The Day the Whispers Began
The day the whispers began was the last day of Ramadan. Many--almost two billion people--believed Gabriel was giving new revelations to the faithful.
The whispers were unintelligible, felt to be some exotic dialect, long extinct.
Then, Catholic women were hearing them, too. Again, it was felt to be the angel, Gabriel, because of his message given so long ago to the blessed mother. But Catholic men began hearing them a week later. Again, the whispers were unintelligible
The Jews were next, but only their first-born children. Again, unintelligible.
Soon all religions had those who heard them. Even the atheists began hearing them, with the unsurprising decline in the world's atheist numbers. Yet, the Pope, Imans, rabbis, and any official church representatives were deaf to them.
The whispers could not be recorded. Only silence was laid down when this was attempted. Linguistic experts weighed in, but a consortium of scholars was unable to put down in writing what was being heard by each faction.
The whispers, when mimicked by talented speakers into voiced utterances, remained gibberish.
Whispers are as much an exclusively human thing as music, literature, poetry, art, and--now--religion. Yet, unlike those, which augment the human "to be" to new heights of fulfillment, a whisper is a degradation, a devaluation--not of what is being said, but of the one saying it. Whispered just so, the speaker's message can be without gender, age, accent, or any other identifiable mien. It is stripped down of all speaker attributes except for one:
Urgency.
Whispers are delivered furtively. In secret. In the shortest possible distance from mouth to ear. And a proper secret, always whispered, also is always urgent. Something meant for just one person to know.
Urgently.
Those of faith heard the urgency but couldn't listen. Listening required the ear of gestalt to glean the message of an aggregate hearing--perception--flowing together from the different whispers.
Thus, the only way the whispers--this urgency, this message--could be properly delivered to the faithful was when they reconciled their individual disparate beliefs with all other beliefs vying for the One True Religion--and truly began listening.
Thus, the urgency went unanswered. It was the message in a bottle, and it was floating away.