The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas by Robin Harvie Read Free Book Online Page A

there had ever been. Lou Pinto appreciated its beauty. He had jogged around this track countless times, often late at night, but he had never seen anything like this. He hoped the nighttime splendor would cheer Nathan, but it had no effect. His friend stared at the ground as he trudged along, moping.
    Lou felt his friend’s pain. He did not specifically understand the angst of a crisis of faith. Lou had never questioned the nonexistence of God. For him this had always been axiomatic. But he knew what it was like to be different from those around you, to be an outsider. This anguish he understood all too well. He placed a gentle arm around the shoulder of his friend and tried to absorb some of the hurt. Sadly, it had no effect.
    As they neared the South Gatehouse, a fog began to roll in. At first it did not seem unusual, other than the fact of it on such a luminous night, but it progressed with preternatural dispatch and had to it an otherworldly density and odor. In the course of taking no more than twenty steps, Nathan and Lou had moved from crystal-clear Christmas air to a dense, miasmic thicket. Instinctively, they turned to retrace their steps, but the brume had closed in on them from behind too, and presently there was no escape. They took a few clumsy steps in the direction they believed to be forward. Lou, normally sure of foot, stumbled, and then they stopped in their tracks.
    Just as he spoke, an ill wind blew through. It sent a chill up Nathan’s spine and activated the dull ache in Lou’s trick knee, which he had injured twenty years earlier running the Tel Aviv Marathon. Lou sensed trouble afoot. The joint only bothered him when something bad was about to happen. The last time, he’d got home from work to find that a wallaby he was dating had absconded with his collection of Richie Rich comic books.
    When the gust died down, the air immediately before them had cleared a bit, just enough so that Nathan and Lou could see standing before them the apparition of a figure from the past. With muttonchops, long coat, and vest, he could have been any nineteenth-century English gentleman out for a postprandial constitutional. But he was unmistakably the famous English biologist—staunch advocate of Darwin, notorious verbal sparring partner of Samuel Wilberforce, and coiner of the term “agnostic.”
    “Thomas Henry Huxley,” Nathan and Lou said softly, in unison.
    “Which one of you is Nathan Townsend?” the specter asked.
    “Who wants to know?” Lou asked protectively. It seemed odd that this apparently supernatural creature didn’t know whether Nathan was a human being or a kangaroo.
    “I have been sent with an important message for Nathan Townsend.”
    “How do we know you’re authentic?” Lou repeated. The ghost’s voice had the appropriate resonance and vibrato, but Lou wanted hard proof.
    “When he was seven years old he had to have an impacted marble surgically removed from his right nostril.”
    “Anyone could know that. It’s public record.”
    “It was, specifically, a blue marble from the game Mouse Trap. He was frustrated because the swinging boot never functioned properly.”
    Lou looked at Nathan.
    “It’s true,” Nathan said. “He’s for real.”
    Lou looked back at the phantasm. “What is it, then? What do you have to say?”
    “I have been told to tell you this conclusively once and for all.” Here the ghost of Thomas Henry Huxley paused for dramatic effect. “There is no God!” The proclamation resonated through the red maples and pin oaks of the Ramble. In the distance, an owl hooted.
    “How do you know this?” Nathan asked.
    “I have been told so by an omniscient, all-knowing being whose credibility I can personally verify.”
    “Then that would be God,” said Lou.
    “No,” said Huxley. “He sees and knows all, but his power has limits.”
    “Such as?”
    “He is very poor at golf. He has taken lessons for thousands of years, but he still slices. He also has great