The Futility of Fiction

I once again had some extra time on my hands, and I vainly tried to fill it by reading fiction. I have had a lifetime struggle with fiction. In school, it is always assigned and held up as an essential human academic venue. But I could see only it’s futility, and furthermore, I derive no pleasure from it. Feeling, however, the pressure of public opinion, I periodically try to force myself to appreciate fiction and literature. I have tried the Dickens, Twain, Melville, as well as the Vonnegut, Dick, Asimov, etc. Whatever genre or time period, I make it about 1/3 of the way through any fiction before I am irritated and bored. Now, I do appreciate music, visual art, and poetry, and by extension cinema (which is mostly visual and musical with the thinnest butter of story), but fiction per se has always remained opaque to me.

Well, having some time on my hands, I set about to read fiction. Since I like movies and science, I figured maybe science fiction would be more successful, so I attempted to read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, said to be one of the greats of speculative fiction, with three pages of glowing critical reviews as a preface. About a third of the way through, the book is already in the recycling/donation bins outside. As to the specifics of this book and why it tired me so, I shall go into some detail. First, it must be remembered that this book is supposed to be 12,000 years in the future. It must also be remembered that this book was written in 1951, and I will judge his “world-building” according to that time frame. In the beginning, there is a trial of the psycho-historians. These historians are predicting a doom (sort of like global-warming scientists), and the government is accusing them of having political motives rather than scientific for their studies. They are cross-examining Hari Seldon as to the number of scientists in his employ, to prove that his actions are political and not scientific. The government asks him how many scientists are in his employ. Seldon replies with a small number, and the government quotes a figure four or more times that. To this (in paraphrase) Seldon replies that those are just women, children, and support staff (other races/slaves). So, even though Asimov should have been aware that M. Curie won Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry, and women had won the right to vote in his youth in the twenties, he goes on to create a world 12,000 years in the future where women are mentally incapable of being scientists and have no political power? And though Gauss made important mathematical contributions as a pre-teen, children cannot make contributions to mathematics in 12,000 years? And the same lack of consideration of the intelligence or political weight of non-white races is still present so far in the future despite Asimov’s awareness of folk such as Langston Hughes, the Harlem renaissance, and the earliest blooms of the civil rights movement in a decade? This is not a credible world. In the very next section, a great worker on the Galactic Encyclopedia is cataloging his findings on paper with a stylus, even though the first computers with punch cards are already in play in the 50s, and Max Mathews is already doing his early acoustic research on early IBM machines. This is not a credible world. Furthermore, despite the 50’s fascination with the glorious future of plastics and synthetic materials, which is well known to a man well-versed in science such as Asimov, there is a grave discussion regarding mining and the necessity of steel for every construction paragraphs later. This is not a credible world 20 years in the future, let alone 12,000 years. Also, the aliens gather into a Christian church with a Reverend next. When we live on a planet where few people give a shit about a psychotic Jew who lived 2000 years ago, we are expected to believe that distant planets 12,000 years in the future will embrace Christianity? Furthermore, at one point a character mentions that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that the ancient wise man who discovered this (Einstein) has been forgotten. But a meaningless Jew 3000 years prior to Einstein with no contribution to human knowledge is remembered and revered? Talk about Mr. Asimov’s distorted personal lens. The fact is that this great of science fiction creates a sloppy, unbelievable and tiresome world with no credibility heavily weighed down by his lack of vision, racism, sexism, failure to understand ecosystems or holism, and a genuine lack of appreciation of the true nature of scientific research or the interaction of science, society and government. Not to mention that the two-dimensional characters, lacking convincing psychological motivations, sexual or self-affirming actions, stuck in a third-world industrial hell, are mere cardboard cutouts to move a facile plot of no significance forward. Like most speculative fiction, it seems to be the play-world of pre-teen power fantasies projected at large with a curious disregard for other people as people versus mere manipulations for the author. I feel sorry for these people’s families.

