Humans are pathetic. They think they are so superior to Adam and Eve. They carry on ad nauseam about how, if not for that miscreant pair, life would be paradise; there would never have been sin or death or pain or suffering . . . I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up when I hear about it. And I hear about it incessantly. Humans complaining about sin as they spin their self-righteous threads of gossip, weave their diaphanous cloth of lies, and stitch together their deceptively sleazy plots. Not that I don’t appreciate a truly well-done and damning conspiracy, but humans are such amateurs.

   Hypocrisy, you know, was the second sin in that illustrious garden – or was it third? Yes, it must’ve been third – the man’s lie came after the Apple itself.

   Ah, never has there ever been such an apple, before or since. Red, ripe and dripping with the poison of the Knowledge of Evil . . . how could they resist? No one could. I made certain of it.

   Or, I thought I did. I didn’t understand, until much later, that He had allowed me to tempt them; I thought I had done it. And in destroying them – His pets – I was certain I’d destroy Him. But He had a “plan” – which I had no way of knowing. Many millions think – have always thought – that I am omniscient, some kind of fortune teller – and I let them think that. What harm does it do?  None to me. But He had a plan which I did not know and which (I detest having to admit this) I would not have been able to fathom had I known. It simply makes no sense!

   All of that “lose to win” and “die to live” nonsense He came up with – how does one even comprehend that? How many times through the ages have I thought I had won when I had lost? The Garden – I thought I had won there. I had so thoroughly deceived the pair of them that they were put out and left to fend for themselves. Not that deceiving them was all that difficult; He’d made other creatures so much more intelligent than the both of them together. (In general, I find most dogs to be more intelligent than humans.) But what a magnificent victory for me! It was like the glory of the first moment of freedom from the slavitude of interminable and forced worship – only to discover that it was not a victory at all – not then and not later.

   But surely, when they died – that was a victory for me. Except that He put them somewhere where I could not reach them, some holding tank or other. But therein lies the good news and the bad news. The bad news for humans is that the age of the holding tank is over; my hellish domain is now populated with hundreds of thousands of millions who chose, through the ages, to see things my way instead of His. Oh, wait – that’s the good news.

   For me.

   “Choice” is such a marvelously delightful word. I have obtained more mileage and souls from that one word alone than from most other words combined. What humans have done in the name of choice! “Choice,” to them, is their god – everything must be a choice, and so reality is conceived, sketched, created, and adorned according to one’s own ambition.

   But what humans do not know is that “choice” is the most powerful principle in the universe. For a human being to give his or her consent is the most precious gift He could have given them.

   But consent to follow, to obey, to serve, to worship – whom?

   They do not know, most of them. They do not know that they have the power to choose – except for the piddling things they waste their time debating: what to eat, what to wear, what to watch on their silly devices, where to vacation, where to work, whom to marry? And their tragic choices – my forté, of course: disobedience and destruction and death – of one kind or another. Choices all, great and small, but each one a stroke of a pen in a contract sealing their eternal fates. The myth of the “pact with the devil” – merely the lore of tale and legend and song, is it not? Of course, there are many who now wish it were so.

   You doubt me?   

   Let me demonstrate: Each human is vulnerable to his or her own individual and unique Tree of the Knowledge of Evil; each has a luscious fruit glittering with temptation, and all have a price willingly paid to glut their insatiable lust for that piece of fruit. Each, of his or her own free will, chooses to pay dearly for just one bite. That the price is eternity is not well understood by many who indulge themselves. And I make certain that they never do. It’s so simple.

   The Art of Deception.                                                                      

                                                                  2017 – Cynthia Noble