“The Presbyterians maintained that it did not make any difference whether you thought you were full of grace and were an exemplary Christian. God had decreed thousands of years before you were born, before the making of the universe, in fact, that this unborn person would be saved and that unborn person would be damned. Their belief was like Twain’s theory of pre-determinism. From the moment that the first primal atom bumped into the second created atom, a chain of motion was set up the directions of which were fixed by whether the primal atom collided with the second at this angle or that angle and the velocity it was traveling at when it bumped the other. If the angle and velocity had been different, everything that happened from then on would have been different. Your course through life was set. Nothing you did could change it. Everything you did was predetermined. To use twentieth-century computerese, preprogrammed.”
The catch was that you could not then say to yourself, “What the hell?” and live a dissolute godless life. You had to behave as if you were a complete Christian. What was worse, you had to be one. You had to truly believe; you could not be a hypocrite.
But you would not know until after you’d died whether God had chosen you to fly up to Paradise or to fall into the eternal flames of Hell.
“Actually, if the Presbyterians were right, you could be a wicked person all your life. But if God had marked you as one of the saved, you would repent at the last moment and rise up to eternal bliss. Who, however, was going to take the chance that that would happen?
“I should have told my parents about my spiritual agonies over this. They would have straightened me out by telling me that there was no such thing as predestination and a literal Hell. At least, they would have tried to ease my mind. But I said nothing to them—which gives you an idea of my communicativeness—and I suffered. They, of course, had no idea what I was being taught there in that church within walking distance. A short walk to Despair, Doubt, and Hell.”
“Did you really suffer that much?” Burton had said.
“Not all the time. Just now and then, here and there. After all, I was an active healthy boy. And I observed that, if the adults in the church really believed in predestination, they did not behave as if they did. They certainly weren’t obsessed with doubts and griefs about their strange doctrine. They paid it lip service in church and forgot about it as soon as they walked out. Maybe sooner.
“Also, reading “about Twain’s life, I saw that he did not believe in his godless and strictly mechanical universe. He acted as if he had free will even though he talked a lot about its absence from human beings.”
At the age of twelve, Frigate became an atheist.
“Rather, I should say, a devout believer in science as our savior. Science as used by rational people. However, I had forgotten that Swift had said, implied, anyway, that most people were Yahoos.”
He had hastened to amend and modify his statement. Most people were only Yahooish; only a minority were genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Yahoos. Too big a minority, though.
“Science could only be our savior in a limited sense and then only if not abused. But everything is abused and misused. I did not really learn that I was until thirty-five, though. Midway in my life, like Dante, I was just outside the Gates of Hell.”
“It took him a long time to realize that people are irrational most of the time and usually more than that,” Nur had said. “What an astounding revelation!”
“Not only the Paleolithic Age but also the bipedal ape lives in us,” Burton had said. “I’m not sure, though, that that is not an insult to the apes.”
Frigate had maintained for many years that there was no such thing as a soul. But it came to him that if God had not given Homo sapiens a soul, then it must make its own soul. He wrote a story based on the idea of artificial souls that insured people the immortality that God, if there was one, had neglected to create.
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