{beginning of email}
As we
sat there with General McArthur, we saw a man in a robe coming along. His robe
was all the colors of the rainbow. And with him was a flock of the cutest
animals you ever saw. Kitty cats with big eyes, puppies with big eyes, hamsters
with big eyes. Animals that would have torn each other to pieces in the wild
but as a result of human domestication and the influence of Heaven, they played
with one another in peace. The lion and the lamb, as described in two places in
the Old Testament, followed. Then along came lobsters and octupuses and
levitating fishes. I was puzzled, because this was supposed to be Hell.
The man
drew closer and wished us an effusively good day.
“Good
sir!” I called out. “I think I know why your robe is all the colors of the
rainbow.”
“You
do?” he said in a piping voice. “What do you think the reason is?”
“You are
or were a member of the GLBT community.”
“The
what? Never heard of it,” he said.
“Okay,
let me guess again,” I said. “You are Joseph with the Amazing Dreamcolor Coat
right out of Genesis 37.”
“Wrong
again,” he said. “I am Noah, and the rainbow was associated with me a long time
before Joseph or the BLTs.”
“You
should have guessed it, with the animals,” Joe whispered to me.
“Please
explain, Mr. Noah, why you are in hell.”
“I built
an Ark—actually, I contracted the work out—and saved two of every kind of
animal from dying in the Great Flood.”
“So how
did you get them to all come into the Ark?”
“It was
a miracle,” said Noah.
“Two of
each species of insect?”
“It was
a miracle.”
“Two of
each species of spider?”
“It will
always be the same answer. It was a miracle. I still don’t know how it
happened, or how we found places to stash all of them.”
“Very
well. But how did that get you sent to Hell? Oh, wait, I know. It’s when you
got drunk afterwards.”
“No,
that wasn’t it. As I said, I saved two of every species of animal.”
“Am I
missing something?” I asked.
“You
most certainly are,” Noah said. “Every species. Not just the ones that humans
found useful, but even the rattlesnakes and the mosquitoes and the spiders.
They each had their place in nature, regardless of their utility to humans.
Why, you may ask.”
“Why?”
“Partly
because no one could know which species might be useful later,” said Noah. “We
had to look all over the place to find the flatworm Caenorhabditis elegans, and we never knew why. But nowadays it is
one of the favorite animals that scientists use in genetic research. Same thing
with that fruit fly Drosophila
melanogaster. But also, it is just because God had this idea that if He
made it it was good.”
“I still
don’t see what was so bad about that,” I said.
“Do I
have to explain everything to you?” asked Noah.
“Yes,”
said Joe.
“Well,
it’s like this. The fundamentalists who decide who goes to hell believe that
most species are useless, and that it is not worth the trouble or the cost to
save them. You saw how much the conservatives despised the Endangered Species
Act in the United States! God did not ask me if I could afford to save all of them, or even if I wanted to. But you just let an American environmentalist say that
we need to save the Lesser Prairie Chicken, for example, and the conservatives
start howling like extinct dire wolves—Canis
dirus—and calling them godless communist atheists. See, they believe that
God wanted me to save all the species so that American conservatives can let
them go extinct in the twenty-first century. I, sir, was the original
bleeding-heart environmentalist. And so, here I am.”
“Well,”
said Joe, “being as you know all the different kinds of animals, can you
recommend what kind of meat we can have for lunch?”
{end of email}
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