After reading this story I wondered why the guardian angels would be men.

Because tall men were what would best deter the attacker.

What you are suggesting, Vivien, is exactly what people have done. You are not the first to talk about
god as a scientist. The problem is, that this concept of a god, really brings no wonder to the universe,
nor knowledge nor truths of our existence. Quite the contrary in fact, as these mythologies only serve
to magnify all the things that are wrong with us. He was a great wizard to those focused on magic, and
a horrific tyrant to those who lived with emperors and kings. “He” was the maleveloent spirit of all
things that were unknown, unknowable, and unseen, and as a result, It's a chimera of the things that
are wrong with us. All of our failings. Even when humans try to add something good, because we are
only a half a chromosome away from other apes, we can't make something great and terrible without
the pettiness within ourselves. . In the end, and even today, we wound up with something that isn't
worthy of the name, let alone serious consideration, because all we can do to make “him” greater, is to
magnify that evil. Believe in me, and worship me, or suffer an eternal and infinite, conscious, torment
of the worst form that humans can devise... because he really, really, loves you.

Psychopathy is part of the human condition, but that does not justifying our adding it to something
that we hope will be more. Sometimes we do things well and right, but on any given day, we can screw
up rather magnificently, and we can do this at any given time. Theists tend to look at someone like me,
and think or say, "You really believe, you are just (Insert human foible here, too mad, too proud, too
stupid to understand...).” I look at them, and think that they cannot but look at their comic opera
gods, like the one in ‘The Goat herd’s Handbook,’ and not see the fingerprints of weak, frightened,
venial, evil, avaricious...jealous and megalomaniacal, humans all over it.

This is why I’ve begun to tell people that I am a creationist as well as a scientist. I have probably fifty
history/mythology/scholarly texts in this room, that show all the ways that men create gods, or god like
beings; to assuage their ignorance if they are good, or more likely to feed those failings in us that are to
us as those listed above. All it takes is a little of one of our failings, added to a good dose of credulity
and/or indoctrination at an early age… and ignorance.

If I had to characterize the scientists I worked with, and whom I knew well; I would never consider
Characterizing them as ones with god-like ability. With all other considerations being equal, I'd have
to say that we were all most alike in the fact of how painfully we felt what we did not know... what we
could not do. It’s an itch that is characterized by the inability to accept some nice and pleasant story
as a substitute for knowing the actual truth. If some god like being were to exist, just hypothetically
we will say in our universe, and if we were to imbue it with the qualities of a scientist... then I think he'd
be standing here, and saying “Okay, let’s see if this works any better."

Here is how I see it.

For about ten billions of years, stars that were ever-so-much more massive than our sun, formed and
died all over this universe. Many of those first and second generation stares died very quickly, in the
most spectacular way possible, seeding the universe with all the products of nucleogenesis - or all the
types of more complex matter that it takes to build things, that grow of the fusion inside of stars. Stars
that died in titanic explosions that shown everywhere, and rang the fabric of time and space, to seed
all that we know with their crops of elements.

Those elements, mostly hydrogen, but still with unimaginably great store of other kinds and more,
flowed out into the universes, driven by the gasping energies of the dying stars behind them.
Monuments to those long dead stare, collecting here and there, moving throughout the universe like
the ebb and flow of oceans, or wind in a field of wheat, helping to create all that we can see.

About six billion years ago, another star, we can't be sure where, it was so unimaginably far
from where we are now, but still one that was much larger than our own sun, exploded. It caused
a shock-wave in one of those clouds of matter that collect here and there was pressed together, and
a newer smaller star began to form in that nursery. Other heavy elements collected in orbits ... the
result was what comprised all the wonder of the universe for most of our history. A sun that seems
eternal, and planets that move in the sky. Imagination for the generations of philosophers and
scientists, who spent their lives in the wonder of all they did now know and did not understand.

And... Imagine that they could never have conceived of how wondrous all actually was.

Now we know the sun sits there converting hydrogen into heavier elements, all the things needed
for life. It spews out billions of tons of carbon and oxygen, as well as its own hydrogen. That collect
as dirty ice in the ort cloud, and on the planets. The solar wind that contains all the things that are
needed like a living breathing thing that is the progenitor of all life. We have learned that once those
elements come together, from our star and from stars from across the cosmos, and from other parent
stars long gone dead and cold, that the complexity that we see all around us begins to grow. All
of this through the most simple and elegant physics and chemistry that we live with every day.

We know, that Right now for the briefest fraction of that Thirteen point seven billion year history, on
this small rock, in and insignificant corner of one average sized galaxy, that is lost... lost, in a universe so
unimaginably vast that its size can't even be dreamed, that this matter will, for a few dozens of turns of
that rock around its parent sun - can look up at that the beauty and wonder of that universe and know
where it came from. It can know what it is, and what it all means… and if perhaps not for the first time
in all that long history of the universe, and certainly not for the only time, still for just this time right
here.

That’s enough wonder, and mystery, for me or for anyone. That is the gift that is beyond price or
compare. That is the miracle that astonishes, and although I have a love of fiction, because it really
is one of the very best things that the mind of man can do, to conceive of other worlds, and lives, or
conditions; I just have no room in my heart and mind to replace the smallest part of that very real
wonder, with something contrived by other and sometimes lesser men, to explain what they did not
know. To explain what still others do not know.

