But I don’t see how to take out the sex and religion. If I do, there isn’t any story left.
This story is supposed to be a completely free-wheeling look at contemporary human culture from the nonhuman viewpoint of the Man from Mars (in the sense of the philosophical cliche). Under it, I take nothing for granted and am free to lambaste anything from the Girl Scouts and Mother’s Apple Pie to the idea of patriotism. No sacred cows of any sort, no bows and graceful compliments to the royal box-that is the whole idea of the framework.
But, in addition to a double dozen of minor satirical slants, the two major things which I am attacking are the two biggest, fattest sacred cows of all, the two that every writer is supposed to give at least lip service to: the implicit assumptions of our Western culture concerning religion and concerning sex.
Concerning religion, our primary Western cultural assumption is the notion of a personal God. You are permitted to argue every aspect of religion but that one. If you do, you are a double-plus ungood crime-thinker.
Concerning sex, our primary cultural assumption is that monogamy is the only acceptable pattern. A writer is permitted to write endlessly about rape, incest, adultery, and major perversion…provided he suggests that all of these things are always sinful or at least a social mistake-and must be paid for, either publicly or in remorse. (The thing the censors had against Lady Chatterley and her lover were not their rather tedious monosyllables, but the fact that they liked adultery-and got away with it — and lived happily ever after.) The whole deal is something like Communist “criticism”…anything and any comrade may be criticized (at least theoretically) under Communism provided you do not criticize the basic Marxist assumptions.
So…using the freedom of the mythical man from Mure…I have undertaken to criticize and examine disrespectfully the two untouchables: monotheism and monogamy.
My book says: a personal God is unprovable, most unlikely, and all contemporary theology is superstitious twaddle insulting to a mature mind. But atheism and “scientific humanism” are the same sort of piffle in mirror image, and just as repugnant. Agnosticism is intellectually more acceptable but only in that it pleads ignorance, utter intellectual bankruptcy, and gives up. All the other religions, elsewhere and in the past, whether monotheistic, polytheistic, or other, are just as silly, and the very notion of “worship” is intellectually on all fours with a jungle savage’s appeasing of Mumbo Jumbo. (In passing, I note that Christianity is a polytheism, not a monotheism as claimed-the rabbis are right on that point-and that its most holy ceremony is ritualistic cannibalism, right straight out of the smoky caves of our dim past. They ought to lynch me.)
But I don’t offer a solution because there isn’t any, not to an intellectually honest man. That pantheistic, mystical “Thou art God!” chorus that runs through the book is not offered as a creed but as an existentialist assumption of personal responsibility, devoid of all godding. It says, “Don’t appeal for mercy to God the Father up in the sky, little man, because he’s not at home and never was at home, and couldn’t care less. What you do with yourself, whether you are happy or unhappy-live or die-is strictly your business and the universe doesn’t care. In fact you may be the universe and the only cause of all your troubles. But, at best, the most you can hope for is comradeship with comrades no more divine (or just as divine) as you are. So quit sniveling and face up to it — “Thou art God!”
Concerning sex, my book says: sex is a hell of a lot of fun, not shameful in any aspect, and not a bit sacred. Monogamy is merely a social pattern useful to certain structures of society-but it is strictly a pragmatic matter, unconnected with sin…and a myriad other patterns are possible and some of them can be, under appropriate circumstances, both more efficient and more happy-making. In fact, monogamy’s sole virtue is that it provides a formula defining who has to support the offspring…and if another formula takes care of that practical aspect, it is seven-to-two that it will probably work better for humans, who usually are unhappy as hell if they try to practice monogamy by the written rules.