Stranger in a Strange Land

“Ben, the foulest sinner of all is the hypocrite who makes a racket of religion. But we must give the Devil his due. Mike does believe in those ‘Old Ones’ and he is not pulling a racket. He’s teaching the truth as he sees it even though he has seen fit to borrow from other religions to illustrate his meaning. That ‘All Mother’ rite—little as I like it, he seems merely to have been illustrating the versatility of the Female Principle, regardless of name and form. Fair enough. As for his ‘Old Ones,’ of course I don’t know that they don’t exist—I simply find hard to swallow the idea that any planet is ruled by a hierarchy of ghosts. As for his Thou-art-God creed, to me it is neither more nor less credible than any other. Come Judgment Day, if they hold it, we may find that Mumbo Jumbo the God of the Congo was the Big Boss all along.

“All the names are still in the hat, Ben. Self-aware man is so built that he cannot believe in his own extinction… and this automatically leads to endless invention of religions. While this involuntary conviction of immortality by no means proves immortality to be a fact, the questions generated by this conviction are overwhelmingly important… whether we can answer them or not, or prove what answers we suspect. The nature of life, how the ego hooks into the physical body, the problem of the ego itself and why each ego seems to be the center of the universe, the purpose of life, the purpose of the universe—these are paramount questions, Ben; they can never be trivial. Science can’t, or hasn’t, coped with any of them—and who am I to sneer at religions for trying to answer them, no matter how unconvincingly to me? Old Mumbo Jumbo may eat me yet; I can’t rule Him out because He owns no fancy cathedrals. Nor can I rule out one godstruck boy leading a sex cult in an upholstered attic; he might be the Messiah. The only religious opinion that I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together!”

“Whew! Jubal, you should have been a preacher.”

“Missed it by only a razor’s edge, my boy—and I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head. One more word in Mike’s defense and I’ll throw him on the mercy of the court. If he can show us a better way to run this fouled-up planet, his sex life is vindicated thereby, regardless of your taste or mine. Geniuses are notoriously indifferent to the sexual customs of the culture in which they find themselves, they make their own rules; this is not opinion, it was proved by Armattoe ’way back in 1945. And Mike is a genius; he’s shown it more ways than one. He can therefore be expected to ignore Mrs. Grundy and diddle to suit himself. Geniuses are justifiably contemptuous of the opinions of their inferiors.

“And from a religious standpoint Mike’s sexual behavior IS as kosher as fish on Friday, as orthodox as Santa Claus. He preaches that all living creatures are collectively God… which makes him and his disciples the only self-aware gods in his pantheon which rates him a union card by the rules for godding on this planet. Those rules always permit gods sexual freedom limited only by their own judgment; mortal rules never apply. Leda and the Swan? Europa and the Bull? Osiris, Isis, and Horus? The incredible incestuous games of the Norse gods? Of course… but why stop there? Take a hard look at the family relations of the Trinity in one of the most widely respected western religion (I won’t cite eastern religions; their gods do things a mink breeder wouldn’t put up with!). The only way in which the odd interrelations of the various aspects of what purports to be a monotheos can be reconciled with the precepts of the religion thereto is by assuming that the rules in these matters for deity are not the rules for ordinary mortals. Of course most people don’t think about it; they compartment it off in their minds and mark it: ‘Holy—Do Not Disturb.’