“Precisely and so, Sonja. Did I pray when I heard Dara’s situation was dire? No. I felt no urge, none. I’ve overcome that urge by understanding what prayer is and where it comes from. Instead, I sincerely hoped that the medical facilities and professionals were up to the task, and—thanks JJ for your contribution—they seem to be. But, let me explain something additional that is interesting about prayer—a logical fallacy. Is God—I mean Yahweh—is he omniscient? Does he know everything—even the future?”
“That’s what they advertise,” JJ agreed.
“How is omniscient different to omnipotent? I don’t know the English words,” Sonja checked.
“Omnipotent means all-powerful, can do anything; omniscient means knowing everything,” Al clarified. “So, God knows everything, even the future. Before you pray for something, He knows you’re going to pray for it. This means that by the time you pray, He’s already considered your prayer and factored it into the plan ages ago.”
She was laughing at the ridiculousness of it revealed.
“Think about it; you’re never praying for something He’s overlooked—He’s omniscient, right? You’re praying for something He’s already decided against; not just originally decided. He’s seen you through time, and seen you praying, beseeching Him to change His mind! Once you’ve realized this, you appreciate that prayer is really a nutty concept, just a control mechanism for that ‘Let’s gather and watch one another all do it together’ I just described. So, no, I never thought of praying. I try very hard to not knowingly do crazy things.”
“Yeah. There’s that comedian who did the skit on it—Carlin, George Carlin. He said if you don’t get what you want, you say it’s God’s Will. So why don’t you just forget praying and go straight to God’s Will if he’s always going to do what he wants anyway?”
“Carlin had great insights, JJ. Funny guys can have more of an impact than clever ones.”
“Loved his skit on the Ten Commandments.”
“Don’t think I’ve seen it.”
“Oh, look it up; ‘Carlin, Ten Commandments’,” JJ suggested.
“But you mentioned omnipotent, Sonja?” Al went on.
“Yes.”
“Now, you’re both smart people, and I’d like you to explain to me how God can be both omniscient and omnipotent. The two concepts contradict one another.”
“How?” Sonja looked perplexed.
“Well, if you can see the future, you won’t make decisions that you will want to change your mind about in the future, understand? Or, you’d see that you were going to change your mind, right? So, it suggests that if you want to change your mind in the future, you didn’t see that coming… hmmmm? And the only way to get around that is not to change your mind, which means you’re not all powerful, not omnipotent. They contradict one another.”
Sonja started to laugh.
Just then, Marsha came through to say that Dara was ready for them.
Al assured her they’d be through in a minute and finished his thought as they slowly began to move into the corridor.
“You were going to say what the worst thing is that religion has done?” JJ prompted.
“Ah, yes. The worst atrocity of religion in today’s world is that it makes people satisfied with not having answers. It allows one to throw resigned hands in the air as soon as the investigations become a little tricky; to declare that some things are just unknowable… a mystery. To teach that attitude to children is a travesty, a crime.”
“Our constitution actually outlaws it,” JJ pointed out. “A major court battle has tested this very thing in our schools and won.”
“Your country’s an enigma,” Al shook his head. “I saw something about the case in the media, some kind of God acronym taking the schools on?”
“Ja,” JJ nodded. “They’re called OGOD. It was a High Court case that they won. Pretty much misunderstood, they’re not asking for new laws, they’re just insisting that the constitution be applied as it is written.”
They moved slowly down the corridor, chatting quietly about the impact of teaching religious dogmas within school syllabi.
“It relieves one of the burden to study, to invest, to explore, to seek, to think or to educate,” Al suggested. “Religion makes a virtue out of wilful ignorance. I say wilful, because we live in an age when good and accurate information so painstakingly won is readily available. You can only be fearful and wilfully stubborn if you manage to keep avoiding it.”
They reached Dara’s ward and filed in.
Dara’s bruising was wicked and in full flush across his ribs.
JJ noticed how he displayed the injuries in Sonja’s direction with almost a hint of pride.
She clucked her sympathies, but JJ could see that she was uncharacteristically bashful, not her usual talkative self. There was something there in the way she looked at him that went beyond pity and JJ felt his culture rising within him. Old biases die hard and it annoyed him that he felt this irrational protectiveness over her.
In a very short time, Dara was too exhausted to hold more than superficial conversation, so they bid their farewells.
As they went through the foyer to the outer door, Marsha put her arm around Sonja and hugged her fast. “I’ve really enjoyed you coming over. I can see that Dara is quite taken with you, will you please come back?”
“I’d love to,” Sonja beamed.
They exchanged phone numbers and departed.
JJ took her out to the best restaurant in town for dinner. It was the only restaurant, and the choices of venues were limited.
Chapter 19
It was a little before midnight and JJ was back home from the hospital and dinner with Sonja.
The night was eerily still and the stiff breeze that had earlier in the evening forced the men to meet indoors around the kitchen table had abated.
