Emails from Hell, part nine.

{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}

Does Humankind Belong on Earth?

Happy Earth Day. Do we, as destructive humans, have a right to wish the Earth a happy Earth Day?

Is humankind a legitimate part of the natural world, belonging to the Earth’s ecosystems and ecological communities, or is mankind a diseased scab upon the planet? This question is meaningless, because here we are, like it or not. Meaningless, that is, unless you are God and capable of wiping out life on Earth and starting over.

What follows is one blogger’s review of the movie Noah, starring Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins and other very good performers. I review it primarily as a writer and as a scientist who thinks about Big Questions. My verdict is that it was better than the original. The reason I say this is that the original Flood story (Genesis 6-8), which is a gigantic epic even more worthy of immortality than the Odyssey, addressed issues of major importance, but left some questions unanswered. The movie filled in the missing issues.

The major point of both the original and the movie is that human evil had defiled the Earth, and the human stain needed to be cleansed away. In the original, God recognizes Noah and his family as uniquely virtuous on the entire face of the Earth. In the movie, Noah recognizes his own sinfulness, and concludes that his job, and that of his family, is to facilitate the rescue of the innocent animals, and then to vanish into obscurity after the job is done. This is why, as he saw it, only his eldest son was married, and this son’s wife was barren.

But then Noah’s wife implores Noah’s mystical, magical, and still-living ancestor Methuselah (played by Anthony Hopkins; who else?) to restore Mrs. Shem’s fertility, and he does. Thus, while the Ark is floating on the face of the waters, Mrs. Shem becomes pregnant. Noah decides that, since his duty is to bring the human blight to an end, he must kill the child if the child is a girl (a boy would just grow old and die without issue). So what does he do? Wouldn’t you like to know!

As a result of his decision, Noah concludes that he has failed God. This is why, in the movie (something left totally unexplained in Genesis), Noah goes off to live in a cave and get drunk. But Mrs. Shem convinces him that in fact he made the right, not the wrong, choice. Noah returns and is reconciled to his wife. It is a supremely touching scene. Mrs. Noah was working in the garden, so that human life might continue on Earth. Noah walks up to her, places his hand on hers, and then begins gardening with her. You will not be surprised to hear what I did when I got home from the movie. My wife was out in the garden planting delicate parsley seedlings. I did with her exactly what Noah did with his wife in the movie. Then I gently, oh so gently, watered the seedlings, seedlings so delicate that too much water would plaster them to the sticky ground.

The ecological theme was clear. Sinful humankind had created an industrial civilization (a sticks-and-stones version of it, at any rate) that had made the Earth a barren wasteland. And Noah had to save biodiversity—all of it, not just the species Noah deemed useful.

The problems that creationists leave unexplained in their literalistic interpretation of the Flood story are similarly left unexplained in the movie. But that’s okay, since it is just a story. It is the creationists that turn it into a problem. It is a story that reveals deep truths, and might be considered truer than literalism.

Even the little touches were good. Hopkins, playing Methuselah, had a craving for berries, and was out grubbing for berries in the forest. He finally found one (judging from the leaves, I’d say it was a bearberry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) just as the Flood waters overtook him.

So I invite you to leave doctrinal arguments aside and go see this movie, in which a modern reinterpretation of great fiction addresses some of the most important questions in human history and in the world today.