It’s not often that I read a book and come away feeling devastated, but devastated in the sense that all I’ve ever known has been called into question–legitimately and rightly.  Brad, a friend of mine, had recommended Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, to me last fall, right after he read an advanced copy of Eve. I devoured it in one sitting.

I’ve just finished Quinn’s The Story of B, the second in the series of three.  The subtitle mentions that the book is an adventure, and it is that–never boring–harping on everything from religion to world hunger, but in novel format.

Quinn does not need to convince me of how awry our human population has gone, due to the fact that we humans are trying, very hard, not to succumb to the same population ecology principles that animals are held to (after all, we’re here to subdue the earth, right?).  I’ve always said this about us; we fall prey to the same things all nature falls prey to–disease, sickness, death.  I am a biologist, after all.  I even agree with Quinn’s tenet that if you stop the excess manufacture of food, then human populations will stop growing.  I mean, come on, that’s Ecology 101.  We have ethics to think of here, of course.  Do we withhold food from people, just to maintain status quo?  This book didn’t offer answers to the individual, but it would behoove the corporations (Cargill, for instance, who is sending excess corn products to Haiti, for a cheaper price than the farmers can grow it for, so hence, the local agriculture is rapidly disappearing, and the people are now almost solely dependent on Cargill’s food products) to sit up and take notice of the practices they’re using on a world-wide scale.  Quinn, I think, rightly suggests that the abundance of food we’re sending all over is not feeding the starving; it’s feeding the population growth.  No arguments on that one–at least from me.

I want to focus on the religious aspect of the novel, simply because that’s where I’m at in my personal life now–questioning, always questioning.  Since the novel delves into so many topics, in a non-linear fashion, the best I can do (besides having you read the book…which you should!) is to give you snapshots from the book, so you can judge for yourself.

In the book, a Laurentian priest is sent to follow a man called B, to see if B might, possibly, be the Antichrist.  The Church wants to know, of course, so they can get rid of him swiftly and cleanly, before he gets out of hand.  The dissenting crowds call B the Antichrist because what he’s saying is blasphemous and radically different from anything they’ve ever heard before.

Soon, before he knows it, the Laurentian priest is being groomed by B to take his place, on the occasion something should happen to him, though the priest doesn’t know it at the time.

Here, B is posing questions.  In particular, he is explaining to the priest how he gives lectures, and the subtleties of the tight-knit group of people who are his supporters.  “They’ve followed me through a complete course of lectures and so have heard at least once everything I’m able to say in public that I feel will be comprehensible.  But you don’t become a Christian by hearing one sermon, you don’t become a Freudian by hearing one lecture, and you don’t become a Marxist by reading one pamphlet.  If an outsider asks the Teitels [one of the couples close to B] something that goes beyond anything they’ve heard from me, they must refer the question to me.  They know what I’m saying, but my message is not sufficiently theirs that they can generate answers of their own.  For them, the mosaic is only a rough sketch.”  B goes on to describe the others, in subsequently more favorable terms… “Frau Doktor Hartmann has twice followed me through my course of lectures and has attended many more such soirees as we engaged in her last night.  If an outsider asks her a question that goes beyond anything she’s heard from me, she may try to deal with it, but when she reports her answer to me, she usually finds out that my answer would have been quite different from hers–sometimes even contradictory to hers.  She too knows what I’m saying, but my message is not sufficiently hers that she can generate answers with certainty.  She can see the general outlines clearly enough, but the image in the mosaic is still rather shadowy.”  And on down the line B goes.  “But Shirin has been with me longer than anyone, and if an outsider asks a question that goes beyond anything she’s heard from me, she’ll answer without hesitation.  Her answer will not necessarily have the same emphasis as mine would have or be delivered in the same style or reflect an identical point of view, but it will have the same authenticity and power, because the mosaic image she’s referring to for her answer is as solid and well-focused as mine is.  The message is hers entirely.  It’s as much hers as it is mine.  She is the message in the same sense that I am the message.

“B paused as if for a response, and I [the priest] told him that I understood what he was saying but wasn’t sure why he was saying it.

“‘I’m giving you a second look at something I talked about at our first meeting,’ B said.  ‘When Jesus departed, he left no one behind who was the message.’

