by Will Storr
‘No,’ he says. ‘Because lesbian nuns are living in public disobedience to their creator.’
‘So it’s the fact that the lesbian nuns are refusing to repent by being straight that’s sending them to hell?’
‘That’s what’s sending them to hell,’ he nods.
‘So a lesbian nun who repents a week before she died would be okay?’
‘As a nun, she cannot plead ignorance of the Bible.’
‘So lesbian nuns are doomed?’
‘Basically, yes.’ He takes a nibble of his fruit cake. ‘It’s like treason.’
The conversation moves further into morality. John tells me 9/11 was a ‘classic case’ of God punishing a sinful nation, a comment which brings to mind a personal calamity that John and his wife suffered a few years ago.
‘What about your miscarriage?’ I ask him. ‘By the same logic, could that be a punishment for your sins?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Because you and I reap the results of the things that went before us that are sometimes beyond our control.’
‘Is gluttony a sin?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ says John.
I point to his belly, which rises into view from beneath his shirt like a mountain summoned by God.
‘You’ve got some repenting to do, then.’
He replies slowly, ‘I’ve got a thyroid problem.’
I close my eyes and try to absorb the irritation.
‘Come on, John,’ I say. ‘Isn’t this all just … just … stupid?’
He looks baffled. He crosses his legs. I go on.
‘What I mean is, you claim there is a legitimate scientific theory that says there’s a magic superhero who has created a planet full of people to tell him he’s great and who get tortured by demons if they’re naughty.’
‘I don’t think it’s stupid,’ he says. ‘You have to have penalties for those who do injustice.’
‘It’s not just the hell bit,’ I say. ‘It’s also the egotistical superhero.’
‘Stop there,’ he says, crossly. ‘You’re attributing your human nature to God. There’s no reason to accuse him of being egotistical.’
‘What’s his motive, then?’
‘Why does he need a motive?’
I have a sudden and overwhelming urge to whimper. What can you do when common sense doesn’t work? When reason’s bullets turn out to be made of smoke?
‘When I sat there listening to you today going on about gay people,’ I tell him, ‘I thought you were evil.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ he says. ‘It was tough stuff.’
‘But can’t you see, the people you’re attacking – the pro-equality lobby – sincerely want to make the world a kinder place? If everyone decided you were right, there’d be a genocide against gay people.’
‘Okay then,’ he says. ‘Let me make a prediction too, based on creation. The end result of all this will be an increase in turbulence. Homosexuals will get into a position where they’ll start to impose their values.’
‘We’ll be forced to be gay by gays?’ I say.
‘Yep,’ he replies. ‘That’s where it will go.’
‘And do you seriously believe that acceptance of homosexuality will lead to an acceptance of paedophilia and necrophilia?’
‘Even in the churches.’
‘Priests having sex with dead people?’
‘That’s right.’
‘But, John,’ I say, ‘the view that homosexuality is a sin is illogical, because it’s not a choice. It’s a state of being that you’re born into. You can’t be tempted to be a homosexual. I’ve been tempted to steal, I’ve been tempted to lie, but I’ve never been tempted to kiss a man.’
‘They have made a choice, whether it’s paedophilia or homosexuality or necrophilia. They are all in a rainbow of that which is an incorrect choice about sex.’
I tell John that I am completely convinced that he is wrong. Apparently, though, I only believe this because I have been fooled by Satan. ‘The Bible warns that the Devil is a liar and is out to trick us,’ he explains. ‘When God says something’s wrong, the Devil’s out to do anything to convince us it’s right.’
‘But if you follow that logic,’ I say, ‘any thought we have that goes against the Bible is the Devil. So we’re not allowed to think for ourselves.’
‘We are allowed to think for ourselves,’ he says. ‘Your first step is thinking that God’s wiser than me so I will accept what he says, even if I don’t understand it.’
This, it seems to me, is a remarkable admission for a man who considers himself to be a scientist.