To me, drama or supposedly realistic fiction suffers from the same problems. The characters are often abnormally aware of the importance of their mundane action, like visiting the parson for tea. In real life, when you go to someone’s house for coffee, you don’t know that very act is part of some grand drama. Some days it may be mundane, some days it may be the beginning of a complicated drama involving the bombing of some buildings in New York with airplanes. You can’t savor the moment a priori with psychic awareness the way novelists do. In some ways, the comic book American Splendor by Harvey Pekar is much more convincing than any work of literature, as the mundane, like finding a jazz album we are searching for, is the drama and grand event to us individually, though absolutely mundane to everyone else. Furthermore, the characters in literature, due usually to the narrator’s grand god-like awareness, have entirely too much knowledge of the contents and motivations of other people’s heads. Whereas, in real life, I am often unaware of the contents of my wife’s head while we speak about some grave and serious matter. Also, there is the constant plague that none of this is real. The people aren’t real. The events aren’t real. They certainly aren’t going to help me build a fence or feed my children. And given the lack of verisimilitude of the characters, their awareness of others, and their prescience of the significance of the mundane, I question as so many blindly accept, that such input could in any way help you deal with real people in real life with any authenticity. I believe fiction sets up an arrogant, solipsistic world for the heavy reader that is flagrantly anti-social in that other people are mere objects for the manipulation and enhancement of experience of the self-centered.

I suppose that is why I think religion is stupid. Religion is fiction. The Bible is fiction. The world was not created in six days. The circumference of a circle is Pi times the diameter, not three times (1 Kings 7:23). Hare do not chew their cud. (Lev 11:6) There was no world-wide flood. Bats are not birds. (Lev 14:11) The sun does not move or go around the earth, but as we know from Copernicus, vice versa. (Joshua 10:12, judges 5:31 and many others) The earth rotates on its axis. It is not still. (Chron 16:30) Human thought is in the brain, not the heart. (Esther 6:6) And that is a short list of Biblical errata, as everyone knows. These are just stupid, made-up stories by pre-scientific people. The Koran is fiction. There are not eleven planets. (Koran 12:4) The sun does not move, the earth is not flat, and the sun does not go to bed in a muddy spring. (18:86, 90) The earth is not still, but rotates on its axis. (27:61) The moon is not its own light, but reflects light of the sun. (71:16) Again, the Koran is a fiction. The Koran is just more stupid, made-up stories by a backward, pre-scientific people.

Only fundamentalists try to say the Bible or Koran is true, the word of God. But for a omniscient being, God doesn’t seem to know much about the world he created, suggesting these are not God’s stories, but the stories of men who lived in ignorance of reality. Many believers, understanding the need to not fly in the face of reality, prefer to say that these stories are poetry, and while not literally true, still have an important core message. Let us look at the core message of both the Bible and the Koran then. They, fortuitously, have the same core message, so we may dispense with both of them at once. Both the Bible and the Koran say that God exists and created the earth and man. When you die, you will be buried and stay there. At some future time, God will blow the whistle for “end of game,” the dead will be pulled out of their graves, and the living and the dead will be judged on their actions and belief affiliations. The good will go to paradise or reward, and the bad will go to the good ol’ lake of fire. First of all, there is no god. Second of all, the dead will not be resurrected. Third of all, there is no punishment or reward. Both scriptures said the end was very near, but it never came and it never will come. If there is an “end of game” for the people of earth, it will be when the sun red giants or subsequently supernovas, and we will all be in a lake of fire, regardless of what book you read or what club you belonged to. And this time of demise for the planet and the heavens is so far in the future that it is entirely possible that we may simply colonize a habitable planet or man-made space colony. So I suppose the scientists who take to the stars will be saved from the lake of fire, and the religious scrabbling with their old books on a crumbling earth will burn in the lake of fire. The real core message of Islam and Christianity, the resurrection and judgment, is an absolute utter fiction. And this intelligent, non-material being called God is a pure fiction. The only intelligence comes from firing neurons in a nervous system, something a non-material being couldn’t have. Furthermore, there is the old “ghost in the machine” problem of how a purely non-material being could interact with a material world.

Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism are utter fictions and nonsense too. There is no reincarnation, as our personality and identity is a by-product of our human brains. There is no human intelligence transferable to a non-human brain such as a roach. The number of species and beings is not a constant, so are some souls being made fresh and some recycled? Buddhism is absolutely contingent on belief in reincarnation, because seeking Nirvana or freedom from rebirth is the sole point to the Noble Eightfold Path. As to pantheistic notions such as Taoism or Hinduism, there is no universal spirit or connection between all things no matter how close or distant. If Alpha Centauri explodes today, the only effect that would have is a peculiar twinkle in the sky some thousands of years hence, because no communication or effect can occur faster than the speed of light. So there can be no instantaneous, magical connection. The only connection between us and something else must occur through the exchange of bosons that determine the four fundamental forces of nature. Any object too distant is limited by the universal speed limit of the speed of light, and therefore such interactions are negligible and slow, and most certainly completely material.

Why people persist in maintaining the utility of fiction is beyond me. We live in a real, vibrant, and beautiful world, full of wonder and greatness. These religious fictions are simply for the control of others, for generating fear and misery. We should embrace reality and the wonder it is.

What Religion Can Do For You

Here’s a sad article from the BBC about a 19-year-old boy who was apparently planning a suicide bombing. Thankfully he was found out before he could go through with it; now he’s facing charges of terrorism.

You know, it’s hard to be a teenager. He was new to Bristol. He’d recently converted to Islam.

When I was a teenager, when you wanted to piss off Mom and Dad, you just read the Tao Te Ching or something. Now kids are strapping on vests full of explosives and sharp objects. I think I prefer Taoism as a form of teenage rebellion; at least there’s nothing in the text that can be construed as encouraging violence.

Some Muslims will insist that the Koran doesn’t, either. But if that’s so, then how come so many have killed in the name of Allah? (And lest anyone think I’m claiming Christianity doesn’t, trust me…I know plenty of violence has been done by both Christians and Jews, too…I think they’re all nuts.)

And I’ll also give credit where it’s due: the article states that the kid was picked up after an investigation following a tip-off from within the local Muslim community.

Song of Solomon is the only part of the Bible that should be read

Kabbalah notes:

The schechinah is a female spirit , who as a symbol generated by the unconscious, ties together the various aspects or modalities of the mind. The kabbalah is the itemization of the mind’s modalities, so as to gain both self-knowledge and control of the self. Many of the letters or paths of the kabbalah take the form of abstractions of sexual relations with the schechinah or abstractions of her sexual anatomy. Whether a man or woman is the practitioner, the inner self, or the schechinah, is this divine female, and one’s divinity is attained by imitating her divine intercourse with the lord of the universe. She is in constant loving embrace with the world. As she says, “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me.” The earth, symbolized by a bull, without mind, is dead. This is why when you first meet the schechinah she is alone and yearning, a widowed goddess, for the earth cannot be seen as a lord without her love. “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves: I sought him, but I found him not.” But it is the love and activity of the schechinah for her lover that returns him to life, joins he and she together in the joyous dance that is the mind at play and in love with the earth.

Below is the elucidation of some paths or energies in my meditations:

Daleth- Door. Understanding. Entry into the temple where one is taught by the schechinah.
Mem - Water. Breast milk. Pain and loss. Tears. Her crying face with her absent lover, keening. That which ties us to life, also the joy and nourishment of existence, food, plants and animals for food, clothing, medicine, and spirituality.
Peh - Mouth. Fellatio. Aggressiveness, drive. Taking over, domination. Energy to do tasks.
Shin - Tooth. The fangs of criticism and self-abrogation. Trial. The harsh aspects of life and nature.

It is clear that the Bible does contain a mystical system. The Song of Solomon is probably the clearest and most accessible pathway to understand the coherent and effective mystical tradition that is behind the poetry of the Bible. The danger of misapplying the remainder of the Bible into aberrant and irrational attitudes that are destructive to self and others is so high, that I believe nothing should be read except the Song of Solomon until that poem is understood. If you read the Song of Solomon and it doesn’t make perfect sense to you, then you should put the Bible away and not read another word of it for a long time. Go meditate, learn, study, love, live. Read the poem only when you are drawn to it because you have already seen it manifested in your own heart. Otherwise, don’t touch that potentially poisonous book of difficult poems. The Song of Solomon is a gate keeper for the rest of the kabbalah. If this path, which is not generic or advantageous to all, does not work for you, there is still the beauty of life, poems to chant, songs to sing and mountains to climb, but to misapply deep unconscious symbols to reality, like fundamentalists apply bad theology to worse politics, is as dumb as spending today the money you dreamed you had last night. It won’t work, and it disrespects the schechinah to such an extent that the mental damage may be hard if not impossible to undue.