“I managed to suppress an urge to blurt out a ‘Wow,’ but wow was certainly what sprang to mind.  This was undeniably true–not in any sense a condemnation, but undeniably true.  Jesus left behind no one who could speak with his authority, no one who could say ‘This is what’s what.’  There were very elementary questions the apostles couldn’t answer with confidence, like: To what degree were those of the new dispensation bound by the laws of the old dispensation?  You can hardly get more fundamental than that.  In fact, it was St. Paul–a man who had never even see Jesus–who ended up saying ‘This is what’s what’ with more authority than anyone else could muster.  More than John or Peter or James (as far as we know), Paul was the message.  But even with the writings of Paul and all the evangelists, it still took three hundred years of Christian thought to reconstitute Christ’s message–to piece together the hints, reconcile apparent contradictions, cut away heresies and lunacies and irrelevancies, and organize it into a self-consistent, coherent creed that more or less everyone could agree on.”

I’ll let that passage stand on its own.

Just the other day, I was on the elliptical trainer and watching the The History Channel at the same time.  The program was covering the universe, and the sequence of events that brought us to today’s knowledge of the skies.  You’re already familiar with it–how scientists were ridiculed when they said that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe.  How Galileo Galilei was condemned to house arrest for proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the earth was not the center of the universe (if you remember, he created the first telescope).  How each subsequent discovery led to temporary banishment and excommunication from the Church.  This is important, because I wonder what it is today that we don’t know, that we’re “banishing” people for thinking or believing.  We don’t know everything.  We’re continually making discoveries, so for us to say that we know what went down at the beginning of Time, and we know how God operates, we’re really being ignoramuses.  Or just sickeningly arrogant.

All this leads to my second story from the book, which will illustrate my previous point further.

B is talking to the priest again.

“‘One of the major obstacles to building the Panama Canal in the late decades of the nineteenth century was yellow fever.  Its cause was unknown and it was untreatable by the medical science of the day.  Perhaps you know something of this.’

‘Yes.  At the time it was thought to be caused by night air.  People who stayed inside at night caught the disease less often than those who went out.’

‘But some who stayed inside at night caught it anyway.’

‘That’s right, because they left their windows open.  Eventually people realized they had to be very careful not to let in any night air at all.’

‘But, as Walter Reed eventually discovered, the carrier of the disease wasn’t the night air, it was the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which hunts in the night air.’”

How many things do we believe in, and in believing in them, we’re being inherently irrational?  We believe them, because everyone else believes them.  We believe them, because our parents told us that it was truth.  We believe them, because, heavens, why rock the boat?

This next part is something I have to mull over until I find a satisfactory response.  I haven’t thought of anything yet, except something along the lines of something so earth-shatteringly simple, I’d be labeled a heretic.

B is lecturing again, and here he seems flummoxed why it is that only recently in the world’s history have so many religions sprung up, claiming that we need to be “saved.”

“Anywhere in the world, East or West, you can walk up to a stranger and say, ‘Let me show you how to be saved,’ and you’ll be understood.  You may not be believed or welcomed when you speak these words, but you will surely be understood.  The fact that you’ll be understood should astonish you, but it doesn’t, because you’ve been prepared from childhood by a hundred thousand voices–a million voices–to understand these words yourself.  You know instantly what it means to be “saved,” and it doesn’t matter in the least whether you believe in the salvation referred to.  You know in addition, as a completely distinct matter, that being saved involves some method or other.  The method might be a ritual–baptism, extreme unction, the sacrament of penance, the performance of ceremonial works, or anything at all.  It might, on the other hand, be an inner action of repentance, love, faith, or meditation….”  You get the point.

I had never thought of it quite that way.  Why did “salvation” appear so late in man’s history?  Archaeologically and historically, there were people before the date that scholars place Adam and Eve.  Who made these people, and did they not come with beliefs of their own?  Why, if God made these people, would He alter the “rules of religion” so late in the game?  [Those of you who have read the Bible, you’ll note, interestingly enough, Paul’s take on what to do with all those OT men who aren’t “saved”; yep, their belief will be attributed to them as faith.]  Conservative Christians might say, “Well, God was reacting to Adam and Eve’s decision in the Garden!  He came up with Jesus.”  Really?  4000 years later?  How does that work exactly?

Here’s another question for you: might it be that the scribes of ancient cultures (including the Hebrews) were creating a belief system for their people, and since all the ancient religions mirror the others in key points (afterlife, raisings from the dead, miracles), it was easy to select which ones they wanted to include and which ones they wanted to discard?

Lots to think about, I know.  And I only included a third of my bookmarked passages from the book!