Apparently the Christians were right. I stood at the Gates of Heaven, staring at a man wearing a halo who could only be St. Peter. Beside me sat my sister, Anne.

"Arie," Anne said, "I know we haven't been the best of friends, but I want to hug you one last time, before I never see you again."

"What makes you think you'll never see me again?" I asked.

"Because I am Christian, and you are not," she said. "I have accepted my Lord God as my savior, as you have not, and so I will be let into Heaven and you will not."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because Heaven cannot tolerate imperfection," she said.

I sighed. "Either imperfect humans can be admitted into heaven," I said, "or we cannot. One or the other. Either Jesus's death opened the way to us, or it did not. If God can let Christians in, then he can let imperfect people in, and so he can let agnostics in."

"But you chose not to be let in," Anne said. "You chose not to love God, and so you chose not to enter Heaven. He will not violate your free will by taking that choice away from you."

I turned to her suddenly. "Anne," I said, "Do you understand freedom of information? Academic freedom, freedom of the press, the 'right to know'-that sort of thing? It's one of the most precious and important freedoms. Do you know why?"

"No," she said. "Why?"

"Because without correct information, free will is impossible," I said. "Look: suppose someone were to feed someone else a dish full of something they were violently allergic to, and that person went into anaphylactic shock and died. Would they be guilty of murder?"

"It depends," she said.

"On what?"

"On whether they knew that they were allergic to it," she said.

"Exactly. Now, here's my point: free will is nonexistent without information. If the first person knew that the second person was violently allergic to whatever it was, then they were freely choosing to poison them. If they did not, then they did not have the freedom to choose whether to kill them or not. It would be an accident.

"Similarly, if you know God exists, then you can meaningfully choose whether to follow Him or not. But if you don't, then your "choice" is meaningless. You can only guess which of the myriad gods that humanity has worshipped over the millennia are real. Then you either get lucky, and guess the right one, or you make a mistake. Either way, there's no real choice involved.

"Thus, if your God had such respect for our 'free will', and also required us to make a choice about how we interact with him during our lives, then He would have been forced to demonstrate to us that he existed, and to have demonstrated it more convincingly than all the 'false gods' that we might have worshipped." I stepped back and spread my hands.

"But you have proof," Anne said. "Read your Bible. It says in the Lazarus story that Moses and the Prophets should be enough to make someone virtuous. It says right there that someone who doesn't believe in Moses and the Prophets will not be convinced by someone who rises from the dead."

I sighed. "Okay, first of all, I would have been persuaded by a miracle, even though I was not persuaded by Moses and the Prophets. That verse does not apply to me. Second, it's not meant to."

She blinked. "How do you figure that?" she asked.

"Read Luke 16 again, if you can. It's a lecture to the Pharisees. The people on the receiving end already were supposedly Jewish, and supposedly followers of Moses and the Prophets. They weren't agnostics who needed convincing; they were Jews who thought they followed the Prophets but didn't."

I took a breath. "Second, that chapter is a lecture on morality. It's about not stealing from your master, and about not leaving a hurt homeless man in the street. It's not about believing that Jesus is the Son of God. I give blood, I'm nice to people, I don't cheat on my taxes. I do what that story says to do. It may say to love God; well, I love my neighbor, and if it is true that Jesus sacrificed himself for me, then I'm very grateful. Are you so sure that I don't love God?"

She sighed. "I hope for your sake that you're right," she said.

"Yes, me too," I said.

Behind us, I heard the gates open.