There once was a beetle of fierce belief made fidgety by the sun.
 
Uncertainty makes small creatures nervous, and surely the sun is the king of uncertainty: never in the same place twice in a day; some days bright, some days dull, some days barely seen at all. At night it wholly disappears.
 
This inconstancy worked on the beetle's nerves. As he rolled his ball of dung back and forth, he would glower indignantly at the sky: "Up or down!" he would shout, "Make up your mind!"
 
The sun did not reply, for the sun is above such things.
 
Realizing he could not change the sun's ways, he sought instead to penetrate its mysteries. But the truth of the sun was elusive: It seemed near, yet could not be grasped; seemed tiny, yet touched every visible thing; seemed puny, but warmed all that it touched.
 
It had no shadow.
 
These observations filled his heart with wonder and his mind with fear. The sun was a deep ocean of mystery that threatened to capsize the fragile craft of his belief.
 
Here is what the beetle believed:
 
 
From these beliefs he derived the comfort of mystery.
 
But his compact and straight-hearted theosophy was inadequate to the task of explaining the questions that arose from his questions.
 
He came to understand that though it had no shadow of its own, the sun was nevertheless intimately associated with the shadows of all other things.
 
He now realized that the sun's movements were not, as he had thought, random, but highly predictable. He trembled to think of how this discovery might be bent to the service of future foraging and building.
 
The sun's movements now seemed more understandable. Each day it rose from the earth, flew through the sky, and burrowed at night into the warmed earth once more.
 
Exactly as he did.
 
And then a wonder not wondered before: was the sun in reality a glowing ball of dung - a cosmic brood-ball in which nested all the beetles yet to be born? And what immense eternity of a beetle might roll such a thing?
 
Such a beetle must be the father of the universe.
 
With this single leap of intuition, the beetle fell under the spell of his own conjecture and became a home to new beliefs.
 
This is what the beetle now believed:
 
 

From these beliefs he derived the comfort of comprehension.

* * * * * *
 
But there was little comfort to be found in his attempts to evangelize his epiphany. Upon hearing his discoveries, the learned elders would, according to their separate predilections, hiss, spit or fling dung at him. And so he quickly learned to confine his teachings to simpler minds - an auspicious choice because there were so many more of them.
 
Little by little the little sect grew, and in time became the dominant theocracy. What had been a spider web of supposition was now a mountain of truth. What had been heresy was now unarguable doctrine.
 
* * * * * *
 
Which is not to say that there weren't challenges and occasional setbacks. The most significant threat to the new orthodoxy arose in speculation - mostly by the young - that beetledom had descended from the lower soft-wings; and, most controversially, that their hard, brilliantly iridescent wing-cases were once as flimsy as butterflies.
 
This disgusting theory was received by the elders of the established faith with purest horror, for it implied that the Father-Beetle was neither omnipotent nor eternal, but in fact was subject to the whims of the more potent and previously unreckoned force of evolution. They especially hated the implications of vile origin.
 
When the first sign of apostasy emerged the elder beetles thought to let it be, In hopes that the dissidents would tire of their journey into the waters of foreign theology and ultimately return to the familiar shores of the true faith.
 
But when it became clear that such reunion was unlikely, the defenders of the faith took a more aggressive tack and called for an inquisitorial examination of the sectarian rebels.
 
But things went awry. The inquiry that the elders had sought to limit to a mere question of heresy quickly became a trial of greater scope.
 
To the elders' horror, testimony served principally to support the heterodoxy. Only through desperate judicial l machinations were the heretics at last convicted and subsequently sentenced to de-segmentation and reduction to their least components.
 
But the damage had been done. From the trial sprouted seeds of doubt that grew into a general disdain for mystery and a consequent hunger for certainty. Faith was outmoded, if a thing was true then it was demonstrably true. Proof was now the prophet of the new God, Science.
 
In reaction, the faithful instantly turned their backs on the secular world. Where they were once joyously expansive, they were now morbidly introverted and devoted themselves to an obsessive preoccupation with ideological purity within their own ranks.
 
The beetle who had discovered the truth of the Father-Beetle became Confessor-General of the Faith, charged with the task of identifying and exorcising doubt and disbelief, a process that inevitably came to involve a great deal of de-segmentation and component-izing.
 
The sheer volume of religious error and consequent carnage shook the philosophical beetle to his core. He now realized how easily evil could enter even the staunchest heart. He saw how out of place he and his co-religionists were in the modern world, and he understood the extent to which the secular plane had overtaken, and now threatened to engulf, his simple faith. The once bold beetle was now afraid, and his fear made him hard.
 
As a result, the faith became even more withdrawn and rigid, allowing not even the slightest deviation from doctrine: what was written was true in its every word. There was increased emphasis on ritual and public profession of faith, and death was the mandatory remedy for impiety.
 
The secular community viewed these developments with fearful disapproval and rising hostility - attitudes that only confirmed the Confessor General's growing suspicion that the secular world intended to war against his faith.
 
The faith had successfully been purged of its dissonant elements, and in the hearts of those that remained was only the clean pure flame of conviction and militant preparedness. All passionately believed that they tread the only path of truth, and that differing beliefs were not merely erroneous but in fact dangerous.
 
One day, a band of secular foragers strayed - perhaps intentionally, perhaps accidentally, but certainly ill-advisedly - into an area regarded by the faithful as sacrosanct - a sacrilege met with instant challenge.
 
Who knows how these things begin? An offense is registered; tempers flare; words are exchanged, then blows; lives may be surrendered; then, on both sides, the cries for justice or vengeance - whichever is nearest to hand, and soon opposing forces are girding for battle and sending up prayers for victory.
 
And so, on a crisp fall morning, the legions of the faithful faced the warriors of the intellect.
 
The Confessor General smiled broadly, it was a propitious day. The sun was high and showered the followers of the Father-Beetle with light and warmth. All about him he saw only tokens of ultimate victory.
 
He envisioned the massive de-segmentation and component-izing that would follow his signal to attack. There was no hatred in him. He felt only love and pity for his enemies. For those who had fallen into evil were in every sense souls in distress. And for such as these death would come as a mercy, would relieve their torment, and usher them that much sooner into the presence and immanent grace and glory of the Father-Beetle.
 
His heart brimmed with joy as he gave the signal.
 
Oh, how blessed to be in the service of the Father!