The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia, Stefano Maderno’s masterwork, in the homonymous church of Rome.
photo -Wikipedia
From Bill’s Story:
Childhood memories rose before me… my grandfather’s good natured contempt of some church folk and their doings; his insistence that the spheres really had their music; but his denial of the preacher’s right to tell him how he must listen; his fearlessness as he spoke of these things just before he died; these recollections welled up from the past. They made me swallow hard.
Few people really are [atheists], for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere. My intellectual heroes, the chemists, the astronomers, even the evolutionists, suggested vast laws and forces at work.
Notes From A Spare Mind 