Karen seemed to go inside herself for a moment, deep in thought. Already far from Heather, Karen actually backed up farther, to the room’s opposite corner, in front of the orange sunlight in the window. Her long shadow fell on Brandon. Soon she shook her head and said, “You keep asking me how I know my God is real. Let me turn that question on you. How do you know that He’s not?”
“I
don’t
know,” Heather said. “Not completely. I’m willing to admit how little I know about the universe. My beliefs could very well be wrong. But if someone shows me evidence that contradicts my beliefs, I’m willing to change them. Are you? Is any religious person?”
“It’s not a religion, Heather. It’s a relationship.”
“Seems like a pretty one-sided relationship.”
“If you had faith, you’d see, just like I do. The only reason you don’t know what it’s like to know God is because you’ve never opened your heart to Him.”
“And maybe the only reason you still believe in God is that you’ve never read any skeptical arguments. You’ve relied on Christian misinformation to tell you everything you know about us and our views.”
“And you’ve read the Bible?” Karen said.
“I have, actually. A lot of nonreligious people have, and a lot of us have seriously considered Christianity’s points, on Christianity’s own terms. Can Christians say the same about our views?”
Brandon never knew what Karen’s response to that question would be, because mercifully, Tim arrived then and insisted that this was neither the time nor the place for such a confrontation. Brandon was ushered back to the men’s dressing room, Pastor Noyce was led away somewhere else, and Heather had been left alone to stew or get dressed, or both.
•
Just as the golf cart was climbing up from another of the area’s many valleys on another of its many empty roads, the headlights turned off.
“Uh oh,” Karen said, jiggling the key in the ignition. Advancing up the incline, the cart quickly slowed, then stopped. “Battery’s dead. Oh, blazes.”
The humans groaned in dismay, but Thorn was relieved to have something to distract the women from their probing interrogation. They’d spent the entire ride asking him about his identity, his past, and his role in tonight’s events. He’d managed to dodge their questions so far, but he felt if he had to keep it up for much longer, Karen would indeed shove him off the side of the cart as Brandon had suggested. And then he’d never get the humans to safety.
Karen pounded a fist on the steering wheel, briefly honking the horn. “Augh! I was afraid of this. Brandon, do you know how to work these things? Is there any kind of extra battery or something we can use?”
“Uh, no. Not that I know of.”
“At least it lasted this long,” Heather said. “The airport’s… well, it’s not far, I think. We should be able to walk the rest of the way, easy.”
And quickly
, thought Thorn. The night was close to ending, and with it, the Sanctuary.
Karen hit the steering wheel again, then got out of the golf cart and started a brisk walk forward, up the road. The rest of them exchanged quick glances, then jumped up to follow her.
“Lord, we’re in a dark place right now,” Karen said as she walked, her hands trembling. “Please watch over us. Please let us get to safety.”
Thorn wanted to speak words of comfort to the woman, but he knew that coming from him, his words might have the opposite effect, so he remained silent.
As the group continued to climb the winding road toward the top of the hill, Thorn kept looking east, hoping he wouldn’t see dawn. Were it not for the darkness, he’d have led them on a shorter route directly through the trees, but in their current state he feared they might hurt themselves in the underbrush, or get separated from each other.
Without the hum of the golf cart’s motor and the squeak of its seats, the Sanctuary had grown so quiet that Thorn could hear the humans’ breathing. Their footsteps on the asphalt sounded like hammers on wood. No insects buzzed. No wind rustled the pine branches. No cars passed. The Sanctuary had likely not intended for any of its inhabitants to make it this far out.
“We can’t get in that plane with him,” Karen suddenly said, walking behind Virgil now, probably to keep an eye on him. “We need to find a car and get away. He’ll kill us all. What are we still doing here with him?”
No one responded to her, and Thorn was so afraid of what Brandon and Heather’s reactions might be, he refused to actually turn and see what they were. But the group kept walking.
“Are you all crazy?” Karen said. “You’re walking right into a trap!”