To capture the action through the built-in camera and microphone, JJ had set his laptop where it would have the best view over proceedings. That best position—where the computer was neither conspicuous nor at risk of being cleared away—had been atop the fridge. This meant there was no power supply available and the recording had necessarily run on battery.
JJ retrieved the machine and hit a random key to reactivate the sleeping blank screen. The screen remained black; the battery was dead. He put the computer on charge in his old bedroom and went for a shower.
Towelled off and in his bedroom, he wind had died and the night was still, so he fished in the laptop bag for an earpiece, plugged it in, and opened the recording he’d set up at the tail end of his earlier discussion with his father.
It was the better part of an hour of wasted recording before the last of the men had arrived and begun to settle. The sound quality was sub-par and JJ had to strain to hear details. He hoped it would improve once all were taking turns to talk and the microphone auto-balanced to the lower ambient volume.
There was a surprise too; a young stranger sporting a beard and even at a glimpse, a fanatical glint to his eye, had arrived with Dominee Gert.
He was introduced as being up from Cape Town and was evidently the founding member of a new group. The noise of the men settling in and their women coming through from the lounge to fuss and ensure that there were sufficient beverages on hand had obscured both the man’s name, his organization and his business there.
Another twenty minutes passed before they settled and began to discuss anything of consequence. By now, JJ had heard the newcomer’s name was Andy.
The Dominee had produced a news cutting. “The rubbish that they print, only saying what they want people to hear.” He read the headline, “‘Religious Communities Embrace Science’.”
He shook his head and read on, “‘“Poor and generally conservative communities are extremely accepting of cutting edge science projects even though they starkly contradict their beliefs,” the Science Minister has said. Major projects like the SALT—Southern African Large Telescope in Sutherland and SKA at Carnarvon in th
e Northern Cape province are actively now looking for the origins of the universe and earth’s place in it.’”
“Because they won’t accept the truth, they invent bullshit and lies,” Andre grumbled his monotonous mantra as soon as the Dominee took a breath.
“‘The irony is, these installations are being developed amid deeply conservative communities’,” Gert read on, rubbing the insults in. “‘Yet, despite the fact that the science starkly contradicts their faith, the communities are embracing the investments with open arms.’”
“Embracing?” Andre spoke for them all as his frustration boiled over. “They lie and lie, then lie again,” he continued, emphasizing each “lie” with the hammer of his fist on the table. “Are city people so stupid… so gullible to believe this report? Do they think we’re all idiots out here in the countryside? That we have a faith that is so unimportant to us, yet we can be bought to not believe it and stand up for it, to not defend it? My own son…” He didn’t finish his sentence, just looked askance to the other men, the tragedy of loss in his eyes.
Watching the monitor, JJ felt a lump in his throat. He wanted peace with his father and all these men that he’d known a lifetime, but he was unable to get over this hurdle with them.
“Ja, Andre,” Jan de Villiers, the former army Kommandant agreed. “All the youngsters are going the same way.”
“Not all,” Gert the Dominee reminded them, not wanting this negativity with a stranger present. “There is a resurgence in belief. This is what I’m waiting for… hoping for. Andy will tell you. People are starting to wake up.”
“But they are buying our youth, Gert,” Andre lamented, under the stress of it, uncharacteristically using the Dominee’s name in public. “Buying them with free computers and Internet connections so the children can be fed more lies. Everywhere you hear about the ‘economic benefits’, and these mamparras, these coloured and black fools, they think that they’re all suddenly now going to inherit houses and cars from nothing.”
“But our Lord Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert too, my friends,” the Dominee pointed out, needing to calm Andre. “It is the temptation that makes our faith stronger. We have a strong youth group now. Even with Neels going away soon, I have made Gerhard Stander the youth leader and he is very charismatic.”
“Neels is leaving?” Jan asked with some surprise.
“Finished school, he’s off on a scholarship program to Kentucky in the USA for three months,” the Dominee disclosed.
JJ stopped the replay and backed the recording up to be sure he hadn’t misheard it. “Neels is leaving.”
He listened to it twice.
“Quite sudden?” Jan observed.
“The opportunity just came from new friends of our church, an Evangelist group in America, Answers in Genesis, they’re called,” Gert confirmed.
“I’ve heard of this group.” Dr. Louw, the school principal spoke for the first time. “The Genesis Answers group has that Creation Museum?”
“Creation Museum?” Jan asked.
“Yes, very well funded. Led by an Australian, Kenneth Bacon. They raised nearly thirty million dollars to build a Creation Museum. It displays all the science in a Biblical context… the right science.” Gert added.
“An actual museum? A building?”
“Ja... more than a building, Jan. Massive; it’s over acres. Millions of visitors already,” Dominee explained, evidently quite taken with it. And JJ wondered about that.
Dominee Gert was not usually an enthusiastic man about anything that lay outside the firm tramlines of his own childhood faith.
