But it was the questions that they came up with that finally provoked the Resurrectionists to question what the twins had wished them to question all along, giving new meaning to the old expression, “Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.”

First Justin and Joshua asked if it might be true that all religious philosophy was, at bottom, a human hunger for immortality.

An uneasy murmur ran through their communities.

Then they asked if it might be true that human consciousness—what their Resurrectionist sponsors called “spirit” or “soul”—arose from nothing more than a special arrangement of cells in the brain. “Could it be true,” Justin asked, “that I am able to ask questions because during the first weeks after conception one small group of cells separated from another small group to become the core of my central nervous system, and that my mind arises from nothing more exotic than specific chemical and electrical signals that are an epiphenomenon not present in the cells themselves? And is it just my good fortune that I am a synergistic sum of all these signals, lucky enough to have arisen from the cells that became the folds of the brain, instead of that other small group of embryonic cells that migrated away to become unthinking skin, or liver, or blood?”

The murmur grew louder.

And then the two friends began searching for the meaning of the near-death experience, in which people all over the world, snatched by medical science from the moment between dying and death, recounted stories of leaving their bodies and moving toward light and even, on occasion, being given what looked for all the world like prophetic glimpses of a post-apocalypse Earth. Joshua had tended to regard the experience as an hallucinatory state brought on by extreme physical stress, because, after all, the patient was still alive, and you can have whatever illusion you like in a living brain; but what interested him most was that the Resurrectionists took all near-death visions as gospel. Seizing on this, he asked his followers how, if they were to accept the visions as really meaning anything, they would come to terms with the fact that Christians and Jews, Muslims and Hindus all met the gods and prophets in whom they had placed their faiths and not those of other faiths.

“If you believe that God’s hand is in this, then what is He telling us?” Justin added. “If there is something more to human consciousness than mere streams of electrons, if the near-death experience is teaching us that man has a soul, then our souls are telling us that all the world’s religions are equally valid, tailored to the local history and experience of a people. Even the views of atheists, who come back claiming to have been in a peaceful place where they met dead friends and relatives, must be valid.”

Joshua said, “As for the apparent paradox of beliefs— even those with conflicting views—being simultaneously correct, why shouldn’t this be so? That’s how I would have put the universe together, were I God laying its foundations. In a multiverse that already manifests every photon of light as a wave and a particle, with both being contradictory yet simultaneously correct, wouldn’t this be child’s play? If God exists, why shouldn’t His will be expressed as pluralism?”