About Red Tales

Here's an evolving electronic collection of short prose pieces, with a poem contributed occasionally. Brevity guides. Although sometimes a piece will run to 900 words, most pieces are much shorter. Here one may find erotica, flash fiction, brief observations, and modest improvisations. Another rule is that each piece must have something to do with"red"; at least the word has to appear in each piece functionally. . . . All pieces are numbered and titled, so there's a de facto table of contents running down the rail below, under "Labels" (scroll down a bit). Browse for titles that look interesting, if you like. Thank you for stopping by. Look for some red today, tonight.

"Flaming June," by Frederick Lord Leighton

"Flaming June," by Frederick Lord Leighton

Friday, August 15, 2008

2. Faith, Science, and Crimsonology

If you believe in evolution, in Evolution, then you must believe we evolved with the capacity to want to pray, and with the capacity to pray. Prayer apparently helped to perpetuate us in our several niches. Otherwise we probably would have been perpetuated without the prayer-behavior.

If you believe in divinity, in creation by uppest echelon, then you must believe that the highest power approved a design which led eventually to the scientific method, which produced reasons to believe in Evolution. Or you must believe that the scientific method is the work of the devil and that God chooses not to put a stop to the nonsense. Or you must believe that, allowed free will, some chose the scientific method, and God may or may not like the choice. Or you must believe . . . .

Regardless of what you believe, you are permitted to consider red. Its origins. Its species. Its functions in nature. The extent to which it does and does not exist in pink and orange and purple. Consideration is not belief.

Red: a divine rage seething in lava. Red rhetoric: the wordless word of a bird’s plume. Red: ripe emergency of cherries, strawberries, tomatoes. Red exists within and without phenomena such as words, such as red.

Red of Communism, red of Christianism, red of Redism.

Professors of Crimsonology theorize ruddily at their annual Crimson Conference. The field of redonics is coming into its own. A red future lies before us. These are exciting, corpuscular times indeed.

Say your red prayers, red believer. Conduct your controlled red experiments, red scientist. Speak to us through your prophetic prism, red divinity. In the name of red, exalt red’s redness.
For thine is the red and the red. I am red that I am red. Red be with you. Jack be red. And also with you.

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