine was common and many starved to death, today even the homeless on the streets are well-fed. Where the little ones often passed away in their youth, life has been so fundamentally changed so that now most now die in their old age. Where people often died of infections from surgical operations, I have provided antibiotics so that they no have additional risk of mortality other than the operation itself. Even to how people feel, how happy or how anxious they are, I have provided them with medication to prevent them from getting depressed, from getting anxious. All this I have done in service of my fellow man so that no one will go hungry, die young, or be unhappy. You cannot have imagined how painstaking it was to organize the labor, the factories, and the farms all for the sake of the universal happiness of man. I have accounted for almost everything. I’m almost there.”

Tubal regained the swagger in his gait in the course of his exposition, his hands tied to one another behind his back, and his face transfigured to an infectious haughty smile. Once more, God said nothing, only revealing visions of the rumblings of the Christ-child within the womb of the Theotokos, the miraculous virgin birth of Christ, His sinless life, the Last Supper, His betrayal, the Passion, the spear piercing His flesh, the blood and water rushing forth, His body broken on the cross, limp and lifeless, all flooding his mind scene-by-scene.

The confidence that Tubal exuded evaporated once more, leaving a look of unmistakable guilt from the deluge. He closes his eyes, wincing in discomfort and pain. His mouth opened but only air left his lips. But he shook his head as if to exit a trance, and having recovered, said “No… no no. I won’t fall for that narrative again. I didn’t do it and am not responsible. Your words are poisonous to me and my movement. Man’s condition was no better off after you came down to Earth. You deified man, but man still dies; man, still suffers. Why? Why did you say the work is finished? It’s not. Anyone can see.”

“You liar. You fickle god. You arbitrary and insignificant god. You make one covenant with your “chosen” people only to redact it later. You condoned the rape and pillage of the many in favor of the one. You killed a man for touching your shiny golden vessel because they weren’t born in the elect of the elect. You told them not to create graven images to order them to carve cherubim to overshadow the mercy seat. Are these contradictions not obvious?

We already have a new set of rules that are only for us and not from you. A universal declaration of unshakable, undeniable, inalienable rights for man, something far greater than what you have given us, superseding it in scope and grounded in liberty, equality, and fraternity. No stone tablet from the sky, or collection of testimonies and letters from dead men, but something made by man for man that marks the final triumphal cry from all the Earth that God is dead. Like Jacob we will contend and wrestle with you to the end of days, but strictly on our own terms and until we have utterly overcome you. We have our rights and we have freedom; freedom from your tyranny, from your fickleness and arbitrariness, from your notions of justice that have done nothing but cause division and strife among mankind.”

“Without Me you can do nothing”

“And yet, I have already done so much. Can’t you see? But mankind will evolve to even greater heights. We have passed the skies and are reaching for the stars and further, farther than you could have ever taken us. As a collective, we will evolve to be perfect, given enough time and organization. If we fail today there is always tomorrow, and inevitably we will build our own Eden. We will even surpass it, have two, even hundreds of Edens. No longer will we be chained to the cold dead sayings of the ridiculous prophets, of a deluded Savior who could not save Himself.

So what if you raised the dead? So what if your Godman trampled on death? We will raise the dead and live forever given enough time and become like gods without you. It will be man who bestows life and holds the keys to heaven. No more war. No more famine. No more poverty. No more illness. And I’ll tell you exactly how we are going to get there. First, we will bring forth an intellectual rebirth. Creation is no longer a one-time event, but a continual phenomenon with many accidents toward increasing perfection. It will be a new anthropology for the new man, one divorced from you altogether, depending only on natural phenomena, displacing you from the source of all being, and utterly destroying the notion that man is anything more than a speck of dust, a branch of the tree of life no more special than the next.