And…

Since I was six years old, there has not been a single day that I did not wish I knew more, or to
Understand just a little better than I could. I have never seen one sunset, or a single leaf, or the grain
in a piece of wood, the curiosity of young animals… or the glow in my lover's eyes... that did not make
me appreciate and think of all the things that I have been privileged - p-r-i-v-l-i-d-g-e-d - to have
known. It has forced me to further appreciation of the things that I have always been sad that I
certainly never will know; But even there, I have the solace that someday someone will.

That's why Vivien, you don’t need to recreate a big scientist, to revamp the big magician, who replaced
the great king of kings. We have more than enough of those. Stories are fun, and history is amazing;
but, for my part, I have too much love, and wonder, and reason, and happily wit, within me, to ever
have the need to try and create something to take the place of it, in the hope for something more.
What is real, is more amazing than anything we can create, as is clearly shown by the dismal failures of
the theologies of every kind and from every age, and I just really don't have the room, let alone the
need, for those. I am content.

Hope that answers the question.

Sincerely,

Sarah Lynn

P.S. And yes, I do recognize that only people who don't like to write, should be allowed to respond to
comments... Hazards of the trade, I suppose.

It's a nice story too.

Were your family ethnic Uyghurs? I'm not actually sure when the majority of
them became Muslims, but I've always loved their music, and think that many of
their women are strikingly beautiful.

Like I said, it is a nice story, and people love to tell such nice stores to
children. Stories that make sense to them, in some simple way. The fact is,
that in that time, there were many groups who fled the campaign against religion
taking place in Russia. What many do not know know or remember, that campaign
wasn't largely driven by the fundamentals of an atheistic ideology. (As if
there really were such a thing, and as if most of the acts of tyrants and
spiritual leaders on that scale, are not politically motivated.) In fact,
the origins of those policies were a reaction to the character of the Russian church,
which had for centuries vigorously undertaken to help suppress the peasantry, and
to support the rights of the noble classes, all so as to secure their own positions
in the scheme of things. It was the agency of the church on behalf of that serfdom
that changed the rejection into a backlash. In both instances, excesses all, lead
to terrible times for all of humanity.

As a funny aside, I too have a list of things that protect humanity, including,
but not limited to: Soap, Antibiotics, constitutions, laws... education. No
doubt at all, that there are Powerful forces acting in this world. I suppose the
ones you notice the most, depends on the stories you are most drawn too. @-_-@

I would love to know more of your grand parents. My great grandfather was the
master of many of the larger sailing vessels out of Newfoundland in his day. His
wife... we are not at all sure if she was the grandmother... died on board in the
java sea, and and was interred in Indonesia. In the time of your grand parents,
and of the great depression, my grandfather and his brother were taken in by a
nice lady, whose name we all bear, but to whom we are unrelated! Of his children
we know very little, other than my grandmother was one of many undernourished children,
who it was astonishing that she even survived.

Other than that, all I know is that if I ever want to wear a skirt and not just look
more pleasant or stylish, that we are allowed to wear either the McDonald or the Royal
Stewart for our Kilt. Probably means that some distant Grandsire owned a cow, as well
as some sheep.

On my mother's side, aided by their rich and carefully created records, were the
surnames of just about everyone I ever knew while living down south. All of them,
completely interrelated through marriage, and easily traced through a dozen generations.
And in all of those hundreds of women and men, a favorite great-great-grandmother, who's
story was told to me by a saintly, wonderful great aunt as a child. Aunt Nanny.

(My mother was one of sixteen children, most of whom lacked the self control that my
grandmother did, with many of the women, like my poor grandmother, obviously not knowing
nearly enough about jujitsu, or even the more martial and more practical uses of an iron
frying-pan!)

It seems like my Great Great Grandfather took a trip from South Carolina to Virginia
one fall, and due to weather took nearly six months with a loaded Wagon. When he returned,
he had taken a wife up around the Virginia / North Carolina border. In all that Rich history
of family do's, she is the only one who is listed as his wife Female Grey. (Yes, though
mostly Celtic, we are from that Grey family.) It was told to me, by Aunt Nanny, in 1969,
that it was because of the scandal, that he had married a Cherokee Indian princess! He
called her "my little Monkey," indeed so much so, that none of the relatives then living
could quite remember her actual name.

Well, at the time, I smiled and thanked her, but my thoughts even at nine, were quite
skeptical. Many folks down there either claim some Indian blood, or deny what they may
have. However, some years later, a good friend stumbled across an interesting note about
a marriage, and later, I gave my DNA to a friend who was supervising a population study.

That area was part of the Powhatan Confederacy, the largest and most powerful tribe were
of course the Pamunkey. Sure enough, the entry found up by a friend in obscure records in
Virginia, though hardly conclusive, noted the marriage of the daughter of a tribal chief, in
that same year, to a man from the Carolina s. DNA showed the link. Some may recall, that
Pocahontas was a princess of the Pamunkey Tribe of the Powhatan confederacy. As a princess
they were surely related, but... we don't have the name. Wife; Fem Grey

Aunt Nanny died shortly thereafter, after fighting cancer for some forty years, mostly with
a smile. With all those children in the family, and me just having moved down from Boston, she
knew exactly who I was, and said hello to me by name from her hospital bed the only time I
ever met her. Amazing. I wish that there had been a way to tell her what I'd found, but she
herself told me the majority share of the story, and she was already on of the most contented,
and sweetest people I've ever met.

With love, Jessica

Sarah Lynn