Wolves of God by Z. Goldstein

“On the day She died, people said that God died with Her. At the beginning of Time the Father gave us the Mother. When the seas rose, it was said that we drowned Her after we raped her. This was the sin that murdered God, the failure of the holy volition of Mankind. Some said that God took the land away from us. Others that She was angered at our abuse of Her treasures and the slaughter of Her kin, the flora and fauna driven to extinction by the ruthless excesses of unchecked consumerism. And then there were those men and women who believed that the cause of this great end, the true scapegoat of all this misery and desolation was the dark angel Satan himself. They argued that the Lord’s powers had become weakened by the sins of humanity, the will of the Mother world eroded through constant abuse and degradation. It was because of the children of men that the devil grew strong enough to destroy Her.” The Consular spoke with a despondent conviction denoting a passive acceptance of the prior sins of his race.

The newly accepted Disciple listened attentively and then paused in deep reflection of the holy man’s words. He thought his response through carefully, fully aware of the ramifications of speaking noise without purpose. “When I was seven years old my father told me the tale of how our ancestors drowned. He showed me their words preserved electronically within the buxom of Luna. I looked upon the writings of my father’s great-grandfather and I wept at first. He was a man torn by the breadth of the gap between his convictions and his experiences. In his time alive he watched the waves come over the mountains and into the cities and valleys. He was one of the last survivors to stand on Her soil. He loved God, though he had naught but anger in his heart. Most of all, he hated men. After the Son had died...he could not fathom how we could not have learned. We had to kill Her first. He hated men because they had killed her. This caused him to hate himself.”

The Consular paused, then spoke: “Do you believe She was angered?”

“No. She was helpless at the hands of our excesses. Lord Plato would have been ashamed.” answered the Disciple.

“At the excess, He [Plato] would. As for the deficiency, if He should have seen it, he would have regretted his profession in its entirety.” said the Consular. A sad, thin smile formed at the edges of his mouth.

“Master, it was not until years later that I realized why my ancestor chose to direct his anger towards himself. It was because of society. He hated himself for his participation in what he believed to be an unholy arrangement between inborn greed, the false free market and the perversion of Her religions. He reasoned that it all began with society.”

“But what formed society...in the beginning?”

“Religion.”

“Though he...loved God, as you say?”

“He loved God. He hated organized religion. He would have hated...what I am participating in now.”

“Would he have hated you for believing in the appointed servants of the God he loved?”

At this the Disciple hesitated, then thought quietly. After a few moments, he answered: “Who appointed them—Fusion barons, politicians, pirate kings or military hegemonies, pseudo-religious dictatorships like our own?”

“Once, long ago a group of forward-thinking intellectual men had a silly idea that they could separate the governments and the religions of mankind. They tried to create a government of the people...under God. They made a paradoxical distinction between holy and secular spirituality. For millennia, humanity had marched blind without comprehending the basic truth that spirituality is a deeply personal affair that may or may not involve communion with God in any variation. It was a magnificent theorem, though it did not survive long enough to be of much remembrance. It is something of the oral tales, this Land of the Free as it was called.”

The Disciple fathomed the Master’s chronicle of this lost nation of humanity. It was a free land...freedom unto excess. “In his worst moments, my ancestor decreed that the free market was the assemblage of Satanic ideology. He felt it to be a violation of God’s will. So, he strove to destroy it. Terrorist—that was what he was called by Her governments. He thought himself...a savior in his later, more deranged years. He thought he was...Her savior. He even writes of targeting the Antichrist, and becoming hopelessly frustrated because there were far too many candidates in his mind to choose from.”

The Consular studied his pupil, the calmness with which he spoke. He was under control. He had come to terms with the violence and the blood spilt in the name of the Lord. The Master spoke: “Do you approve of the jihads of your ancestors?”

“No. But I understand why he acted as he did. In the end, I can only imagine he faced the waters of his death with relief and jubilation.”

“This Land of the Free Market was called united under God.”

“How can we be free if we are bound by the shackles of the holy? A free world cannot be holy—a holy world surely cannot be free. This vision...was doomed to fail.”

“It failed because of men. It failed because men perverted the teachings of God unto the profit and power of their own design. This happened because men and women were free to worship as they saw fit. There was no holy control...guidance, if you will.”

