Mortals

where every mind is set free. And your heart is for what minds set free at last might do together, with all these… these chains and curbs and dodges struck away. You see in your heart a world made by minds standing straight up at all times, where in past times most were stooping or trammeled down. You see a beautiful place, differing in all ways to this place.

“Ehe, yes, perhaps such can be… when we have done away with all this that you see, begging of children, this suffering whilst the rich are opening their hands the wider to clutch more and more of this country. Soon they will have all the cattle, and the villages will be roofless places, and then sand and dust. And there will be even more of the poor than at present pushing in from those villages to fill up Old Naledi until it is a solid ring of suffering around us. And… sha! Yes, it is a shame, what you see about you here, but in Sehitwa, in Shorobe, you can see worse. Come with me once to Shorobe. Well, I have said everything.”

The silence that followed was difficult, Ray could tell. It would have to be.

When Morel spoke, his voice was cold and loud, but there was a fine tremor in it at first.

“You are wrong, Kerekang.”

There was another silence, until Morel began again. “Kerekang, listen to me please.

“You remember when we began to discuss these things for the first time and I told you that faith was a terrible poison and you laughed because you thought I was making too much of it because in your experience it was a weak thing. You had been living in the U.K. where the established church is indeed in a rather etiolated condition. You found it hard to see the church as a live part of anything that people were deciding to do or not to do. This is what you compared it to. You told me that when you first ate in a good restaurant in England, the first couple of times, I believe, you said that when the proprietor came to the table to ask how you’d liked the meal, you’d been truthful, praised a couple of things but criticized others. And you’d seen a certain reaction among your friends and in the proprietor, of shock. And from that you had realized that obviously the custom was quickly to praise everything that had been served, whether you had liked it or not. And you proposed to me that religion was like that. Religion was like the protocol of saying everything was delicious, with the proprietor knowing it was unlikely or untrue and your companions knowing it was untrue… because they had complained during the meal… and you yourself knowing it was untrue. Nobody really believes, you said. Most people say they are Church of England, if you press them, you said, but nobody believes. The priests, many of them, certainly don’t, you said, and the priests know that nobody sitting in front of them believes. But people keep going at Easter and Christmas and saying they are C of E the rest of the time. Oh, and I think you also compared it to makeup on women, am I right? They all do it, you look at them, women, wearing makeup, and you incorporate it into your assessment of them without being aware you’re doing it, even though the woman knows and you know that you aren’t seeing the truth and she isn’t showing you the truth. So you proceed anyway. It’s minor, you said, and doesn’t hurt.

“And then what else did you say? I’m trying to recall. Oh yes, that the church was a useful thing if only for the fact that, just by stopping in irregularly, you would have a chance at getting a few people to turn up for your funeral who otherwise wouldn’t have, which was, you said, a comforting prospect.

“So, okay. England misled you. I showed you that in the world at large faith was expanding, credulism was expanding, and that the particular types of religious belief that were expanding the fastest were the purest, most primitive, the dumbest ones. And this is true in England now too, though it’s early days yet for the Muslims and others.

“And then we went country by country over a map of the world, my brother Kerekang. And I demonstrated to you that where the older sects and denominations that had in one way or another made certain accommodations to scientific reality were declining, these fiercer, simpler strains of faith were coming back. And we counted the actual theocracies existing in the world and you were surprised, weren’t you? And I gave you the statistics on beliefs in the United States of America, and you found them hard to believe.

“And then you hardly seemed pleased about the situation in Africa, where the rate of conversion is the highest in the world and going up all the time and more than making up for the denominational declines in Europe, and where two beasts, the Christian beast and the Muslim beast, are fighting to see which can eat the most Africans before dark. Because the darkness is coming. Is coming.

“And I explained how faith is a toxin, a peculiar and dangerous toxin because even in dilution it waits in the blood to blaze back into madness under the right conditions of fear and trembling. In its most virulent forms, it prevents the host from knowing that it is going to die, to die forever, that the host is a dying animal, that we are merely mortals, and that death is our common fate, the fact of life that should make brothers and sisters of us all. And I tried to show you how even in dilution religion addles and undoes our ability to see death, how even in dilution it sweetens death, allows it to be denied, allows the deaths of others to be made casual.”

Morel paused. “Our task is to do everything, in a way. Too bad, but we may just have to do everything. Too bad for us, but unless we bring free minds to the work of renewing the world, keeping our minds fixed on death and the disguises death puts on, we will raise up a new hell, like Russia where they closed the churches and made the state their god. We must say no gods. None.

“And be sure to remember that the great architects of injustice in Russia were products of centuries of Christian processing, beginning with the seminarian Joseph Stalin. Hitler always considered himself a good Catholic, despite the superficial pagan paraphernalia he held up in front of the German people for a while, and the good soldiers who did his filthy work were as Christian as you could ask for.

“And before you or anyone begins about the mission schools and hospitals… and they are worthy, okay, and you may want to say, well, these people are good, they are saving our lives, how can you argue? Which would mean that we should be quiet on this subject. But I am telling you to see the matter whole.

“Here is a picture. You conquer a country and give the vanquished a clinic. Look around Africa and see if this seems familiar to you. No, conquer a country and then give it a clinic, and oh, also some mission schools, and some Christian bookstores to pump out cheap Bibles to change the children of the land into Christians. The conquerors in this continent and in South America and in my own country came pushing their crosses ahead of them.

“Look, go deep inside yourself, Kerekang. We have been tainted at the deepest levels, deep in the foundations of our minds. Say a man lives his life without regard to faith, as he thinks. But he hasn’t gone deep enough, because to his surprise, when he falters, lo, here it comes, a deathbed conversion. I could keep us here all night with the history of deathbed conversions, amazing ones. A great poet writes Loss of faith is growth and the next thing you know he’s beckoning the priests to his deathbed. We are penetrated with it. It works invisibly and insensibly to direct our accommodation with the world’s evils. God help us!

“Belief is like this… It falls into three types and I ask you to tell me which kind of faith is more dangerous than the other.

“We begin with any society saturated with belief. I’m talking generically. What types of believers do you have? First, the devout, who believe everything up and down and in and out. They make us despair. In Kenya the devout bring death to the sick because the word condom shall not be spoken aloud, on the radio, anywhere. The same in Zimbabwe, with the fine Roman Catholic prime minister nodding yes in the corner. So let that stand as an example for us of a contribution by the devout.

“So then, the next type, the hypocrite, who believes only in himself but who pretends to believe in scripture and uses the blindness of genuine believers to satisfy his own desires. No need to say much about them and the harm they do.

“Ah but then we come to, what shall we call them, the half-believers, like the bulk of the British, the ones who say let the little ones believe that their classmate who jumped off London Bridge is in heaven and happy. Or like the half-believers who say it won’t hurt to have children mumble the Lord’s Prayer every day in school, if they do it under their breath. Which brings us to the half-believer at his most dangerous, the character who begins to feel inwardly that his beliefs are untrue but who cannot bear that feeling and who sets out to perform feats of loyalty to convince himself that he must in fact believe, like killing a doctor who gives women abortions. As their belief weakens they become terrors of the earth, mesmerizing themselves with acts that plunge them into peril, that spread ruin everywhere. They convince themselves through their transgressions that they must, in fact, be believers.

“In America the beautiful, in the mountain West, you have armed madness of just this type. They are under