- By the will of Buddha,- stated Ivan, ‘we both ended in the same place.’

1. My friend, the Catholic.

I have a friend who is a devout Catholic. He is a fierce pro-lifer and considers abortion a source of all sins. He also promotes the idea that Catholicism is the perfect system for the everyday life. Once he organized a group of teenagers to demonstrate in front of the Planned Parenthood clinics. To his dismay the local Catholic bishop not only did not support him but told the kids to stop that foolishness and better hit the books. My friend was so upset that he wrote a letter to Pope about it.

-You realize, I said to him, ’that if we had a fully Catholic system here that bishop could have sent you to jail for that?’

In another case my friend was very upset when he found out that in one penitentiary when religious inmates conducted seminars on their religions the atheists demanded that too.

- They should not have seminars, he said, ‘Atheism is not a religion.’

- Does it matter? People, inmates will have the same occupation. Let it go.

- No, that’s not right, Atheists cannot have it.

So according to my friend those unfortunate atheists might as well rot alone in their cells. There is one very good verse by the Russian poet Mandelshtam perfectly attributed to this situation:

- Why won’t you spend some time in a coffin, young man?

1. The Gadfly.

The most fiercely anti- clerical book was written by an American woman- writer Ethel Lilian Voinich in 1898 and is called ‘The Gadfly’. In that book a young man, a devout Catholic in the 19th Century Italy finds out that not only his confessions are reported to the police but he himself is an illegitimate son of his beloved priest-teacher. He renounces God and disappears, faking his death. In time he returns after a tough life and severely injured. He comes back as a radical revolutionary under a new name and a penname The Gadfly. After one of the skirmishes with the Austrian police he kills a policeman, gets captured and sentenced to death by a firing squad.

His father meanwhile becomes a Cardinal in that province and it is his duty to confirm or oppose the sentence. He visits the prisoner and they recognize each other. In the dramatic scene Cardinal offers his son to help with an escape but the young man refuses to go unless his father renounces God and joins him. The Cardinal cannot do that. He leaves and confirms the sentence. On the day of the execution the Cardinal preys in the Church for the ‘suffering of God, the Father’ and then violently curses the ‘blood of Christ’. He succumbs to madness and dies from the broken heart soon after.

All the stories above, real, apocryphal and fictional have one thing in common: they show the great spirit of Humanity, the conviction, the dignity, the powerful message of an independent mind whenever and whoever dared to use it. That’s Divinity in its magnificence, the miracle of the human being rising to the highest level of effort and/or encountering a real greatness or a really great problem which is practically the same.

That’s where the dimensions collide and only the cosmic powers decide the fate.

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