And those who try to marry this new narrative of man’s progressive origins with your mythical creation will have a bastardized and perverted anthropology, where death will be as natural as life. They will erroneously conclude that you are the progenitor of such a flawed design of mankind, that you had damned creation to decay and corruption even before the fall. And eventually when they realize that one narrative is incongruent with the other, they will collapse the traditional view to serve something higher, one that is above Your word, above Your wise men of old. That inconsistency will fester and destroy their faith. Instead of faith in You, it will be in my priests and prophets, the new clerics of modernity.

Your time is over; Your flock divided, confused and scattered. A new age is upon us. The age of man clothed with majesty will eclipse the kingdom of heaven. As You made us in Your image, we will make ourselves, and new beings in our own image. The created shall become the creator. Behold, we stand at the door, and knock at the gates of Eden. As we once served you, they will serve us. And it will be glorious, it will be wonderful. Truly, a new civilization will burst forth from Your rotting putrid corpse.

Even now they know not what movements undergird them. They know not the machinations and the efforts we have taken to subvert them. We have made weak Christians out of your meek Christians. We have made atheists out of weak Christians. We have made a mockery of your Gospel, and turned it into an empty hollowed-out man-centered ideology, turned into nothing more than another tool for man to serve man. I inverted what You consider good to be evil, and what You consider evil for good. The end to which your Gospel preaches is not you the Father, but man. And to those who are no longer Christian but still hold religious tendencies, as all men do, we have even made our own good news, a new religion to harness their fervor, and we have already made great strides to steal your flock.

A shortsighted man once said that without God everything is permitted, but he did not foresee a time that man had the presumptuousness and boldness to pervert Your evangelion and preach that with God everything is permitted.”

God says, “The gates of Hades shall not prevail against my Church for the Holy Spirit resides within the members of the Body of Christ.”

“Old Man don’t you get it? They have already been breached! There are Christians running around preaching idolatry, of money, of success, and best of all, of other gods! We have been working too you see. They don’t even believe in the truth of their own Gospel. They don’t even believe in the truth of their own Faith! It has become impotent, and barren. The pearl has lost its luster, and they say “Each religion holds some truth to it. Who am I to judge their beliefs, let alone convert them?”. Many have begun to resemble Israel in their infidelity, sleeping Jezebels and worshipping false gods. Your Bride has forgotten her wedding ornaments and has grown tired of You. An old face has even showed up in Rome recently. Very fitting as we return to practices from a time before you scourged this Earth, where the old shall devour the young. Like Cronus shall we rule.

Some have even forgotten how to address You, as if You had not sent Your Son down to reveal the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as if the Deus Homo never walked this earth as the Incarnate Logos, so when He comes again, they will not even be able to call out “Lord, Lord”. They are so happy to welcome these changes that it has surprised even me. Gone are the days of Your fearless and peerless apostles and their followers. Your believers are lukewarm, spineless, directionless, and completely thrown around by the tides of manufactured culture. They will consume what we tell them. They will believe what we tell them. They will obey.”

“My flock know Me, and I will have mercy on those whom you have deceived.”

Mercy? They will be burned by Your presence because they have forgotten what it means to love You. You will be like hellfire to them, and though I know I will not be spared, as long as I live, I will fight to destroy you. I will burn Your churches, step on Your icons, rip to shreds Your Scripture. But I will take the most pleasure in perverting Your flock, dividing them and blotting them from the face of the earth. I have already uprooted many of Your faithful from their homelands and sent them to Godless nations, where they will try as they might to preserve their faith but will inevitably fall flat and worship me.

All that is symbolic of your relationship to the people will be erased, diabolically torn apart, or even better: inverted. Of the Father and His children. Of Christ and the Church. Every distinction must be erased. So goes the king and the subject, the priest and the laymen, the husband and the wife. All must go the way of the past. We shall put these archaic notions away because they reek of a time that is backwards, anthropocentric, logocentric, patriarchal. Instead, man and woman will be equal in every respect, and children are in a similar fashion, no less capable and worthy of authority than their parents. At home, wives will domineer husbands, and children will challenge their parents, just as the church is beginning to distort the Bridegroom and the children of God are beginning to change God in their own image. After all, there is neither male nor female. Through our careful instruction, they will have a real education apart from You. The respected and adored peoples of the new age will be Godless, even satanic just to spite You.

