Mysterious Answers
Rationalism
The crowd gathered in the plaza numbered three thousand, perhaps more. They stood beneath the gray afternoon sky of a city that had forgotten how to believe in anything, their faces upturned toward the stone platform where the old man waited. Some had traveled hundreds of miles. Others had simply wandered in from the surrounding streets, drawn by the murmur of something happening, something different.
The Prophet Eli was not what they expected. He wore no robes, carried no sacred text. His clothes were simple, his beard untrimmed, his eyes the color of river stones. Only the wooden staff in his hand suggested anything of the ancient, and even that might have belonged to any wanderer on any road.
He had been preaching for seven years now. His followers called themselves the Rationalists, though the name sat uneasily on them, like borrowed clothes. They were seekers, doubters, people who had found the old faiths hollow but could not bear the emptiness that remained. Eli had given them something else. Not comfort, exactly. Something harder and more honest.
A woman in the front row clutched a worn notebook. A young man near the back recorded everything on his phone, the red light blinking steadily. Somewhere in the middle, a journalist from one of the last surviving newspapers waited with growing impatience, wondering if this would be worth the trip.
Eli raised his head. The crowd fell silent.
“Hear me, children of dust and breath.”
His voice carried without amplification, clear and unhurried. It was the voice of a man who had stopped rushing long ago.
“Two men came to me quarreling about a tree that fell in the wilderness, where no ear received its falling. One cried, ‘It made a sound!’ The other swore, ‘It did not!’ And they gnashed their teeth and tore their garments over this.”
A few people exchanged glances. They knew this parable, or thought they did.
“I asked them: ‘If you walked together to that forest, would one of you see the tree fallen to the east and the other to the west? If you placed there a device that captures sound, would it speak differently to each of you?’”
He paused. The silence stretched.
“They fell silent. For their dispute was wind. Words chasing words in an empty circle.”
His staff struck the stone beneath his feet. The sound rang out across the plaza like a bell.
“This is the teaching I give you: A belief that touches nothing is worth nothing.”
The woman with the notebook wrote furiously. The young man’s phone trembled slightly in his hand.
“You say you believe the fire comes from phlogiston? Then tell me, what will the fire do tomorrow because you believe this? If your answer is silence, your belief is a ghost. It haunts your mind but walks not in the world.”
He began to pace, his staff tapping against the stone with each step.
“You say the scholar Wilkinsen writes with ‘alienated resublimation’? Very well. What will you find when you open his book? If you cannot answer except with more words that lead to more words that lead to nothing you can touch or see or hear, then you have learned only to pass examinations. You have not learned truth.”
His voice softened. The crowd leaned forward as one.
“Our great gift, children, is that we can see the unseen. We speak of what lies beneath stones, beyond mountains, within the hearts of stars. No beast of the field can do this. But this gift is also our curse. For the same mind that builds true roads into the invisible can build roads that go nowhere. Beliefs connected only to other beliefs, floating above the earth like clouds that bring no rain.”
He opened his hands, palms upward, as if offering something invisible.
“So I give you this commandment: Do not ask what to believe. Ask what to expect. Let every belief pay its rent in anticipation. Let every teaching earn its place by telling you what must happen or what cannot happen. And if a belief sits idle, taking shelter in your mind while doing no work...”
His voice dropped to nearly a whisper.
“Evict it.”
He turned to leave. The crowd held its breath. Then he paused, looking back over his shoulder.
“The truth constrains. The truth forbids. The truth says ‘this, not that.’ Anything that permits all things is nothing at all.”
The last light of afternoon caught his face.
“Go, and believe only what will meet you in tomorrow’s sunrise.”
He walked down from the platform and disappeared into the crowd, which parted for him and then closed again, swallowing him whole. No one followed. No one spoke.
Within a decade, his words appeared in the back pages of every Bible, every Quran, every Torah and Tripitaka printed anywhere on Earth. Not by decree. Not by conquest. Simply because, in the end, no one could find a reason to leave them out.