Origin

The titles reminded him of a dark tale Edmond had shared years ago after Langdon had commented that Edmond, for an American atheist, seemed to have an unusual obsession with Spain and Catholicism. “My mother was a native Spaniard,” Edmond had replied flatly. “And a guilt-ridden Catholic.”

As Edmond shared the tragic tale of his childhood and his mother, Langdon could only listen with great surprise. Edmond’s mother, Paloma Calvo, the computer scientist explained, had been the daughter of simple laborers in Cádiz, Spain. At nineteen, she fell in love with a university teacher from Chicago, Michael Kirsch, who was on sabbatical in Spain, and had become pregnant. Having witnessed the shunning of other unwed mothers in her strict Catholic community, Paloma saw no option but to accept the man’s halfhearted offer to marry her and move to Chicago. Shortly after her son, Edmond, was born, Paloma’s husband was struck by a car and killed while biking home from class.

Castigo divino, her own father called it. Divine punishment.

Paloma’s parents refused to let their daughter return home to Cádiz and bring shame to their household. Instead, they warned that Paloma’s dire circumstances were a clear sign of God’s anger, and that the kingdom of heaven would never accept her unless she dedicated herself body and soul to Christ for the rest of her life.

After giving birth to Edmond, Paloma worked as a maid in a motel and tried to raise him as best as she could. At night, in their meager apartment, she read Scripture and prayed for forgiveness, but her destitution only deepened, and with it, her certainty that God was not yet satisfied with her penance.

Disgraced and fearful, Paloma became convinced after five years that the most profound act of maternal love she could show her child would be to give him a new life, one shielded from God’s punishment of Paloma’s sins. And so she placed five-year-old Edmond in an orphanage and returned to Spain, where she entered a convent. Edmond had never seen her again.

When he was ten, Edmond learned that his mother had died in the convent during a self-imposed religious fast. Overcome with physical pain, she had hanged herself.

“It’s not a pleasant story,” Edmond told Langdon. “As a high school student, I learned these details—and as you can imagine, my mother’s unwavering zealotry has a lot to do with my abhorrence of religion. I call it—‘Newton’s Third Law of Child Rearing: For every lunacy, there is an equal and opposite lunacy.’”

After hearing the story, Langdon understood why Edmond had been so full of anger and bitterness when they met during Edmond’s freshman year at Harvard. Langdon also marveled that Edmond had never once complained about the rigors of his childhood. Instead, he had declared himself fortunate for the early hardship because it had served as a potent motivation for Edmond to achieve his two childhood goals—first, to get out of poverty, and second, to help expose the hypocrisy of the faith he believed destroyed his mother.

Success on both counts, Langdon thought sadly, continuing to peruse the apartment’s library.

As he began scanning a new section of bookshelves, he spotted many titles he recognized, most of them relevant to Edmond’s lifelong concerns for the dangers of religion:

THE GOD DELUSION

GOD IS NOT GREAT

THE PORTABLE ATHEIST

LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION

THE END OF FAITH

THE GOD VIRUS: HOW RELIGION INFECTS OUR LIVES AND CULTURE

Over the last decade, books advocating rationality over blind faith had sprung up on nonfiction bestseller lists. Langdon had to admit that the cultural shift away from religion had become increasingly visible—even on the Harvard campus. Recently, the Washington Post had run an article on “godlessness at Harvard,” reporting that for the first time in the school’s 380-year history, the freshman class consisted of more agnostics and atheists than Protestants and Catholics combined.

Similarly, across the Western world, antireligious organizations were sprouting up, pushing back against what they considered the dangers of religious dogma—American Atheists, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, Americanhumanist.org, the Atheist Alliance International.

Langdon had never given these groups much thought until Edmond had told him about the Brights—a global organization that, despite its often misunderstood name, endorsed a naturalistic worldview with no supernatural or mystical elements. The Brights’ membership included powerhouse intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, Margaret Downey, and Daniel Dennett. Apparently, the growing army of atheists was now packing some very big guns.

Langdon had spotted books by both Dawkins and Dennett only minutes ago while skimming the section of the library devoted to evolution.