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My speech was scheduled for Friday morning. I was sure everyone was tired of speeches. Most of the speeches hadn't amounted to anything much. With this in mind I borrowed a bar chair from the bar in lobby area. I brought it with me as I came in, set it up at center stage, right at the most forward edge, grabbed the microphone from the lectern and sat down.
"Let me tell you a story," I said. "It's a story about an airline captain and a deep pit miner. They met one day over a beer and complained about the sad state of the world, just like we have done all week long. The miner suggested to the captain, that if there were a God in the universe, none of that would happen. That's not true said the captain. All of that would still happen and I can prove it to you."
That's how my story began. In the story, the miner asked the airline captain if he ever saw any God floating among the clouds in all of his tens of thousands of hours of air time in commercial flying. The captain laughed and asked the miner in return if he ever encountered the devil in all his lifelong digging into the earth. So they both laughed over their silliness.
"So what's your proof then?" said the miner to the captain.
"That will come," said the captain. "I will give you an opportunity to deliver that proof yourself," added the captain and called the waiter for another beer for himself and for his friend.
"You will give me the opportunity to prove to you that you are wrong?" the miner asked.
The captain nodded. "If you can do that, I'll buy you lunch, the full spread, because you will then have earned it."
The miner nodded.
"Here is the deal," said the captain. "We are going to do some role playing. I am going to play God, and you will play the devil. Being gracious, I will let you have the first word. Ask me a question."
"Alright," said the devil. "Mr. God are you happy with what you have created, and if so why?"
Mr. God smiled. "Of course I am happy. How could I not be? I have created a beautiful people, with a beautiful mind. I gave them the quality of my own consciousness. I gave the them the capacity to understand everything that I understand, by which they can have power with me as the creators of their own new universe, a universe rich in culture, art, music, dance. And I have created them with a beautiful heart, a heart of love, so that they will all love each other by design. And my design is perfect. To most of the men, women appear indeed beautiful, and men to women. They like to be near each other, see each other, touch and kiss each other. They don't have to be educated to love each other. They simply do. If they as much as look at each other, they get a bright and warm feeling deep inside, and they respond to that with a smile. It's the perfect design that nobody can beat. People have been living like that for thousands of years, and they still do."
"That's not entirely true," said the devil. "I have been wise to our design almost from the beginning, and I've been able to foil it. Sure, I was impressed with your design of humanity. It posed a challenge that no devil ever faced. So I brought together all my agents for a brain storming session. As you know, we don't have much up there in our noodle. For this reason we left nothing to chance. We put ourselves out in a big way to defeat your beautiful thing. And it worked, as you know. We realized afterwards that half of the effort would have been enough, so easily were we able to defeat your design. You say that you designed your people with such a beautiful heart that they love each other just by looking at each other. That's true, you did that. You gave them a beautiful spiritual quality. But guess what some of my agents did; they created a spiritual quality of their own and told all your people that they must have this quality too, since it is a 'spiritual' quality. So, they embraced the quality of shame. And it worked. Instead of loving each other for the beauty of their humanity, your people became ashamed of themselves and one another, and went through extraordinary trouble to hide themselves from each other's sight; to cover up whatever most directly identified their humanity."
At this point Mr. Devil, the miner, stood up and boasted that this little project worked so well that he ordered all his agents to make sure that this devilish, 'spiritual' quality would never be lost sight of and never be shut out of peoples' mind. He even boasted that his agents never failed him in this.
At this point Mr. Devil laughed sarcastically. "We never thought that this project would work so well," he said to Mr. God. "If we had realized how efficiently it worked, we would have never bothered with launching our backup project. For the backup project I sent my agents out to devise a really daring plan. I told them I wanted a plan that prevents people by law, from looking at each other. The plan they came up with was absolutely brilliant. They simply narrowed down the allowable field of love to just one person. Only one single person was allowed to be loved for a lifetime, and they arranged this to become the law. Anybody who rebelled... Of course you know what happened to them." He drew a hand across his throat. "My agents did this so cleverly," said Mr. Devil, "that they had the very same people whom you designed to love one another, throw stones at those persons who broke MY law by daring to live up to YOUR design. I got them to throw stones at these people until they were dead. Did you know how many people got killed that way? But the irony is, that they killed each other for exercising what you have put into their hearts as a beautiful element of their humanity."
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