Free The Artifact by Jack Quinn

concern me.”
    “ Then let your hair down. You’re stuffing this radical idea down their throats and giving nothing of yourself.”
    “ What would you have me do?”
    “ Give me an interview. On camera, not on the air. You don’t like my questions, don’t answer them.”
    Hannah smiled at her for a long moment, then closed the door. Andy thought she’d been rejected until the door opened again minus the safety chain. Hannah said, “I feel like Daniel walking into the lion’s den.”
    Steve sat in a chair just inside the tiny foyer, his tripod mounted camcorder, directional mike and lights aimed across the double beds at Hannah and Andy seated at a round table angled toward him. Ceiling-to-floor white window curtains had been drawn behind them.
    ANDREA: First of all, who is Hannah Ogie? What is your background, your religious or philosophical training?
    HANNAH: Those details are irrelevant. People should focus on my concept, not on me.
    ANDREA: You would have more credibility if you opened up to your listeners.
    HANNAH: I am my message.
    ANDREA: Why, then? What do you hope to accomplish by your exhortations to eliminate all religions and obviate their infrastructures?
    HANNAH: I am trying to bring people closer to God. We should not require intermediaries to commune with our Deity, whomever we perceive Her to be.
    ANDREA: I have heard you refer to God in the feminine gender before. Is that part of your message, also?
    HANNAH: God can be whoever or whatever you perceive your Supreme Being to be. Buddha, Mohammed, Yahweh, our Christian God or any other benevolent entity.
    ANDREA: That’s the way it works now. You are born to or choose whatever religion suits you.
    HANNAH: No religion achieves its professed intent of helping us lead moral lives. The church, synagogue or mosque is designated as a place of worship and prayer; so the core congregation goes there once a week and most of us rarely think of God or morality between times.
    ANDREA: That’s quite an accusation.
    HANNAH: Then to what do you attribute the suburban familyman who bludgeons another driver with a tire iron in a fit of road rage an hour after he leaves religious services? Child molestation, wife beating, rape, murder, theft, white-collar crime, sexual perversion by clergy?
    ANDREA: Criminals are usually not God fearing, church-going people.
    HANNAH: I am not referring to just professional criminals. The crimes I mentioned are perpetrated by husbands, fathers, neighbors, public officials. But hasn’t religion failed them and avowed criminals, alike?
    ANDREA: Wouldn’t the elimination of organized religions leave a vacuum of prescribed methods of worship, doctrines, historical tenets, the basis for belief and moral behavior?
    HANNAH: Do you really think people need to be told how to worship? How to talk to their God? How to pray? Some of the ancient Biblical stories and admonitions have very little to do with our personal relationship to God in the twenty-first century.
    ANDREA: Most people understand them as guidelines for behavior.
    HANNAH: I think we all know the difference between right and wrong. Our distance from God created by meaningless rules, tenets and practices imposed on us by religions and clergy allows us to make poor choices. Greed, thirst for power, the exclusion of alternative means of worship, secular divisiveness. Religions do not set good examples in any of those areas. Religious wars throughout history, the Crusades, Inquisitions, terrorist-based jihads today.
    ANDREA: If you were able to disband organized religions, with what would you replace them?
    HANNAH: Nothing. I am not trying to eliminate religious beliefs, just the flawed, ponderous structures that purport to administer them. We should not revere human saints instead of God; we do not need ritual sacraments invented by man to worship God; we do not need the gold chalices, expensive vestments, circus-like gatherings by up-start, self-proclaimed ministers, gothic