The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten by Thomas M. Disch

Author:Thomas M. Disch [Disch, Thomas M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Humorous, Science Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781892391773
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2008-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Monotheism has a bad track record regarding diversity. Even American monotheists, though they give lip service to the notion that other people might have ideas of their own, are liable to brand other gods even slightly different from those they adore as liberal or otherwise not to be condoned. This was made painfully clear last night in a PBs documentary on the President’s evangelical faith, which is scary in just the way the worshippers are at the Noah’s Ark Pentecostal Mission and Children’s Zoo in Chapter Six. Perhaps President Bush read that story when it first saw print in 1983.

I jest, of course. Monotheists don’t need to read any book beyond the screed of their creed. Among Muslims it’s the Koran, in Texas the Holy Bible (King James version), and those in A.A. read the Big Book, as they style it. True believers don’t just read their holy writs, of course, they memorize them so that when they want to cinch an argument they can cite chapter and verse, and then, automatically, win. Henry Morris explains how that works in his treatise, Scientific Creationism (Master Books, 1985): “It is precisely because Biblical revelation is absolutely authoritative and perspicuous that the scientific facts, rightly interpreted, will give the same testimony as that of Scripture. There is not theslightest possibility that the facts of science can contradict the Bible.”

How reassuring that is, especially if one doesn’t want to be put to the bother of reading a lot of tedious textbooks about soil erosion and carbon dating and pterodactyls. That—reassurance, solace, balm—is what any holy writ is designed to provide. Poetry has much the same mission and makes the same promise (“That’s all you know and all you need to know,” Keats assures us after he’s made one very dubious proposition in “Endymion”), but too often poetry lacks the guts to take the battle into the enemy camp. There have been a few rowdies like Alexander Pope and Kenneth Koch with a take-no-hostages attitude, but on the whole the arts are polytheist territory. There are, after all, seven muses.

A good bit of the holy writ I grew up with is given over to berating false gods and those who worship them. Idolatry was a big problem in olden days, from the Golden Calf that Moses had to contend with down to the Babylonian captivity when King Cyrus tried to get the prophet Daniel to worship Ba’al. By way of assuring Daniel that Ba’al was a living god the king pointed out what a huge appetite the god had. Every night when he was locked inside his temple Ba’al downed a whole banquet table of food and wine. Daniel, a proto-private eye, sprinkled the sealed banquet hall with dust, and next morning he showed Cyrus the footprints that the seventy priests of Ba’al along with their wives and children had left around the table as they were gobbling down the “living god’s” dinner. Cyrus was furious and, to quote verse 22: “The king

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