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Letters From The Earth, Letter 7: Noah And His Family Get Hooked! • The Devil’s Details • Episode 719

Letters From The Earth, Letter 7: Noah And His Family Get Hooked!

Letter Seven finds Noah’s family aboard and saved — if that could be called an advantage, Satan says, since no intelligent person over sixty would consent to live his life again. They were saved, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows, obese with them, distended like balloons. Enough had to be preserved to supply future races with desolating diseases, and there were only eight people aboard to serve as hotels.

Typhoid, cholera, lockjaw, consumption, black plague, and hundreds of other aristocrats — golden bearers of God’s love to man — all sumptuously housed in the lungs, the heart, the brain, and particularly the guts, where the great intestine was the favorite resort. They gathered by countless billions and sang hymns of praise, and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. Their principal hymn: Constipation, constipation, the joyful sound proclaim, till man’s remotest entrail shall praise its Maker’s name.

Then it turns. Many poor people go barefoot because they can’t afford shoes, and the Creator saw his opportunity. He always has his eye on the poor — nine-tenths of his disease inventions were meant for them. You can tell because one of the pulpit’s favorite names for him is the Friend of the Poor, and the pulpit never pays him a compliment with a vestige of truth in it. When science exterminates a disease that’s been working for God, God gets the credit. He is the slowest mover in the universe, and in all history never thought of a noble deed first — he always arrives just after somebody else did it, and annexes the dividend. The hookworm cure was going to cost a million dollars, and God was just reaching for his wallet when Mr. Rockefeller pushed in ahead of him.

The letter closes with a convert who asks his priest how to be worthy of his new faith and is told to imitate his Father in Heaven. He studies his Bible thoroughly and does exactly that. The results are catastrophic. When he reports back, the priest changes the subject and asks what kind of weather he’s having up his way.

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.”