Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Danusha V. Goska, PhD, has lived in Africa, Asia, Europe, on both coasts, and in the heartland, of America. Her writing has won several awards.

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ROUNDFIRE BOOKS

Chapter One

Saturday, Midnight

Dear Lord Randolph Court-Wright, Marquis of Alnwick,

Don't you feel embarrassed going through life with such a ridiculous name? Look, I'm an American, and I'm damn proud of it. We fought a revolution to oust gits like you, and here we are importing your ilk to tell us that there is no God. Me? No title; I am not "Mira of Paterson." I am a Bohunk with a keyboard and a modem.

I just saw you on TV – public TV, no less. My tax dollars paid for that cushy leather chair you languished in. I kept waiting for Bill Moyers to provide us with your resume. What qualified you to tell millions of viewers that there is no God, and that there are, furthermore, no soul, no afterlife, no ESP, no meaning, no elves, no magic, no Tinker Bell – how else did you put it – nothing but "leaden matter"? (Why "leaden"? Why not "gold"?)

Your bona fides consist in this: you are tall, you are blond, you have an aquiline nose, you've climbed Mount Everest, and you made some discovery about the first few seconds after the Big Bang. Also, you speak in that insufferable accent typical of an upper class English git. I've never used the word "git," but I've heard it in British movies, and I want to insult you in terms native to your lingo.

"He lives with his head in the primordial nebula," Moyers said. "His body is amongst us, but his mind resides in a few nanoseconds around the Big Bang." Gag me.

Moyers had other talking heads on, of course; the guest-list was sanctioned by the Bureau of Political Correctness. There were two women, both slender and attractive. One an actress; one a poetess, one of those beautiful, older Irish women whose beauty I just want to steal; we Slavs do not age well. Their thick hair goes gray and stays thick and they all look like sages, no matter how much folderol they mutter about mists, salmon and St. Patrick, the Potato Famine, the Little People; Celtic harp music rose in the background and I'm sure the PBS fundraisers' telephones rang off the hook. There was a black liberation theologian in dreads and kente cloth. One Asian, whose entire identity seemed to be that he was the one Asian. One Captain of Industry. Diverse? There were no poor people. No ugly people. No diseased people. Why do you people get to tell the rest of us whether or not there is a God? How about six million dead Jews? Isn't the Holocaust the signature event that types that question IN ALL CAPS?

I became excited when Moyers identified you as a skeptic who questions everything. I actually put down my fork and stopped chewing my pasta fazool. I question everything, and I find that that makes me very lonely. If you want to talk about Islam and terror, for example, you know that the Politically Correct will resist anything that implicates Islam. On the other hand, self-identified "Patriots" won't allow any critical statements about US petro-dependency. Abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage: people bring so many agendas to these matters that real, probing questions are never asked or answered. But you were as dogmatic in your atheism as a Monty Python parody of a pope.

Lord Randolph, just between you and me, does it matter to you at all that you lie? You lie like a Soviet propaganda minister. You create a false dichotomy: either one is a thinker, or one is a believer. Either one is a flea-bitten person of faith, scuttling about some hovel, chaining human beings to superstition and fear – you glanced at the Irish poetess the moment you said this – cruel and unfair of you – or one is a whistle-clean scientist, gleaming in the new light of truth. One is Prometheus, liberating humanity. Does it matter to you at all that these words of yours are complete, unadulterated bullshit?

Lord Randolph Court-Wright, I know that you know that Isaac Newton, frequently dubbed the greatest scientist and mathematician of all time, though he wrote reams of math and science, wrote even more about his own Christian faith. I know that you know that Copernicus and Galileo were devout Catholics. You know, also, that Louis Pasteur died with his rosary in his hands. You know that Max Planck was a church warden. You know of contemporary physicists who seek only equations and then cough up poetic admissions of ineluctable confrontations with God. You know that Einstein adamantly refused to be counted in the atheist census, though he was aggressively invited, and that he emphatically insisted on his own understanding of God as driving his science: I want to know the mind of God, Einstein said; "the rest are details." Johannes Kepler, Renee Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Gregor Mendel: Remove these Christian names and you've pretty much erased the scientific canon. I know that you know all of this. I know that you know that you are lying. What kind of a mind, what kind of a soul, lies behind lies like yours?

When I was a kid, my mother schlepped me to her home village in Slovakia. A few handmade houses plunked down between a river, fields of rye, and mountains you could hike to, hunt boar in; with another hour's climb, you entered medieval ruins; from those heights the village looked as it must have when the castle was first erected.

Mom and I arrived a few years after the Soviet tanks. The liberators who would free humanity from religious chains.

There was a priest in the village. He had been tortured. They just showed up one day and took him. He was gone for some months. They sent him back. He was broken. His body looked fine. His mind was gone. He could eat and dress and walk, but that was it. He was guided around town by the hand of a little girl. There was no question but that the villagers would tend for him. Nobody talked about it. He moved like Frankenstein. My blood ran cold.

There are these people, these people who rise up every so many years or so, and they speak really well, and they get others to listen. They get others to listen because they are smooth but loud and full of themselves and convinced that others must listen. These people have an intuition of the mob's simmering resentments, and they glom on to those incoherent grumblings, and preach them back in grandiloquent prose. And their message is always the same: "There are two kinds of people in this world. Only two. There's us, and there's them over there. And them over there, those people who are different from us, they, they are the cause of all of our woes." These slick speakers don't use their fists. No, they never hurt anyone. They pave the way for all hellish mayhem.

Is that what you are all about?

But you know what I was thinking the whole time I was watching you on TV? That this guy, in high school, got way more wedgies than blow-jobs. And that's why you don't believe in God. At least you don't believe in a God that is beyond you. Because you do believe in God, really, you believe in Lord Randolph Court-Wright, Marquis of Alnwick. You believe in your physics discoveries and your mountain climbing and your posh, Jane-Austen-movie accent. You believe in all of that so hard because when you were a fourteen-year-old science geek, before your legs bolted and your voice cracked, you were a little boy nerd and nobody liked you. The tough kids in school – there had to have been some tough kids, even just relatively tough, even in an English boarding school – the tough kids in school stole your self away from you, so you make your living stealing God away from us. And then you sit back in your...