The God Society

The God Society

By Samuel Duffy

Copyright 2003 Samuel Duffy

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Table of Contents

Author's Preface for the 10th Anniversary

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

About the Author

Coming Summer 2013

Author’s Preface for the 10th Anniversary

To be honest, it has only been about eight years since the publication of my second manuscript, The God Society, but it takes time to get a manuscript published, so it has in fact been ten years since I first wrote and copyrighted what I had believed then to be my magnum opus. It is funny to reflect on the things one placed the greatest value on in youth. My sheltered sensibilities had led me to fear in some minor degree social ostracism for the ideas in my allegorical novel about religion and social control. I must admit I was somewhat disappointed when I found the ideas in my novel agitated no one, yet a story about a boy learning to be a wizard had enticed churches to decry the fantasy as an education in witchcraft. (How strange the things people choose to take up arms against.) Of course, my little novel held no sacrilege, probably because I myself had no qualms with the idea of God, but rather with the idea of a standardized version of God. Just shy of 30, I find myself reflecting less on the book I wrote and more on the boy who wrote it a decade earlier. I find I am the same, though much more learned and, as consequence, far more aware and less prejudice of others, or, to be more specific, less afraid of others. Still I feel this book was an integral part of my growth as an individual and as a writer.

When I wrote The God Society, I was 19 and working on my second semester of college. I hadn’t had any formal training in writing beyond those basic skills taught in a U. S. public high school and those acquired through my love of the classics. For my style guide, I carried a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and I wrote, not with the formulaic prowess of the grammarian, but with the purity of a question. I had intended The God Society as an allegory for any Christian’s journey to identify the nature of God. To say I was Christian Good is no stretch of the imagination. I grew up in the Bible Belt of Oklahoma: a place where everyone knows God, but if you don’t like Him, there is always another church down the road with a different interpretation of Him. As a teenager, one believes every issue is happening to him for the first time in all of human history, and so I believed I was very much alone with my internal debate. (Everyone else seemed so certain.) Still, I figured I couldn’t really be the only one with doubts about man’s interpretations of an omnipotent God, and I have since discovered that questioning the Bible is something most Christians do, so long as they do it without announcing those doubts publicly. A humorous anecdote from this time will illustrate this idea well. My girlfriend at the time knew I questioned most everything about Christianity, more so after I had finished writing The God Society, but she never showed her feelings on this idea more than the time I bought a collection of apocryphal texts. I was excited by the find and decided after much deliberation to purchase the collection. It was at this point my girlfriend informed me she would not be caught standing in line with me if I was purchasing that book. She then made certain there were two or three strangers and their purchases between her and me as I purchased my fringe text. Apparently, I was a real rebel.

Of course, this was not the only influence on my little book. I had been unlucky enough to turn 18 the day after the Twin Towers incident. Admittedly, my mind turned immediately to questions of a Draft, since many were talking about war before we even knew who had done it or why. Once the details began to emerge, the who became clear, and most people bought into the why. I did not. I found myself still asking the same question most had abandoned, Why? For most, the fearful search for understanding quickly soured and turned to anger based on the limited reasoning of politicians and media—the oldest of reasons given: they are them and not us. I watched the world draw superficial lines based on religion, I listened to men argue the Muslim God was not the Christian God, and that Islam is a violent religion that shouldn’t exist. I watched men allow themselves to be swept up in the collective cyclone of half-truths and easy answers, and I watched two entirely unrelated wars spin out of this funnel cloud and strip my generation of nearly all the rights prior generations had promised us. Throughout my childhood I had seen the world crumble under religious fervor. I had watched good Christians curse homosexuals for a choice (namely marriage) that had no baring on their lives and I had watched on television reports of Christians bombing abortion clinics; I had watched the fear boil over into anger in the way it always does whenever men are faced with something or someone they don’t understand. And, more importantly, I saw how some men took advantage of this lesser part of human nature, how some men profited from the irrational behavior of the majority. The idea of using religion—any religion—for social control is as old as animism. Fearing the spirits in the sacred woods kept children from wandering into the woods alone. Fearing the punishment the ever-watchful spirits might impose on an ungrateful hunter insured no one man would hunt all of an important food source out of the area. Even the Crusades came down to Pope Urban II, not wanting to start a war between Christianity and Islam, but rather, looking for a way to stop infighting among European nobility, and when someone, especially a Pope, says, God wants you, most Christians jump without question. There are many more examples of men of wealth and power flying the religious banner in order to manipulate the masses, and yet, we always seem to fall for it. We were falling for it when I wrote this book and, sadly, we are still falling for it on a daily basis as the majority of U. S. citizens will vote for the man who spends the most money to convince them he is the closest candidate to God’s Will. (Voters forget the founding fathers didn’t just separate Church and State to protect the State from the Church, but, just as important, to protect the Church from the corruptive power of the State.) I could see no reason this form of social control would suddenly end in the future, and so this manipulation became a major part of Christian Good’s struggle to define God as well.

