part 4

So, now that the carpenter was dead, you would think that would be the end of it, since the foreigners were pretty good at putting an end to people and things, but nothing could be further from the truth. While most of the former nomads and foreigners thought that X was nothing but a lunatic, there were others who thought he made a lot of sense.

"You know," they would say, of a starry night, sitting around a small fire on rocks eating unleavened bread and wishing someone would invent reclining chairs, and perhaps even toilet paper, "I thought he made a lot of sense."

Often these were the same people who had thought the ten rules had made sense, and hadn't been able to make sense out of why they weren't more popular. They were sensible people, but since good sense is not objectively quantifiable, and social sanctions are typically normative, they were often held to be, as it were, out to lunch. They just couldn't get with the program. Their friends would say to them, "Look, I know where you're coming from. The carpenter was a very nice guy, and it's a shame the foreigners put an end to him, but these things happen, and really, just think about what would happen if people started to take him seriously. If you had to treat everybody like they were a member of your own family, how would you get off ever being able to kill people, or take things from them, or fornicate with their wives, let alone charge them compound interest. Get a hold of yourselves, you really do have to think these things out."

But not everyone was convinced. "You know, if we were to adopt the new contract, it would pretty much cover the ten rules wouldn't it? I mean, if you love someone, you aren't about to go killing them, are you? Or any of the other things the rules were telling us not to do?"

And they began to think about how X had insisted that there was a need for them to make changes in themselves, in their motives, in their behavior, in their consciousness itself, and it seemed like this was something important, that just exchanging one belief system for another was simply movement within a field, and couldn't lead to a different kind of world.

But the other former nomads would have none of it, they had been waiting for thousands of years for a guy with a flaming sword, and by God, they wouldn't settle for anything else, and why don't you just take your silly ideas and move along. So move along they did, and decided they didn't wish to have anything to do with the other former nomads, and wanted to be called something else. They considered calling themselves the Carpenters, but there were apparently some issues regarding trademark infringements so they decided to become Xns instead. For many years they actually became nomads again, moving from place to place trying to convince their friends to see things the way they had come to themselves. They didn't have much luck with an ideology that didn't contain any killing of foreigners, and after awhile they had pretty much worn out their welcome and decided they needed to take their membership drive to some new location. They started traveling and oddly enough, eventually found themselves in the land of the very foreigners who owned the land they had just come from. Here, of course, the foreigners were not foreign but native, and the Xns started telling them about the new contract they had made with their Cosmic ET. At first the natives didn't understand.

"Love our neighbors?" they said. "We've been doing that for years. You know, start with some decent wine, break out the olive oil . . ."

"No, no," said the Xns, "Not that kind of love. We're talking about compassion, literally to suffer together, to feel the experience of the other that you understand him, and can forgive, and not seek vengeance for what others may do out of their own pain and ignorance."

The natives were delighted to hear this. A people who were peaceful and would not seek vengeance would make excellent animal feed, and they did. The natives had brought many large, exotic carnivores from other countries for their own entertainment, and keeping them in fresh meat was a big problem, but the Xns could be kept fresh with very little maintenance and you didn't even need refrigerators or trucks to haul them around in, just point something sharp at them and tell them which pen to go into.

Then, things began to change. The natives got to thinking that their own cosmic ETs were actually pretty weak compared to the one the Xns had. They were petty and capricious and always bickering. Their baddest cosmic ET was a henpecked old malcontent who couldn't do anything more than toss around some lightning bolts and this really didn't impress anyone anymore. They even held that some of their own leaders were supernatural beings, but still, if you stuck something sharp into them, their juice ran out and they died just like anybody else. But look at what the Xns had! This guy could kick ass! Imagine, make a whole universe! Destroy a whole planet! One guy with all the knowledge and all the power! Now here was a cosmic ET you could really fear and control people with! But this cosmic ET was the same one that belonged to the original desert nomads that the natives had been killing and stealing from for centuries, so they went to look for some. This turned out to be difficult since the natives had recently burned the former nomads' principal city to the ground, which was a testament to their technical skills since stone and mud brick burn very poorly, but they managed to scare up a few and asked them what it would take to be adopted by their cosmic ET.

"Ha!" the former nomads sneered, "he will never accept you, you have not suffered like we have, you have not paid the price! You are not from the right family and you don't have the right accent!"

So the natives stuck something sharp into the former nomads, and their juice ran out just like every generation before them. It did occur to the natives that the former nomad's cosmic ET wasn't really taking very good care of them, but it didn't matter, they wanted a symbol for the absolute power at the apex of an ultimate patriarchal hierarchy and they were determined to get it.

"Let's try the Xns," they said, and found some who had not yet been fed to the animals. "How about it?" they asked.

"Well," said the Xns, "there's this contract." The natives looked it over and decided that they didn't want any part of it. There had to be another way. So they thought about it for awhile.

"I have it!" someone said. "We just tell the cosmic ET that we're personal friends with the carpenter, and he will let us in!" It was inspired thinking. Salvation by association. This way the natives didn't have to change their behavior at all, they could keep all of their sharp things and all of their dreams of conquest, and carry on in the name of the only son of the biggest, baddest, all knowing, all powerful, supernatural cosmic extraterrestrial ever conceived. It was a marriage made in a perfect metaphorical place.