2008 Is Going to Be a Very Strange Year

After we invaded Iraq, I repeated at the forums I frequent the phrase, “Is it 2004 yet?” to sum up what I felt. Silly me, I actually assumed the American people would have the sense to evict these liars from the White House.

It was too depressing to follow that with “Is it 2008 yet?” Not only did it seem way too far away, but now I have no confidence that the American people will have the sense to vote for change.

The only candidate I see who could offer real change is Dennis Kucinich, and, as usual, he’s hardly in the running, because he has common sense, and I’ve found there’s nothing actually common about common sense, and it’s not something the American people seem to appreciate in their politicians.

Now, we’ve got Obama, whom half the nuts in the country think is part of the Illuminati (a group that doesn’t really exist anymore, and never did anything real while they did — the OTO and the Golden Dawn accomplished much more in terms of opening up possibilities for astral exploration, for example), Clinton (talk about more of the same — egads, having the legal and insurance lobby running things? no thanks), Romney, who’ll never be elected because he’s Mormon (a religion many Christians don’t recognize as part of their club), and Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher (please save us from such a fate…having lived 13 years in the Bible Belt where Southern Baptists behave like Hilter’s brown-shirts in their evangelical zeal, I can’t imagine what would happen with one of theirs in charge). And McCain. Well, at least he’s been to war, and doesn’t approve of torture. But something about him doesn’t seem quite right, either.

Last night I finished reading Milan Kundera’s excellent book The Curtain, an essay in seven parts on the history of the art of the novel. It’s fascinating, and of course, as an escapee from Czechoslovakia after the Soviets invaded, he’s got real perspective on the importance and relevance of politics on people’s daily lives (and deaths) — he knows that when things go badly, artists are often eliminated by the powers that be. It makes me glad to live in America, where we do have some small protections, but I don’t take such things for granted. I don’t put it past Big Money to assassinate uppity poets.

One of his themes is the omnipresence of stupidity. And boy is he ever right. Folks are stupid. What really scares me about the current situation, though, is that the stupid have been in charge for so long now in America, they don’t seem to want to give up power even though they’re running the country into the ground. What is this distrust of intelligence? Why wasn’t Kerry elected? Why won’t Kucinich be elected?

I guess I’m going to buy a farm and live far away from people, and watch, like Robinson Jeffers did, while the stupid people of this country continue to elect stupid men who will continue to behave stupidly and make America the fool of the world.

Barack Obama Illuminati?

You know, ever since I made a funny little post, during the dead-Jesus broo-ha-ha, about the next step being to introduce Barack Obama as Christ’s heir, every day at least one person finds my blog by searching for some combination of words including “illuminati” and some form of the man’s name.

Well, since he won the Iowa primary, my readership has spiked. And most of the new visitors are here to read that little post.

Come on, folks, the illuminati were an old secret society founded by a nutbar, that never did anything and that fell apart a long time ago. The only group of folks pulling the strings from behind the scenes are multi-national corporations, not men in dark suits intent on bringing the world into contact with aliens or into secular humanism or some new enlightenment or whatever it is you fear they’re doing. The strings that get pulled are pulled for financial reasons. Even seemingly religious wars really have more to do with real estate and mineral rights. The little man, the one who goes to church and goes to work and tries to pay his bills, is just a cog in the wheels of money-making for the small number of families who actually own everything. You are expendable. And it doesn’t have anything to do with liberal agendas. It has to do with money. To the rich, you are less than human. That’s just the way it is.

If there were an illuminati, a group of people who saw the bigger picture, who saw what humanity suffers and had some good ideas about how to drag it out of this dark age, I’d join up in a minute. But no one has come knocking. Because it’s just a conspiracy theory, folks. Quit watching so much TV, do some real reading, learn your history, and pull yourself up out of the scum left over from a 3,000-year-old land-grab.

