To My Friends of the Abrahamic Religions

"To My Friends of the Abrahamic Religions"

Our differences are marked by similarities.
Neither of us believe, for one,
in the beginning
a primeval bovine lapped salty ice
until the grandfather of a metal-worker
(or so it seems from his hammer)
thought to have a son who had a son
who with his brethren bled and scalped Ymir
to create the world in which we live,
or a sentient, ancient serpent circles
the earth in its entirety to grasp its own tail
with a salivating mouth,
or that a boy and his dad crafted wax wings
to free themselves from Crete,
and in the midst of flight
the boy soared to space where solar winds
melted the wings and gravity grabbed the boy
by the ankles and pulled him to the sea,
or a feathered-serpent swooped down from the heavens
to the underworld and wiped his bloody dick
on the bones of the dead to resurrect them
and create a fifth sun to brighten a world
destroyed by a Noahless flood.

The difference is,
in addition to that, I don’t believe
a voice in the sky turned a woman
to salt for staring at a city in the distance,
or an transdimensional spirit
imbued a teenage girl with ghost cum
to create an cannibalistic king
who lives inside billions of folks simultaneously,
or a Middle-Eastern man
after trekking through sandstorms
and barren deserts to the promised land
stepped atop a rock,
and flew into the sky
to join an alien overlord in space.

What if a blue-skinned, four arm creature
descended from the skies,
quadro-arms splayed out in welcoming,
tongue flipping about in Hindi and Sanskrit
not a bit of English to be found:
would you accept this new leader
as your personal savior and follow him
to the afterworld and beyond,
or would you deny him the chance,
deny his piety, deny his deity
and say, “No, no! Antichrist must he be!”
then take up arms and shoot him down
from the skies from whence he came,
and assemble your armies
and your nuclear bombs against this monster’s
tan-faced children?

Does your faith in such things,
the brevity of your books
explain away everything that is,
or was,
or ever would be
to the point that a frizzle-haired German
patent office worker would say,
“Was ist das? Wie kann das sein?”
and then dedicate his life to the all-powerful
and forever knowing tyrant of your
precious little novel, your singularity
of a moral compass,
or rather would he look at the leather bound tome
you call Good and laugh jovially
then get back to calculations and use
symbols and sines and cosines and tangents
and derivatives and integrations,
though he’ll die long before the proofs
are formulated and Higgs is found
and the Swiss warp the lights and
magnetic-fields and gravity of the Earth
into a million tiny black holes
ending life as we know it
whether your deities wanted to or not.