The God Society should seem an odd title to most, but it is very much intentional. On the one hand, I wanted a unique title, but I also wanted a title that summated a major theme in the story, so I used God as an adjective, thereby subjugating the word, and by extension the idea, to Society. I hope this book encourages readers to ask, Why? even when you think you already know. Christian Good was very much me at the time I wrote it: a 19-year-old kid with too many inherited answers, sifting through books for some solid truth or another as I struggled to understand the nature of God on my own terms. We have been given too many answers from birth. Time reveals some as absolute truths, but it reveals just as many to be fallacies passed on from generation to generation. It takes tremendous bravery to explore one’s own beliefs when they have been handed down from father to son for centuries, but it is necessary if we are ever to understand ourselves and, subsequently, each other. Ultimately, what I had hoped to convey to my readers was the sense that they were not alone in their doubts and that searching for God is an individual journey. As a friend of mine pointed out, The God Society is really just a retelling of Luther’s Protestant Reformation. Regaining access to the Bible on an individual basis meant, and continues to mean, an individualized interpretation of the Christian God. Fundamentalists would argue against this individualized God as heresy, but that is where we have been headed since the 1500’s. To legitimize an interpretation only by officiating it as one of the 30,000-plus denominations is to forward the idea we all secretly fear: that reality is dependent upon a majority consensus, in other words, it’s only real if two or more people believe it. I believe it was Emile Durkheim who put forth the idea that God is merely a symbol of the collective conscience. In other words, God stands in as a more authoritative symbol of our collective morality/reality. One need only consider the tremendous support the Church once gave to the slave trade to see how we adapt the Christian God to what we agree upon as moral as a society. Whether God is really there or not, the question remains the same: Which version of God should we follow? My ending to this story has been criticized as unresolved, but I felt it was best to end the story where most religions begin, that is with someone wandering into the isolation of the unknown, expansive desert to listen for the inner God.

S. Duffy

25th December 2012

P. S. Ray Bradbury once commented that looking back on his early novel, Fahrenheit 451, he saw the many errors in his text, but he knew the work to be that of a younger man. Feeling as though he were tampering with the work of a distant acquaintance, he knew he could not edit the work without inadvertently removing every trace of this other Bradbury. There are many things I would change about The God Society, but I have chosen to fix only one error: the missing end punctuation at the end of the first paragraph of the novel. That has bothered me since I first saw it in print, but I couldn’t change it once it had gone to press. Finally, to give credit where credit is due, a POD named PublishAmerica was the first company to publish The God Society, and though I allowed our contract together to expire recently, I would like to say I am grateful for their taking an interest in unknown writers trying to break into the traditional publishing oligopoly.

I.

Lying in bed, Christian gazed out his third-floor window at the purple moon hovering over the metropolis wall that stood a streets-width away: his arms wrapped warmly around his wife, hugging her closely. Christian tried to imagine the surreal beauty of the moon’s actual color; his grandfather had told him it was an enchanting silver and how the weather shield that enshrouded the metropolis distorted all of the heavenly colors.

The television in the living room filled the stillness of night with a feminine voice that monotoned the laws, and Christian tried to block it out with memories of how lively and wonderful his grandfather had always been, even on the day he was ostracized for carrying that book. He tried to recall which book, or even if he had ever seen the book with his grandfather, but he could only remember his grandfather’s last words to him: Find God, Christian. And when you do, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, or make you let go. Okay? He had assured his grandfather with a child’s nod and understanding – the best he could muster at nine.

Christian spotted the shadowy figure of a guard pacing in front of the moon, rifle in hand, and he questioned whether he had found God in the decades since his promise. A second figure darkened the moon’s hazy glow, pausing beside the first.

He had always known who God was. The Council was God. The three members of the Council had always spoken the orders of God. They guided and protected the city from the banished.

He watched as the two figures squared off with the moon, flashes of light appearing with every string of cracks that came from the assault rifles – the cracks deluded occasionally by laughter.

For more than a week Christian had found it harder to say the Council was God, and more than ever before he found himself awake in the middle of the night, one question pounding inside his mind like a jackhammer: Who is God?

The question came from Christian’s lips as a whisper, but he hadn’t intended it as such and fear shot through him.

The voice droned on in the background, Law 447: No male shall wear his hair at a length exceeding one inch, as Christian waited to hear the faint waking of his wife.

He wondered how he could be a member of the society if he didn’t know who God was. He realized he couldn’t, and they would banish him, just like they had banished his grandfather. And if Sarah ever found out,