‘So that’s all the thinking for yourself you’re allowed?’ I say. ‘The decision to believe everything God says?’
‘Yes.’
*
Two weeks later, I discover that the only thing I know for sure about evolution is completely wrong. I find this out in a back office at Sydney’s Australian Museum, the place I have come to for the end of my story. Playing the white knight, the truth teller, the good guy is Nathan Lo, a thirty-five-year-old doctor of molecular evolution. Lo is going to assess Mackay’s assertions and offer a counter-creationist perspective on who built the gympie-gympie tree. We talk at a bare wooden table, beneath a framed picture of an aphid and behind a sink full of bottles marked ‘glycerol’ and ‘H2O’.
I begin by telling Nathan about the puzzling lack of betwixt species ‘fronkey’ types in the fossil record. But, apparently, this isn’t how evolution works at all. ‘One very common misconception is that we evolved from things that are on the earth now,’ he says. ‘We didn’t. Humans, for example, didn’t evolve from chimps. They both evolved separately from things that have shared characteristics, and that don’t look like anything that exists today.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right. And are these things in the fossil record?’
‘There are many, many fossils that have characteristics that are like both chimps and humans,’ he says.
I ask about the claim that the fossil record doesn’t show creatures getting steadily more complex.
‘That’s completely wrong,’ he says. ‘Yes, things are relatively complex for three or four hundred million years, but before that they’re much simpler. Fish start approximately four hundred million years ago and if you keep going back, you get to things like worms and then if you go back about eight hundred million years, there’s nothing that has any complexity. Everything was single-celled.’ And so it carries on: the polystrate logs can be explained by the earth – and therefore the strata – moving around; dinosaurs do not suddenly appear in the fossil record fully formed, and so on.
Nathan, it turns out, is the un-John, his life-story being an uncanny polarised version of the creationist’s. Where Mackay was brought up in an anti-Christian house and read a book in his teens that turned him godly, Nathan was sent to a fundamentalist Christian school and read a book that turned him rational. Its author? Richard Dawkins.
‘There are middle-class suburbs everywhere that are full of people like John Mackay,’ he warns as we walk down the echoing corridors. ‘I know. I went to school with them.’
He explains that scientists are especially infuriated with creationists because of their determination to have the subject taught in schools as a scientific theory that’s the equal of evolution. And as Lo explains, it is creationism’s very simplicity that makes it dangerously seductive to children.
‘The main problem,’ he says, ‘is that creationism is a really easy explanation to understand, whereas evolution is complicated and takes a lot of time to get. Sometimes, people just want to go with the easier one. But they’re being led down the wrong path in terms of the truth. And you also have to ask why people like your creationist do it. They feel threatened by rationalism and science. They want to keep their numbers up so they can stay rich. All preachers need to be paid.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think you’re right on that one. I think John and people like him really do believe they’re correct.
’
Nathan gives me a doubtful look.
‘They believe they’re doing the right thing,’ he says, ‘but ultimately their motive is to make more money.’
I thank him politely and walk to the exit, towards the blaze and stress of the midweek city morning, feeling itchy and irritable and disappointed.
2
‘I don’t know what’s going on with these people …’
In the winter of 2001, I met a ghost-hunter who baffled me so thoroughly that he ended up inspiring my first book. After more than a year of reporting, I concluded that neither science nor the superstitious have satisfactorily explained the myriad phenomena that people report as ‘ghosts’. I was sure, however, that science would offer one in the end. This seemed obvious. I mean, the idea that there might be an afterlife – a heaven or a hell or a purgatory that souls were somehow stuck inside – was so clearly stupid as to be unworthy of sensible consideration. Stupid, dumb, ridiculous, stupid, stupid, stupid …
I was angry about religion when I was writing that book. I had been angry about it for as long as I could remember. Angry at the teachers at the Catholic schools I had attended; angry at the priests at the church that I was driven to every Sunday morning; angry at my parents for believing it all so thoroughly. My father is an intelligent man – sometimes intimidatingly so. And so I used to think, How could he? I mean, everything, the whole lot of it, it just seemed so …
When my father read my ghost book – in which I wrote about how stupid, stupid, stupid I considered his religion to be – he telephoned me at home. ‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ he said, with what I now understand to be admirable restraint, ‘I think you have misunderstood the concept of faith.’ Faith is a journey, he told me. Many thoughtful, senior Catholics agree that belief in God is complex, subtle and often elusive. I made some impetuous response about even archbishops not being really convinced and we left it at that. It was as if we had both reminded ourselves of the separation that exists between us, and silently agreed to a retreat.
