Numen's sign
In my world I am one of the Unabled.
Through a scientific imbalance, which I don't quite understand, I, and about ten percent of my world's populace, am unable to experience anything beyond normal human intellectual capacity. What does this mean? Well, I cannot see a ghost, for instance, or experience a transcendental moment, or have any kind of spiritual or religious experience. Unless we can be intellectually persuaded through scientific methods that something exists, the Unabled will not, and cannot, believe in it.
For centuries my kind were scorned and looked down upon due to our lack of faith in anything or anyone beyond human parameters. We were thought of as heartless, cold-blooded, and unromantic.
Then some trials were done on all the unbelievers, and it was discovered that when the lobes that normally elicit a supernatural experience were triggered in our brains, no such experience occurred. Our brains simply don't have the chemical makeup of a believer. We were not to blame, then, for our scepticism and unwillingness to believe. We were simply incapable.
Soon the harassment of our kind stopped, pity took hold, and we were given the mantle of 'unable'. We were used in positions which could utilise our qualities. We became mediators for international conflicts, lecturers in comparative religion and philosophy at universities, scientists and newspaper editors — any position which required a complete lack of religious baggage or spiritual moral parameters.
Of course before long a school of thought developed within our kind — and I admit to being in the vanguard — that asserted that we were not in fact un-able but rather super-able. We determined that if we, the small elite of the populace, contained no ability within our temporal lobes to feel supernatural and religious experiences, then that is how nature must surely have intended it.
The rest of the population, led astray by this aberration in their brains, had fallen into a delusion that such meta-physical phenomena could occur. The fact that 90 per cent of the population had this aberration as opposed to our meagre numbers just reassured us of our intellectual cultivation.
*****
On the 14th day of our summer, we have what is called 'Divine Day'. This is when the god worshipped in our world, called Numen, displays himself/herself/itself to the general populace. Numen does this by performing a miracle, often manipulating an aspect of