"Jesus peered at Asura through the hair that hung loosely down over his eyes. “Gods sometimes do violent things,” he said, his voice soothing, “but it is a mistake to want to exact revenge upon them.” He held up one hand, as though offering salvation.
“Say what you wish,” Asura spat. “Yet to revere a herald of destruction as some sort of heavenly father figure is surely a sin—”
“Herald of destruction?”
“Perhaps you do not understand. In this Milky Way, there are many planets upon which higher intellects have thrived. Imagine, if you will, that these beings you look up to as gods did not approve of these emerging sentient life-forms and decided to remove them. How would you go about doing this, if you were them?”
“What do you mean, ‘how’?”
“I will give you one possibility,” Asura said. “You could visit the life-forms at every stage in their development, sowing seeds that would, over the course of millennia, result in inevitable destruction.”
Jesus’s face twisted.
“You could build in economic dead ends, military strife, population problems, declining health, psychological and physical atrophy, and much more. Take any one of these calamities that plague humankind, and you can see that its true cause lies far in the past. Some hail from as far back as the ancient age when humanity’s forerunners existed only as single-celled organisms living in a warm, shallow ocean.”
“Blasphemy! You have it wrong—”
“Not that they had to predetermine everything. Some of the conditions could have been arranged later on, when there were more variables to work with.”
Jesus fixed Asura with two eyes blazing like fire. “O, dear God who is in Heaven—”
Ryu Mitsuse (2011). Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights. São Francisco: Haikasoru Press.
