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Magic And Religion

Fiction

Magic and Religion (excerpt)

By: Dale R. Cozort





 

What if France Had Fought On From North Africa? Part III

Scenario Seeds

Magic & Religion (Fiction)

Stopping The Fall of France

Best of the Comment Section





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Fair warning: This is just an excerpt from a 8,500 word story.  I like to give people little samples of my fiction writing, but I can't give you the whole thing without making the story unsellable.   If you get hooked and want more, unfortunately I won't be able to give it to you.  With that in mind:

It was almost a miracle that Pastor Darl Johansen’s car didn’t kill anyone.  It actually did surprisingly little damage for a car going down an expressway at nearly 80 miles per hour without a driver.  Fortunately the road was straight for the first mile, and by the time the car left its lane it had slowed to no more than about forty.
    A state trooper happened by in his patrol car and noticed Pastor Johansen’s erratically moving and rapidly slowing car.  The trooper turned his bubble lights and siren on, and followed Pastor Johansen’s car as it slowed to thirty miles per hour, then to twenty and finally to about ten before it crashed into the barrier that separated eastbound from westbound traffic and came to rest partway up on that barrier.
     The state police didn’t have a good explanation for how Pastor Johansen’s car came to be driving down the expressway with no driver in it.  That didn’t keep them from trying to explain it.  Their explanations were unlikely, but good enough that the mystery faded from the mainstream news after a few weeks.  A few Forteans showed up and asked questions, then went away happily baffled.  The pastor was unmarried, and no one outside the pastor’s church members and a few friends cared very much.  A few church members half-jokingly, half-nervously mentioned the rapture.  Pastor Darl Johansen’s body was never found, at least not in this reality.
     One of Pastor Johansen’s friends, Jimmy Sullivan, took charge of the pastor’s personal belongings once the police were done with them.  He also stopped by every morning and evening to feed the pastor’s small mixed breed dog.  After about a week, Jimmy stopped by one morning and took the dog out to his car.  He went back to the pastor’s apartment, looked around, then said, “I forgive you.”
     

     ****
     

Pastor Darl Johansen’s prison room was sparsely furnished, but he could tell that the furniture in it was very expensive, made of hardwoods with exquisite craftsmanship and attention to detail.  From the style he could tell that the furniture was no more than a year old, which meant that the very comfortable bed, the desk, and the nightstand each cost more money than he made in three or four months.  He paced around the room, his shoes sinking slightly but comfortably into the thick carpet.  He passed by a heavy wooden door that he knew opened into a short hallway that led to another door that could only be opened if the first one was closed.  He wasn’t sure what other precautions had been taken to keep him in the room, and he didn’t particularly care.  “I don’t know enough yet.”
     According to the date on his watch it was Monday morning.  Three days now since--  Since what?  Since he went instantaneously from sitting in his car to sitting on the bed in this room.  The headaches came less often now, and the disorientation and nausea that came with them seemed less severe.  The doctor that came in and examined him every morning and every evening said that he was fine.  “All ready to play your role.”
     Darl’s pacing took him past the nightstand, and past the glossy, full-colored magazine that sat on top of it.  The magazine’s style made it look like a newsmagazine—like Time or Newsweek, but the title on the cover said, “The Technological Soul”.  Pastor Johansen picked up the magazine and looked at his own face staring up at him from the cover.
     The face on the cover looked a little older and a little fatter than the one Pastor Johansen had seen in the mirror that morning.  It also looked a little harder, with a hint of ruthlessness in the smile if you looked for it.  The “display until” date on the magazine gave a date from about a month ago.
     “So I started a cult, or would have.”  Pastor Johansen used the word ‘cult’ like most people would have used an expletive.  He flipped to the article for the fourth or fifth time and read the title yet again: “The Technological Soul and Religion: Friends or Enemies?”
     The words in the article felt familiar, almost as if he had written them.
     

You know, there was a time when I planned to be a minister—Baptist in case you were wondering, though that doesn’t matter.  I still have a deep respect for Christians of all kinds and for Christianity.  So why did I found something that many Christians view as a major enemy of Christianity?  

Somewhere in quest for the ministry I became an agnostic.  Now I think that a lot of agnostics are atheists without the courage of their convictions.  I wasn’t that kind of agnostic.  I wanted to believe but I didn’t have the courage to leave my chance at eternity to something where I had no evidence as to whether or not it was true.

At some point along the way, I realized that I didn’t have to anymore.  I realized that mankind had created the technology necessary, not to give a person eternal life, but to preserve enough of that person that when the technology did become available there would be a significant chance that the person could be reconstructed.

A lot of Christians as well as believers in other religions wear the cameras of the Technological Soul movement.  They let us record their brain scans, and they store their DNA in our vaults.  They don’t do it because they don’t believe in their religion.  They do it as an insurance policy, a very prudent one in my opinion.
     

Pastor Johansen shook his head and said out loud, “He/I actually did it.  And people actually bought it.”
     A woman in her late twenties opened the door and came in to the room as he said that.  She said, “It isn’t a very hard sell.  People are looking for a way to live forever.  Getting old and dying are scary.  When you feel yourself circling the drain you grab for any way to hold on.  A lot of people stopped believing in the old answers, but they didn’t stop asking the questions and desperately wanting answers.  Darl—Mr. Johansen gave them those answers.”
     Pastor Johansen shook his head.  “He sold his soul to do it."


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Copyright 2004 By Dale R. Cozort


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