“Do I really have to say this again?” Heather asked with more than a hint of annoyance. “If Virgil wanted to hurt us, why has he saved us multiple times tonight? We’re not going to the plane because
he
wants us to. We’re going to the plane because
we
think it’s the best way out of here. So don’t blow a gasket. We’re watching him. And Virgil, it’d go a long way toward helping us calm Karen down if you’d just tell us what’s really going on here.”
“You’re lying to yourself,” Karen said before Thorn even had a chance to respond.
“It’s called reason,” Heather said.
“That’s funny, because it sounds a lot like faith.”
Thorn turned to look at the women. Heather was shaking her head and looking up at the sky, like she was trying to wrap her head around Karen’s accusation. “Like faith? What?”
“That’s right,” Karen said. “You have faith just as much as I do. You have faith in
reason
. And in all kinds of more innocent things, too. You have faith that Brandon loves you, for instance.”
“Hey, no. We’re not going there again. Brandon is affectionate with me, he spends time with me, he sacrificed his social ties in Bristol so he could
marry
me. That’s all evidence. I don’t need faith to believe that Brandon loves me, and there’s no good reason for Brandon to require my faith. Like I said earlier: why would God value faith?”
“I mean no offense by this, Heather, but at some point along the way, I think you decided that you wanted to fit in with your pleasure-seeking friends.”
“Jeez, give it a rest,” Heather muttered under her breath.
But Karen continued as if Heather hadn’t spoken. “You decided that you didn’t like the idea of a loving God who had standards that He wants you to live by. And I don’t fault you for that. Lots of people get seduced by mainstream science and make the same choices. But you have to understand that scientists have created their theories about a world without God precisely
because
they don’t want to believe in Him. Most of modern science has been built around a selfish desire to ignore God’s grace, so that people can live carefree lives.
Hedonistic
lives. But God is trying to draw you nearer to Him, Heather. You don’t have to believe those lies. All it takes is for you to open your heart and accept God’s offer of grace. This might be exactly the night to do it, too. Maybe that’s been God’s purpose through all of this.”
Heather’s feet shuffled on the asphalt. One of her fists was clenched. “So you
know
that I haven’t thought my views through?” she said. “You
know
that the entire argument I made to you before the wedding was just a cheap excuse to allow me to live in sin? I’ll tell you what, Ms. Noyce. Atheism isn’t faith. Atheism is an absence of faith. For example,
you
are an atheist of Allah. That should give you some indication of how my own thinking process works.
“And here’s how science
doesn’t
work: science doesn’t assume that God is nonexistent, then develop evidence to support that assumption. If science did work that way, it’d be faith-based reasoning—not science.
“Now here’s how science
does
work. Science looks at evidence with as little bias as possible, then sees where that evidence leads. We don’t start with answers and then go back to questions, like faith does. Scientists start from a place of humility: from not knowing anything. We start with questions, and
then
we get answers. Those answers aren’t always perfect, or all-encompassing, but because we can test whether or not they’re true, those ideas get either falsified or refined over time. Unlike faith, science is self-correcting. It defends itself against bias. I can see, hear, touch, and smell science, too. Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather trust
that
method as a source of knowledge and morality than an ancient book written by people who knew almost nothing about how the world worked. And if you—”
“Enough! That ‘ancient book’ provides a moral compass for me, and for billions of people around the world.”
“So the Bible passages encouraging slavery, rape, and genocide have to be understood in context, I guess.”
“There are no such encouragements in the Bible, and if you think there are, then yes, you have to read it more carefully to understand it.”
Thorn had often wondered about the Bible himself—even in the depths of his depravity, thousands of years ago. There was a time, before the Bible, when demonkind had grown tired. Some had talked openly of abandoning their fight against the Enemy, of just quietly waiting and doing nothing for all time. A few had even tried to defect. Thorn imagined that this behavior would only have grown worse over time.
But then something had happened to change that trajectory: the Enemy spoke to the humans and made them write a Book. And ironically, that Book had not only influenced the humans—it had rejuvenated the demons as well. The truth of the matter was that before the Book, the demons had lacked direction, because they had never known the details of God’s real plan. But the Bible… it offered them a blueprint. It showed them precisely what to fight against.
It gave them new hope.