Since then, I have written about many more people whose beliefs I consider strange. And when I really dig into the reporting of these subjects, I usually find things to be never quite as I expect. My work has taught me that the truth is always nuanced; that outrage is mostly born of misunderstanding and that, sometimes, black really can be white.
I have also been losing my faith in stupid. My father isn’t stupid. Neither is John Mackay. People who dismiss believers in God in this way do so in error. And Nathan Lo was wrong too, I think. Mackay’s motive isn’t money. I am convinced that he really does believe what he is saying, and that his mission is sincere. And when he says that he feels God so absolutely within him that he is left with not a whisper of doubt about his existence, I believe that too.
Nathan Lo and I are of the same team. We see ourselves as the rational ones, the clean-sighted bringers of twenty-first-century reason. And yet both of us, I have come to believe, are mistaken. We are wrong about the wrong.
*
It is six months after my journey to Gympie, and I find myself submerged in the impossible puzzle once again. It all begins in the lounge of sixty-eight-year-old UFO expert (and no relation of John) Glennys Mackay, which is cluttered with mystical ephemera – a Native American wolf mirror, a framed diploma in urine therapy and a crystal ball dumped in an ashtray. It doesn’t go well. As Glennys speaks, I frequently feel as if I am being chastened for my naivety; as if my ignorance of the minutiae of alien lore is giving her a migraine.
Our meeting started happily enough, with Glennys telling me that she saw her first UFO in 1948, on her parents’ farm. ‘It wasn’t until April 1964 that one followed me home,’ she says. ‘I was in a car and these hands, these faces, came to the window. They smelled like eggs.’
‘What did you do?’ I ask.
‘I said, “Oh my God, don’t you smell?” I remember going on to the ship. They said they didn’t mean us any harm. They look like us, but their skin’s more translucent. They wear wigs. These “greys” that everyone talks about, they’re really robots.’ She crosses her arms and adds wearily, ‘I don’t know why people carry on about greys.’
‘How do you know they’re robots?’
‘I just know it,’ she says.
‘But how?’
‘It’s just something I’ve been shown,’ she snaps.
Glennys believes that humanoid, wig-wearing aliens are already mingling with people on earth.
‘I was at a conference in the US and two females turned up. You could tell they were wearing wigs. It was quite obvious. What they do, they dress up and go to Las Vegas and wander around.’
‘If you were in a casino and saw two aliens in wigs playing poker, would you be able to tell?’
She nods proudly. ‘The average person wouldn’t.’
Glennys goes on to explain that their abduction programme involves aliens ‘taking cells and seeds and eggs from us and trying to produce a better race.’
‘That’s a frightening thought,’ I muse. ‘A bit like Hitler. Dangerous.’
‘But look at what the scientists are doing now!’ she says. ‘They’re dangerous too. Look at Monsanto!’
‘Oh, come on, Glennys,’ I say. ‘Frost-proof wheat is one thing. Creating an alien master race to enslave the planet is quite another. If the aliens had their way, we’d be the ones that get wiped out. Don’t you think that’s a bit of a worry?’
‘It is a bit of a concern,’ she concedes. ‘But then, you’ve got to look at the people who are in power now. Are they aliens?’