And btw, Obama is too pedestrian to belong to any such enlightened group. He’s just another politician eager to suck on the corporate tit, who happens to have dark skin, which sets off your sublimated racism. You’d rather imagine him part of some weird conspiracy than admit that you hate him because he’s black.

This is Why I’m in Poetry, Not Politics

Because I have children. And so did she, which is heartbreaking. They’ve assassinated Bhutto in Pakistan. Here’s the news story. And I thought our democracy was in trouble.

O, sons of Abraham, when are you going wake up and realize that we’re all one family? The human family!

Dominionism and the Religious Right: Somebody Save the Constitution!

Here’s an incredible article written by someone who managed to extricate herself from her fundamentalist upbringing. It’s published at The Dissident Voice, something new for the blogroll (and maybe a potential market!). This is the meaty part:

Today, as I witness the possibility of losing the last shreds of liberty to a fundamentalist theocracy, I am reminded once again of my college research paper and how “dangerous” research, critical thinking, and asking the right questions can be. All those years ago, I extricated myself from the fundamentalist Christian programming of my family and subculture, and now I am watching it threaten to engulf my entire country.

To even attempt to understand the religious right, which many are now naming “Dominionism”, one must grasp the mental duress it holds on its followers. I should know; I was one of them. Axiomatic in the worldview of the fundamentalist, born-again Christian is: “I have the truth, I’m right; you don’t have the truth, you’re wrong.” As a result, critical thinking, research, or intellectual freedom of exploration are not only unnecessary, they are dangerous and potentially heretical. Paul Krugman noted in a recent article that while the religious right bashes academia for its “liberal bias,” studies of the political persuasions of college and university professors indicate that persons who prefer academia as a lifelong career tend to be more liberal, just as those who prefer the military as a lifelong career tend to be more conservative. The halls of academia do not spawn the likes of Tim LaHaye or Pat Robertson. Remember, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

But simply shunning critical thinking does not make one a terrorist. What does, however, is the notion that because one “has the truth” and everyone else who believes differently is “wrong”, those individuals will be condemned to spend eternity in hell and must be incessantly reminded of their fate and their “inferior” status in the eyes of God. Moreover, because of one’s “superior” spiritual status, one has the so-called “divine authority” to subvert, by whatever means necessary, the very machinery of government in order to establish a theocracy in which one’s worldview is predominant.

When sufficiently pressed, Christian fundamentalists intractably argue that people are poor because they have not been born again. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century America, wealth is a sign that one is following the will of God, and poverty indicates that one is not. People are poor because they are doing something to cause themselves to be poor, and whatever that may be, the underlying cause is that they do not have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Increasingly, one sees many faces of color in fundamentalist congregations, but those individuals are almost without exception, born-again Christians who tow the dominionist line with other people of color.

Dominionism deplores the mental health system. Like those who are poor, the mentally ill would not be so if they were born again Christians. After all, mental illness is a label given by the Dr. Phils of the world to people whose minds have been devoured by Satan. What they really need is Christian conversion and of course, a great deal of medication from the pharmaceutical lobby. The only valid therapist is Jesus; down with Oprah, God bless Joyce Meyer. Obviously, according to Dominionism, government should not be financing mental health programs.

And what about addictions? In case you haven’t caught on to the drill yet, Jesus is the answer to that one as well. Who needs a Twelve-Step program? There’s only one step: Accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior as soon as possible, and your addictions will be erased faster than those eighteen minutes on the Richard Nixon tapes. (Remind me to write another article on the religious right AS an addiction.)

Christian fundamentalism in “cafeteria style” has chosen which parts of Jesus’ teachings it chooses to honor and which not. Preference is always given to the “I am” passages such as those in the Gospel of John in which Jesus says, “ I am the door; the bread of life; the way, the truth, and the life; the light of the world; the living water,” and so on, supposedly claiming to be God and commanding his listeners to accept him as the only way to live forever with God in heaven and escape eternity in hell. Little attention is given to the Sermon on the Mount and the many passages where Jesus condemns the wealthy and the religious leaders of his time for their callous, hypocritical, mean-spirited absence of compassion. In fact, theologians who pay much attention to Jesus’ teachings on compassion are viewed as bleeding hearts, unorthodox, and not really Christian. For this reason, Pat Robertson stated on his 700 Club program, January 14, 1991: “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’ have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.”