“I’ve been communicating with Ham and his group for a while and also with their benefactor,” he went on. “His people contacted me through Andy, but I wanted to first know what they were about, so I dealt with them privately till now, to see if they were properly of the Faith. They’re Evangelists; not our own denomination, but as Andy will tell you, in these times when we’re under siege, we must not let our differences divide us.”
“Led by an Australian, you say? With some of this telescope in Australia, perhaps he will want to collaborate?”
“That’s how I’m thinking too. They’re going to help with funds for our fight. A delegation’s coming to see us soon.”
There was a general hubbub of approval and excitement among the men.
JJ paused the recording again to let it sink in. As Gert spoke, it was all falling into place, the connections immediately obvious. He caught himself pondering it aloud, “South Africa’s Bible Belt cozying up to their American counterparts… all the crazies egging one another along? Shit!”
This was not good news; it would push the whole issue into a new direction and league. It set JJ’s mind to racing. These strange bedfellows falling in league together was a natural progression, he realized. He knew all too well, how for decades in the US, extreme sects of Conservative Christians had been agitating in politics, medicine and education to oppose progress, to drive biblical agendas and enshrine biblical governance in all-important matters of regulation.
As a boy, JJ had seen the tail end of quasi-theocracy driving South African politics and its biblically inspired Apartheid. He looked on it with extreme distaste.
Historically these groups had waged war against evolutionary biology for the challenge that its discoveries posed to biblical creationism. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the SKA and its objective—to uncover the origins and evolution of the universe—trampled the same biblical sentiments.
His mind needed a break, to consider what he had reviewed; so he got up to make tea.
The kettle was just beginning an escalating hiss when his father appeared in the doorway. “Hello Pa, did I wake you?”
“No, I couldn’t sleep.”
“Tea?”
“It’ll make it worse.”
“Ma?”
“She never has problems sleeping. Women… you know, nothing important on their minds.”
JJ hated it when his father spoke glibly like that about females, but it was cultural. The older men-folk cherished their women but generally thought of them as children unburdened by ‘big’ issues. White women were senior children, several rungs above the other races who the old culture thought of and treated as young children. Fortunately, he thought, things were changing rapidly in the new generation.
It wasn’t worth challenging though, as he sometimes did, not at this late hour.
“How was your evening?” his father asked.
“Had a lekker braai,” JJ responded casually.
“Good—Sonja home?”
“Safely in bed, yes.”
A braai was the traditional way to spend a Saturday evening grilling meat over coals, and JJ had gone on from dinner to the tail end of a braai on one of the farms of old friends.
He’d faced too much red meat from his mother’s kitchen for the entire week already and needed something less substantial for a change, so he’d delayed his arrival at the braai to ensure the eating would be over.
The womenfolk would have insisted on dishing for him and would never allow a man to choose only salad.
Andre had been phoned during the evening by three different parties living in the town who reported his son’s car outside the clinic. “And now at De Meerkat Pizzeria…” Casual reports of JJ’s movements streamed in, woven into other mundane village chatter.
The Ferrari had been at the Pizzeria for an hour and then departed, but JJ had only arrived at the braai at ten-thirty. A ninety-minute gap remained in Andre’s mind unaccounted for. Nobody in the town volunteered JJ’s whereabouts during that period, and it plagued his police brain that his son was not volunteering the details, even after some prompting.
“I’m sorry we have tensions, Pa,” was all JJ would say.
He knew his father’s every expression so intricately that he’d guessed already what information his father had about his movements.
His was the only car of its type the vill
age had ever seen, and he knew full well that his minor celebrity status in the village meant his movements would hardly go unnoticed or unreported. But he was sick of the pettiness of logging and defending his every movement. The time had come to let the tensions exist if they must exist.
“I just want to visit and relax and bring everyone presents, Pa,” was all he’d offer. “I have enough stress in the city. I could easily rent the best room in town but the best room in town is here with you and Ma and Sonja. This is where my heart is—it’s better than any plush hotel or mansion.”
Andre still looked peeved.
“I don’t want you and I to have trouble,” JJ offered to neutralize the suspicion still written on his pa’s face.
“Ja… we like you here too, my boy.” There was a momentary gentleness to the big craggy man; he so rarely let gentleness or emotion breach through his tough façade.
Then almost as if catching himself, Andre hedged against showing any more weakness. “These are stressful times… not stress we’re making, stress pushed on us from outside by the rooineks and their communist government. We don’t want this stress.”
“It’s too late to get into it again, Pa. I just wanted to say I’m sorry for earlier. I want you to know that I’m not the enemy… I understand everything you feel, I just want to give you a perspective. I know is not easy.”
JJ could feel his father’s mood switching into battle mode, the big battered shield rising before him, covering the slipup of momentary emotions that had exposed his soft underbelly.
The more vulnerable Andre felt, the more he over-compensated with an offensive.
“There’s another troublemaker in town,” Andre prodded, “…that little black fucker’s father.”
How to react and play this? JJ’s mind was suddenly bolting in every direction, as if a bucket of ice water had been thrown over sleeping cats.
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