A week later, I am sitting in a circle in the middle of a forest at midnight, attempting to induce a close encounter of the third kind with some bells. Moments ago Kay McCullock, the organiser of the UFO group that I have joined, finished her introductory talk.
‘First and foremost, health and safety,’ she said. ‘If a UFO lands, you must wait until it’s stopped completely before approaching. Only invite the ETs to come closer if it is absolutely safe to do so. If anyone gets zapped, the first-aid kit is in the back of my tent.’
Right now she is walking about in circles, half-heartedly ringing a gong. After a couple of minutes, she stops to bring up the question of what sort of mantra we should be chanting in order to entice the aliens. This is when the bickering begins.
‘I don’t see why we need a mantra,’ says one. ‘Just hold the thought in your head. We don’t need to repeat it and repeat it.’
‘I’m not saying it’s a mantra,’ says Kay. ‘That was just the first thing that came into my head. It’s more like an affirmation.’
‘Well, affirmation, whatever. Why do we need it?’
‘Because once you put words out there – they’re a frequency. It’s creating on every level,’ says Kay.
‘Well, I’m not doing an affirmation. There’s no point. Just keep it in our heads. They’ll pick it up.’
‘I think he’s right,’ says someone else, nervously. ‘They can use ESP.’
‘Are you sure?’ says yet another voice. ‘If we do an affirmation, it’s more certain. We should offer assistance. They’re coming from a long way away.’
‘Our thought-forms will be projected perfectly clear as it is. For God’s sake, these beings are highly advanced. We’re not talking about Plutonians here.’
‘Plutonians don’t have ESP? Why do you say that?’
UFO-spotters, I have learned, are extremely adept at bickering. Over the next sixty minutes, there will be low-level grumbling about all sorts of things, including the mantra, about the dire risks of ‘projecting blasé thought-forms’ and about whether or not it is racist to call Plutonians ‘nasty’. As I am sitting here, under the magnificent stars, listening to these adults arguing about things that don’t exist, I wonder if I have accidentally shuffled slightly closer towards an answer. There is a hint of something in these arguments that are taking place around me: a kind of process that is in evidence.
It starts with a s
mall and friendly disagreement. That disagreement is challenged. The pitch is raised. The friendliness vanishes and the positions harden. It goes round and round. As the irritation builds, Kay seems ever more convinced that the chanting of an affirmation is essential while her opponents shed any sliver of doubt that the ETs will be able to hear their invitation perfectly clearly via ESP if they beckon them silently, in their heads.
Haven’t we all done this? Hardened a particular position, not as a response to superior information, but because of anger? I think of John Mackay – the young evolutionist who was sufficiently piqued by the arrogance of the chapter on ‘why there is no religion’ that he picked up a Bible and allowed it to alter the architecture of his world completely. It seems that for Mackay, in those first few life-changing hours, it was nothing to do with sounder arguments and everything to do with anger. Here, right in front of me, I am witnessing strange beliefs being born by a mechanism that has nothing to do with reason.
*
I have chosen to visit Kay McCullock’s group because I want to meet one individual in particular. I have been hoping that a man called Martin Gottschall will give me a more orthodox perspective on the subject of UFOs.
‘UFOs have been observed coming towards a hillside, not slowing down and going straight into it,’ he tells me when we sit down together the next morning. ‘They do a dimensional shift so they no longer interact with the matter of our dimension.’
Martin says this with absolute assurance, as if he is telling me how the carburettor in a bus works. The strangeness condenses further when we discuss his belief that the aliens are here to deliver a vital message.
‘Typically, they tell people: “Look after the planet, don’t pollute it with all the chemicals, don’t go into nuclear power because there are better ways of making energy,”’ he says.
I ask Martin if these aliens – who have supposedly harnessed the power of clean and limitless ‘free energy’ – have ever actually taken the trouble to tell us how it works, and thus finally releasing us from our destructive dependence on fossil fuels.