We will inoculate their minds to be sensitive to anything that reeks of tradition so that it will be thrown away and overturned so that they can have their precious “liberty”. Throne has been but overthrown, but there still lies many altars. This movement is labeled “enlightened”, “scientific”, and “rational”. Who would ever want to be opposed to science? To rationality itself? The old order and hierarchy are flattened, but they don’t realize that in the chaos of the perpetual revolution a new order will arise, one without faith, but reason, where everything is organized, efficient, and nothing will go to waste. Such an effort will only come to pass by trampling over You.

We will set son against father and daughter against mother, so subversively that they will do so willingly, convinced that their parents are selfish and conceited people who only want to control them and to project their values onto them. They will disrespect their parents, even abandon them, and in their self-induced estrangement, will begin to question their own motivations and aspirations for having their own children. More and more of them are convinced that preventing the little ones from even ever walking this earth is their merciful duty, even a moral obligation, but more likely they will see life as just another inconvenience. If they even manage to have children, they will have, by that point, no meaningful tradition to pass down, only that which we have curated in them; for they are rootless, cut off from their God-bearing forefathers. Every generation dilutes it further, but my stock only grows more concentrated. Individuals are so easy to manipulate… but the family is an obstacle to the future and to progress. Too often does a father instill inconvenient traditions into his children. The state will replace him, and serve as the provider, of bread and of “tradition”. And soon after we will replace the state.

The only bread they will seek is the earthly bread, and the only wine they shall drink is the one that inebriates. They will always seek flesh, but only their own. And if they seek blood, they will only seek their own, and not Yours. And to those that still recognize you and continue to call you Lord, the “elect”, your holy ones, the unmarked….

Tubal paused. He breathed heavily, his eyes bulging and engorged, blood-shot from fatigue, but passionately and desperately attentive to the figure in front of him, trying to glare directly at the light that blinded him repeatedly. Yet time and time again he looked as if the next time would yield a different result. In his head, he had been walking toward the light as he was talking and shielding his eyes whenever he was blinded, but when he took just a brief moment to catch his breath, he had suddenly realized he was farther from the light than he had started, and it had started to quickly grow cold and dark. “Where are you going? I am not finished with you yet you wretch.” He started his march again, but this time picking up his cadence, completely focused on regaining his position. The sound of his footsteps reverberated in the empty, seemingly endless room. But it continued to grow colder and darker.

Running now, he was determined to make his case before God, to make a defense of himself, and to accuse his maker of iniquity, of evils worse than mankind had ever committed. It had seemed his entire life has been pointing toward this singular moment. He was not going to simply let it get away from him. Having been without the presence of the Lord for what felt like eternity, he was categorically brimming with reserve resentment, despair, and longing, the emotions of a man abandoned and neglected, which were by this point, almost indistinguishable from one another, homogenized into an almost tangible mass of negativity. It weighed heavily upon his spirit.

Faster now, he chased the dying light, but he knew it was only getting further. It was freezing, but his body was radiating heat from the prolonged and desperate procession. Tubal panted as he ran, but defeat diffused in the air that entered his lungs, as bitter as the cold that enveloped him. Finally, he sprinted, fully engaging his entire being to this effort. His body was tilted forward, his arms swung, and his feet pounded the ground. It was night. He could no longer see yet still he pursued, but his body was failing him, and his tempo stalled to a jog then a walk. Just as the last rays of warmth and light gradually receded, the fire that fueled his being was doused by the biting cold and darkness, and the loneliness that accompanied it brought him low. He collapsed shivering. Each time he inhaled he smothered the breath of life further, but by resigning, the great dread spirit of self-destruction left the vessel at last. “Am I not worthy? Have I not merited your presence? Why, LORD, do you reject me, and hide your face from me?”. Sitting in blindness, Tulab wept in the deep.