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Letters From The Earth, Letter 6: Waiter! There's a Fly In My Ark! • The Devil’s Details • Episode 718

Letters From The Earth, Letter 6: Waiter! There’s a Fly In My Ark!

Letter Six opens with the funniest sentence in the book: “On the third day, about noon, it was found that a fly had been left behind.” The Ark turns around. Sixteen days of searching follow, and the fly is recovered and welcomed aboard with hymns of praise, the family standing uncovered out of reverence for its divine origin. It had not lacked for food — the multitudinous corpses had furnished it in rank and rotten richness.

Satan insists this was no accident. Without that one housefly, the repopulated world would have gone without typhoid fever — a disease he admires because it can wreck a patient without killing him, restoring him to his feet with a long life ahead and yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, and idiotic. Billions of sickbeds stocked, billions of cemeteries recruited, all from one fly, foreordained from the dawn of creation.

Then Satan hands over the key to the whole Bible God: jealousy. Among humans it ranks as a weakness, a trademark of small minds, a thing the smallest mind will lyingly deny. And here is God announcing it outright — I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God — which Satan says is only another way of saying: I am a small God, and fretful about small things.

The letter ends with the harshest passage in the book so far. Every mechanism of the human body has an enemy planned for it by the Creator. Not one has been overlooked. They are an organized army, a besieging army, moving by squad and company and regiment. It is the Creator’s Grand Army, and he is the commander in chief. And man’s chiefest pet name for his ferocious commander in chief is Our Father in Heaven.

We also get into whether we should eradicate mosquitoes now that we can, the Euthyphro problem explained via a turkey sandwich, and why this letter reads less like blasphemy and more like an old man’s grief.

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”