Let us not overlook the obvious: Dominionism is about dominion — over women, children, the poor, people of color, alternative sexual orientations, and the earth. It fits so nicely with fascist tyranny.

Christian fundamentalism is fundamentally UN-American. Dominonists clearly desire a revised United States Constitution that will institute a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. As Katherine Yurica has so assiduously reported, the Dominionist agenda would shred the Constitution and end the democratic republic our Deist founding fathers hammered out for five grueling months in 1787 in Philadelphia.

In fact, Pat Robertson believes that only Christian people should interpret and benefit from the Constitution. Again, on his 700 Club, December 30, 1981, he stated that, “The Constitution of the United States, is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society.” Never mind that most of the founding fathers did not consider themselves Christian and clearly, adamantly, and unequivocally defended the right of everyone in America to believe — or not believe, as he/she chooses.

I hope Americans outside the Bible Belt become more aware that reasonable people down here are being suppressed. It’s an insidious threat. A lawyer I enjoy at another forum calls it the American Christian Taliban. I think that’s not a bad label, with all the appropriate connotations. Except that they are really quite unAmerican, which is why I prefer Christianofascists.

Majutsu sez…

“Americans want science confined to a money-making box, not wandering in church asking questions.” We had a big discussion about labels today, whether I ought to call myself an atheist or a secular humanist, or one of my own making, which I’ve been using and which my former mentor says he likes: agnostic secularist.

And it’s not that I’m not sure whether or not there’s a personal deity. I know that’s not so. Or at least I’m confident enough to consider people like Richard Dawkins to be perfectly reasonable, if somewhat impatient with people who value their heritage more than the need to feel 100% rational. Personally, for example, I think it’s just fine that some Christians and some Jews and even some Muslims have managed to pare away the extraneous BS of superstition and ignorance and cultural overlay to find the core of their faiths, which have enough truth to them (the smallness and insignificance of the individual as compared to the Whole, the importance of kindness and the other virtues, etc.) to be valuable when taken with a grain of salt (and never, ever insist that anyone agree with your take! enough evangelism, already, which ought to be called dominionism, at this point…let’s call a spade a spade). Heck, we even used the Bible recently to illustrate a point to our kids (the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has political connotations lost on most of us…). But I like using “agnostic” to say that I am not certain. That I’m not saying I know what happens when you die, or how the world came to be (I mean, I know life evolved, but I’m talking about what happened in the millisecond preceding the Big Bang), but that I do not know and further I don’t consider it important. What IS important is secularism. That religion and government remain forever separate. Religion is just too personal a choice to be legislated. Period. And the problems we all face together as one species on this beleaguered planet, problems of our own making that require solutions other than war OR prayer.

But back to Maj’s statement about science, it’s so true. These folk love science so long as it’s making them money. They gladly embrace it while it fills their coffers, but badmouth it if it seems to contradict the religious tenets that give them power. Another six weeks or so, and we escape the Bible Belt. I can’t tell you how eager I am.

Ann Coulter Is a Cunt

WARNING: MATURE CONTENT

Sometimes it’s more fun to be mad than sad, so since I got an email from a democratic candidate (how I got on these lists I don’t know, since I’m not a democrat, actually) about this woman I’ve long detested, I just thought I’d let y’all know how I feel.

Ann Coulter is a cock-worshiping cunt. I bet she has fantasies about taking three at a time. I bet Cheney has fantasies about getting a Cleveland steamer from her, that scat-muncher.

That woman gives women a bad name. I wish she’d get cancer and lose that well-maintained head of bleached hair. I wish she’d get a tumor that takes out her verbal center, so she can choke on her hate in silence, unable to write or speak another word. I won’t wish her dead, since women in my family have a history of having such wishes come true, but I’ll dance the day her death is announced, that’s for damn sure.

Universal love? It’s a nice idea, but I’m only human, after all, and Ann Coulter’s an individual the species can definitely do without.

God is Not Great: Excellent Excerpt at Slate

Here’s one of three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’s book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I haven’t read the other two yet, but this was so good I had to post it here.

A little bit to whet your appetite:

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.