“So you have method of baby control? What is it?” I asked.
The wick in the oil lamp started smoking, so the gardener adjusted it and put a bit of animal fat nearer the flame to be rendered into grease.
“In truth, my lord, I don’t know. You’d have to ask a nobleman or a wizard. My wife and I are servants who were born of servants, and neither of us did really well on the tests, so we aren’t troubled by that sort of thing.”
“You mean that you don’t care who the father of a child is?”
“No, my lord. I mean that we can’t have children. We’ve both been sterilized. It’s the law.”
THIRTEEN
In the grey dawn, Roxanna came to me and said that it was Sunday. My period of quarantine was over and I was well enough to get around, so therefore it was fitting that I should join the household and go to church with them. I wasn’t happy with the idea, but wisdom and maturity had taught me when to keep my mouth shut.
You see, I was raised a Catholic, and I spent my teenage years vigorously fighting the system. It wasn’t easy. The Christians had started indoctrinating me during the first year of my life, and they were so proud of this brainwashing of children that they publicly bragged about it.
“As the twig is bent, so the tree will grow.”
They bent so me hard I damn nearly broke. They began programming their party line into me long before I was old enough to think rationally about what they were saying. They dumped a load of undeserved guilt into my young subconscious long before I learned enough discrimination to sort their turds from their shit. They gave me the same ugly guilt treatment that they shoveled into every other helpless child they got their hooks into, but because I was more honest, more sincere than most, I think that those hooks hurt me more than they hurt most of the others.
I was many years straightening out my mind and my thoughts about religion, and in the process I diligently studied all of the major religions. In the end, my conclusions were very simple.
Western religions all feed on the most fundamental terror that a living being can ever face, the innate fear of death. They all said that if you would just live your life exactly according to the pattern that was given to us on the high mountain, if you would give up most of life’s little pleasures, and if you would shell out a major hunk of your after-tax income for the greater glory of God, then by golly, they’d take care of everything and you wouldn’t really have to die after all! They’d written vast piles of impossibly obtuse and deliberately unintelligible theology to prove that every word of it was true.
The real truth was that it was all a bag of nonsense designed for the sole purpose of keeping priests well fed and comfortable without any of them ever having to work for a living. It gave them a high-status job, being the direct representatives of the absolute boss, while letting them all live as lazily as any cheat on welfare.
It was so simple. All you have to do is to invent a God and then say that everything you wanted to do was on his orders. Only to pull that off, you have to explain just what this God thing is. Well, to be a God, a being must have at least three main attributes. He must be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all- loving.
What throws a wrench into the works of every Western theology is the obvious existence of evil. There is a lot of really bad shit happening in this world, and God lets it go on happening. The innocent are wrongly punished. The good die young. Babies are born with incurable brain cancers. God lets it happen.
Obviously, if He and evil both exist, He either can’t get rid of evil, or He doesn’t know about evil, or He doesn’t much care if evil exists or not. Yet if He has only two out of the three godly attributes, He just doesn’t make it as somebody worth worshiping.
If He is all-knowing and all-loving, but not all-powerful, then He knows that evil is happening and really feels bad about it, but He can’t do a thing about stopping it. Well, that’s the same position that I’m in, and it would be pretty stupid to worship someone who’s no better than me.
If He is all-powerful and all-loving, but not all-knowing, then He’s sitting somewhere up there like a fat cat thinking that everything is just fine with us darkies down below. I could never worship so ignorant a being, and even if I did kowtow to Him, what difference would it make? If He doesn’t know about something as obvious as evil, how could He notice something as insignificant as me? How would He know if I was worshiping Him or not?
And if He is all-powerful and all-knowing, but not all-loving, then the existence of evil proves Him to be one nasty son of a bitch. He must like it, that a baby is born with brain cancer! I’ll be damned if I’ll worship such a bastard! I may lack His power and knowledge, but I’m still a better, more moral being than He is, since if I could cure all the wretchedness and pain of this world, I would certainly do so!
All of which goes to prove that if there is a God, His character and abilities are such that He’s not worth worshiping. Not that there is the slightest bit of evidence proving that such a critter exists in the first place.
It would take a very strange sort of mind to believe both in the painful world about us and in a full, three- attribute God. My mind isn’t strange enough in that direction.
I’m a rationalist, and if that means that I will be dead when I die, and there’s no pie in the sky by and by, well then, so be it. I’ll just tough it out and die dead. Better that than to live out the only life I’ll ever have as a fraud.
Curiously, there are people who are both rational and religious. My best friend Adam is that way. How he manages to do it is beyond me. All I can guess is that he and the others like him must have minds that are somehow compartmentalized. There are areas where they are rational about everything, and areas that are blocked off, like a computer memory in “protect” mode. These are things about which it is not permissible to think. Or something like that.
Growing up in a staunchly Catholic family made breaking away from religion a very painful process for me and everyone around me. I did it because I felt that I had to, for my own self-respect, my own integrity, and for my own superior moral code.
It was a battle that I fought long ago, but along with wisdom and maturity comes a certain amount of resigned cowardice. I wasn’t going to change these people. They were going to keep on believing in God no matter what I did. Hell, they still believed in magic!
There was also the fact that if these people sterilized their servants and let people starve to death just because they couldn’t afford the food, I wouldn’t put it past them to burn a foreign heretic!
* * *
Thus, I went to religious services with Roxanna and the servants. Dressed in our best, we walked together for a quarter hour to the church. It was in a section called Troicinet, where Roxanna had grown up. There was a closer church, but she preferred her old one.
Between the medieval schtick that pervaded this floating island, and the fact that Roxanna never mentioned any but the one religion, I had naturally assumed that the church that we were going to would be Roman Catholic. And maybe it was. Sort of.
Like everyplace else on the island, it was a huge cavern hollowed out underneath a field of growing plants. Also like the mansion I was living in, the walls and ceiling were heavily carved and decorated, but the decorations were not at all what I expected.
Every Catholic church has an altar in front, above which hangs that ancient instrument of torture and death, a cross. Nailed to the cross is a graphic representation of a dead, mutilated human body, with blood and gore dripping down. Here, though the centerpiece was still a persecuted Jew, it was now the Christ of three days later, after He had arisen. I thought that it was much less offensive than the way I was used to, even though they still displayed a dead man’s body. There were other changes, too. There was a series of carvings on the walls of the room, where the bloody Stations of the Cross are usually displayed, only now they showed scenes from Christ’s life, rather than his death. From where we sat, I couldn’t see them all, but I recognized Christ with the little children, and the Sermon on the Mount.