I was drawn to an advertisement that a reptilian friend had posted to her tumblr account, replicated below.
It reminds me, momentarily, of the human religions – a subject I have dedicated my life to studying as a Professor of Imaginations and Aislinology at our alma mater, Brown. For in the advertisement, offering some sort of building material up for sale, a selection of bricks casts a shadow similar in form to this country’s most famous dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus rex. This suggests that humans, in seeing such a formulation of bricks, might believe it to represent the mighty lizard king and become afeared. Just so the fictions of the human race strike terror into their hearts when labeled with the word “god,” for they are a fretful and fragile species, easily squashed, and it has come to my attention that they are in the habit of seeing these gods everywhere they turn.
This is just what happens to Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park. He believes he is on a safe and controlled tour of a live-dinosaur theme park (fool!), and yet security fails and he seems unable to escape the tyrannosauruses, or the raptors, or the many other variables of our kind that the purveyors of the park had anachronistically lumped together for the purposes of capitalism. Truthfully, an unenviable position.
And yet, where dinosaurs were (and are!) so indisputably real, the human gods are indisputably not real. They are pretty characters for paintings, assuredly, and for sculptures made of marble or bronze. They make excellent fodder for jokes in Disney movies, and like the mystical unicorn, they inevitably charm. But in all my years of study, I have never met one. They are notoriously reticent, even when one sends the most cordial requests and copies of one’s impressive c.v., and this despite their depictions in the national poetries as chatty and attention-seeking! It seems the most sensible response for humans to adapt would be to reject their looming phantasmal deities and to accept dinosaurs as overlords – given our very real ability to eat them, as opposed to Yhwh’s rather feeble threat that he will fry them with lightening. The white witch Martha of Stewart has survived this punishment no fewer than three times already! It seems obvious that god is a construct as surely as the lego monster. Why do we not take his place and gobble up the human race?
All best wishes,
Jamieopteryx
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