The sweet taste of hypocrisy

Chapter 5

Texas was a fine place to eliminate morons from the human experience. But first, a final test to see if he was correct about his powers.

Nom was driving a stolen car. He needed to get off the road and get some sleep, before he was forced to test his powers against the might of the Texas Highway Patrol. He saw the glowing sign of the Grand Hyatt ahead. It was next to a municipal airport.

How perfect. He thought. I'll dump the stolen car in the long-term parking lot, get a rental, and then check in for some sleep. Who knows? Perhaps I will find an ideal lab rat along the way.

Nom pulled into the parking lot and rented a luggage carrousel. Loading his gear, he left the lot ticket in the stolen car, and walked into the airport. Conveniently, a trash can by the door accepted the keys to Tripp's father's car.

Thanks to the Patriot Act, Nom knew that he wouldn't have a choice but to register the rental in his own name—a convincing fake ID would take too much time. The woman at the counter for Enterprise Rental quickly had him on the road in a late model Ford Fusion. Since Nom was from another state, it was easy to claim he had just flown in for the week. Why, if the feds checked out his little fib, they would see that he did have cousins in the area. The flight bit could be seen as an oversight by an airport worker.

Nom knew he would need to do a number of experiments to get even a basic idea as to the scope of his powers. He could kill, but could he simply maim? Could he reverse one of his wishes, or alter it? Was there a range limit to his gift? His efforts to study that last one with Tripp had not exactly been precise. Could he eliminate multiple people at one time, or could he only effect one? Was there a limit on how gruesome a death he could inflict, or on how slow of a death?

The irony was that the power of death made Nom feel alive for the first time in years. Probably since around the time that he had lost his faith and become an atheist. The old saying, ignorance is bliss, is only true if you are ignorant of your ignorance.

Nom had once been ignorant of the fact that there was no god. In his upbringing, Nom had been taught that the King James version of the Bible, and it alone, was the answer. Whether it be the pocket copy he carried, or the study Bible on his night stand, that book was literally the user manual to the universe, written by the coder who had engineered everything, and who was actively in control to that very moment.

Any answer he needed was simply a Strong's Concordance search, or a browse through the Spurgeon or Scofield Commentary away. What need was there to know anything, or even think for himself, when it was all just a few pages away?

Christianity was easy: simply blindly believe. Reject the information reality fed you, and obey regardless of the consequences. After all, the afterlife was the real life. Atheism was hard, the consequences were real, and the answers had to be won rather than simply given. Faith was easy, just be a good little robot, and do what the bronze age myth told you to do. Knowledge and reality had to be studied and interpreted through reason. It was back breaking never ending work.

Nom put in a reasonable start and effort at being a good atheist. He obsessively self-educated himself. After getting two undergrad degrees, a masters, and studying for a second one, he admitted to himself that he was miserable.

What was the point? What could he possibly accomplish, regardless of his credentials? Nom's great dream was to start a national movement to finally crush religion through its greatest weakness, children. Nom wanted a law, one that made it so that no child could ever be brain washed into a cult as he had been. True freedom was not freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. All children would be legally entitled to a public, secular education, regardless of their parents' wishes. No child would even be exposed to religion until they were an adult and could legally consent. In Nom's mind, religious educators were worse than pedophiles. They did not only defiled the bodies of children, but they destroyed young growing minds.

It was a task that Nom threw himself into. For a while it seemed that the American people were ready to potentially embrace a change of this magnitude. The Affordable Care Act was passed, the first black President of the United States was elected, and for the first time in US history almost a quarter of the population identified as non-religious. In those moments, it actually looked as if the modern political dark ages of the US, started by Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, were at an end. Nom took a minor civil service job to support himself while he completed his education. He would need government experience before he could found the non-for profit he dreamed of using to spearhead his vision.

Then the walls came tumbling down. For years the most ill-educated and moronic fools that the GOP could muster rallied the forces of the TEA Party. Behind the scenes, using their demented senior citizen activists, they managed to take over most of the municipal level governments in the US and use that power base to take over state level and national governments.

Their average budget proposal called for a slash to social welfare programs for the neediest of Americans. Why should the US Government feed the people it impoverished? Mass incarceration, slashed regulation, gutted unions, an unlivable minimum wage—if this caused poverty who cared? After all, that same money could be spent on a wall. One that would remove twelve percent of the economy by deporting innocent people. Even better, it could be spent on new military toys, like aircraft carriers. The US already spent more than all of its allies and enemies combined, what was a bit more waste? Then they could take the rest, and give subsidies to corporate profits through tax cuts.

Funnily enough, many of the Republican voters were themselves beneficiaries of the very programs they elected Republicans to eliminate. When newly elected Republicans tried to do exactly that, suddenly, their voters were in the media spotlight protesting.

If the American populace could manage to vote in the most regressive regime since Herbert Hoover, what hope did Nom have of achieving his wish in even ten lifetimes? He could have gone to his grave a happy man knowing he had simply started the ball rolling on protecting minors from religion, but to work already knowing that the bet was a loser? Who could do that?

One of the turning points in his evangelical faith had been when he had discovered that having the faith of a mustard seed did not mean that he could literally levitate mountains. Most modern Christians would claim that Bible verses were metaphorical, but Nom had been raised to literally interpret the Bible. It was a soul crushing revelation that God was not a genie, with the Bible as his lamp. The election of 2016 crushed his faith in saving mankind just as thoroughly.

In many ways Nom had been slowly coming to the conclusion that the only way to save humanity was to cleanse it. The world was overpopulated, polluted, and corrupt. Morons bred like rabbits. The natural forces that had restrained the human population since it began had been curbed thanks to modern technology. In the US, Nom's native country, a cult had long existed that worshiped the common man. That same cult cursed learning and intelligence. The folk wisdom of a plumber about economics was somehow more valuable than someone with an actual degree in the subject.

What the US needed was an apocalypse. Nom was sure if the rest of the Western World would benefit from the same. The same trends that had destroyed the US were now appearing in Europe. The UK had voted to succeed from the EU, racist and anti-immigrant parties were on the rise in central Europe in a wave not seen since the 1930's, and regressive conservative parties were winning election after election. It was building to the same crescendo America had seen only a few short years before.

The woods around Nom's childhood home in northern Michigan were occasionally set on fire by the DNR. The native bird, Kirtland warblers, were only capable of breeding in the aftermath. Not that they needed ash and desolation; they needed a specific species of pine tree. Those trees were short-lived, and had a problem: their pine cones had a coating that had to be burned off before they released their seeds. No fire, no trees. No trees, no birds.

Nom was convinced that the same must be true for humanity. He was not sure if he needed to burn down the whole forest, or just a grove, but humanity needed to lose a lot of stupid people so that its best and brightest could flourish without all the dead wood.

Taking his rental car to the Grand Hyatt Nom checked in and decided to start experimenting…

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