Thorn had spotted quite a few inconsistencies in it, though. He knew the God of the Old Testament well. This was the God who had killed the innocent firstborn sons of Egypt during the plagues, who had sanctioned slavery and rape in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, 2 Samuel, and elsewhere. (Comically, demons had fought against rape and slavery for hundreds of years for this very reason.) In the days of the Israelites, God had been a merciless, xenophobic commander, demanding animal sacrifices from His friends and blood from His enemies.
But somewhere between the Old Testament and the New Testament, God changed. After the Roman Empire blossomed and Christ was put to the cross, God became a loving father figure, welcoming all human races into His forgiving embrace. This sudden Biblical jump from wrath to kindness had never made sense to Thorn before. But it did now—now that he’d met the true, limited, and somewhat bipolar God face to face. Thorn understood now that God’s attitudes could change over time, and that as a result, it was only natural that He would amend some of His policies.
But why did He need to send His son as a sacrifice? How did that factor into His tests? Why not just forgive humans directly if they passed the tests?
Both eons ago and now, Thorn could find no ultimate answers to these questions. It was enough to make him doubt the accuracy of the story of Christ that demons had fought so hard against… though naturally he’d never dared to share even a glimmer of this doubt with his fellow demons, lest they think him weak. Humans who doubted the Bible’s authenticity were seen as prey; demons who doubted it were seen as fools.
It was true that the Good Book seemed to represent the combined output of many middling human authors, mixing hearsay and legends over the course of many centuries, each one heedless of the fact that their writing was inconsistent with what had come before. But despite all of this, the Bible as a whole must have been true—or true enough, anyway—since it had been written thanks to direct divine inspiration from the Enemy Himself. Or so the argument went.
And thus demonkind had been obligated to combat it.
Thorn only briefly mulled these matters over before tuning back in to the women’s argument. It was an argument that he—having heard both of these positions vigorously defended thousands of times before—found rather dull. But at least the conversation had veered away from whether or not they should trust Virgil. And that was all that mattered for now.
Heather was droning on about science again. “Now, there are certainly a few disreputable scientists. There are scientists who fake their evidence for profit and prestige. But in science, we can get
even more
profit and prestige by proving those people wrong. If I think that a prominent hypothesis is false, I have incentives to prove it false, and other scientists will celebrate me for doing so! There’s no more a conspiracy among scientists to fabricate evidence against faith than there is a conspiracy among forest rangers to fabricate evidence against Bigfoot. We see what we see, we don’t see what we don’t see, and we accept that.”
“Well, I believe that the realm of science can never comprehend the nature of God,” Karen said, keeping Brandon between her and Heather as they treaded up the hill. “I believe He’s much greater than science.”
“And I think He’s probably not real at all.”
Thorn couldn’t resist chiming in. “And I believe God is an androgynous, fingernail-biting, twenty-five-year-old animal lover with sparkly blue hair, plants growing out of His skin, a weird guttural voice, and a temper He can only control if He has a terrified angel playing the harp for Him.”
Thorn’s contribution to the conversation was met with silence, save for their footfalls. Heather, Karen, and Brandon all stared at him with expressions of utter befuddlement.
Thorn sighed wryly. He half-wished the Judge were here to appreciate the humans’ squabbling with him. “But hey, what do I know?” he finished, then waved them back to their debate.
Karen picked right back up where she’d left off. “What if you’re wrong, Heather? What if you die and go to Hell? And what if you take Brandon there with you?”
“What if
you’re
wrong, and you waste the one life that you do have on following superstition, wishing for an imagined afterlife?”
“Okay, look, darling. You don’t have to take my word on any of this. We have all the evidence we need walking right here with us.” Karen motioned to Brandon, whose eyes focused forward like he very much did not want to be involved in this discussion. “Brandon was such a happy kid when he was growing up, always running around playing with friends, eager to lend anyone a helping hand. But now he’s gotten your ideas in his head, and look at his life. He’s miserable. Even at his own wedding! Without God in our lives, we lose all joy, all meaning. Emptiness is all that remains. Sadness and sorrow. Purposelessness.”