Hearing these words, the first stir of agitation peaked in the Disciple’s throat: “Guidance, Master...unto enslavement to foolish dogmas and holy writ? Where does it end? The taint of slavery runs deep throughout the pages of the Bible—your censors cannot hide that from the youth, though you try.”

The Consular remained serene. He spoke deliberately: “The free men and women of this dead civilization once used the Bible to justify the taking of slaves from a foreign land. They ignored certain parts and focused on others. They used selective interpretation to validate their short-term goals, which could only be accomplished through a truly, brutally free market. You see, religion is a mold. Like...government. The two must always exist and one cannot subsist without the frame of the other. Everything depends on what we choose to shape those molds into—this is the essence of control...the crux of holy guidance.”

At this the Disciple laughed. The Consular frowned. He could not understand. Were his words somehow mistaken as jest? Nonetheless, he waited patiently until his pupil replied: “Forgive me, Master. Do you believe because your subjects are trained to see the holy and the spiritual on like terms that they have no spiritual lives independent of your sermons?”

“My son, anarchy and spirituality are not so far apart without faith to bind it all together. Without a hierarchy in religion you have no basis for dictating the proper behavior in any society. Without God, men would cut each other down without discretion or thought. There would be no moral law. And Lord Plato understood that religion was the basis for proper social conduct.”

The Disciple stared into his Master’s eyes. “Lord Plato did not believe in the same God that you do.”

“In his heart, he knew the pagan ways and false gods of his Greek temples were only methods of control until the population was ready for the fruition of the true faith.”

Even as the Master spoke these words something changed in the pupil. The Disciple knew he could never look upon the face of his teacher the same way again. Now it was the younger who was smiling. “Thank you Master. Finally, I understand the trials of my ancestor.”

The Consular was taken aback. He felt as if his student had gone, and another man was sitting before him—a different man. “My son, I have noticed patterns in your speech. Placements of certain words, tones and use of expressions—are you having any...doubts which you wish to share with me?”

“No Master, no doubts.” The Consular knew these words were true as he heard them. No doubt. The teacher was troubled by these revelations. The pupil continued: “My ancestor had a silly idea. He believed that the only way to save Her was to introduce...anarchy into the populace. The governments condemned him and the armies hunted him. In one of the last entries he wrote, he likened the grip of society to a ball of yarn rolling down a tilted table. The tilt is so slight that one cannot discern it—like a pebble falling into a vast, dark ocean. Eventually, the yarn will either unravel before it falls off the edge or fall off and...die, as he put it. He wanted to speed up the process of unraveling. He thought that society would end when the yarn ran out.”

“What happened instead?” queried the Consular.

“We fell off the edge.”

The Master looked confused. “My student, does the yarn not signify the decay of society?”

“No, Master. The yarn represents the ignorance of humanity.”

“Do you share the convictions of your ancient kin?”

“My ancestors were...misled. We were all misled—told an illusion as if it were truth before we were old enough to discern the difference.”

“What illusion, my son?”

The Disciple smiled again thoughtfully, his expression betraying sincerity with no arrogance. “Faith. I refuse to believe that spirituality and religion are one and the same.”

“Do you love God as your ancestor did?”

“Faith is control. Control depends upon the illusion that faith is reality. I have often heard you speak of guidance and control as if they were the same, Master. You control the cast but the mold is only there because people believe in it—in essence, all your powers exist as puppets and shadows do. You have no real authority, your decrees ring as hollow out across the universe now as they did when She was still living and nurturing us. No, I understand why my ancestor loved God. He did not have a choice—he clung to the deception, feeding off it, defining his whole reality by its demented sway. His mind was a bastion, and the wolves were already inside the keep. There was no hope for him, like so many to this day. But my perspective is different. I do not love God. I reserve my affections for the living and the real.”

“You speak blasphemy, child.”

“That word no longer holds any meaning in my heart.”

“If you persist in this heresy, you must leave us.”

“Yes Master, I will leave. God is not longer my shepherd—God...is the wolf. We are the castle. I must find my own way through the valley of darkness. Farewell, milord. If I see you in Hell, I’ll know we were both mistaken.”