“I’ll go with them,” said Zilia. “I must.”
“If you wish,” said Dern, annoyed. “All of you go, if you like. Make it a holiday.”
“If that’s all you wanted me for …” murmured Sam, rising to his feet, longing for escape.
Dern nodded, irritated at them all, without exception. “Sorry to have interrupted your work schedule, Sam. Give my best to your family,” and then when Sam had gone, “Zilia, that was really quite outrageous, even for you. Horgy, tell your girlies to go study the previous ten years’ production schedules. I don’t want them at another staff meeting until they know what’s going on. Jamice, stop fiddling with those things in your hair. It’s annoying. Now, Spiggy, if we’ve aggravated ourselves sufficiently over the crop shortfall, may we get on to the budget reports? What is this ridiculous set of figures listed under ‘Miscellaneous’?”
At lunch, Tandle sat next to Spiggy and tried to keep him from vanishing under his own weight of woe. “What did you mean when you said the last thing anyone would want was a God who worked?” she asked, just to get him talking.
He focused on her with difficulty. “Well, it is,” he said. “Early on, of course, it was assumed there were lots of gods who caused various things, and one needed access to them to propitiate them or ask them to undo what some other god had done or, in rarer cases, to say thank you. Since there were lots of them, one always had a god to go to if some other one was acting up. Not a bad state of affairs, really, very much the system Phansure has today. Of course, it carried the seeds of its own destruction, because some of the priests that rose up around the man-gods got carried away with their own greed or need for power.
“So, some of them became prophets, each of them claiming his particular god—or some new one he’d thought up—was the biggest or the best or the only. Sometimes they said God was all-good or all-powerful or all-something-or-other or even, God knows, all-every-thing, which inevitably created dualism, because if God was all-everything, why did these contrary things keep happening? This required that man postulate some other force responsible for contrariness, either a sub-god or a bad angel or man himself, just being sinful, and that placed man squarely in the middle of this cosmic battlefield, always being told it was his fault when things went wrong.
“And as long as man was in the middle, nothing could happen but a kind of tug-of-war. Man constantly prayed to God for peace, but peace never happened, so he decided his god must really want war because the other side was sinful. Man invented and extolled virtues which could only be exemplified under conditions of war, like heroism and gallantry and honor, and he gave himself laurel wreaths or booty or medals for such things, thus rewarding himself for behaving well while sinning. He did it when he was a primitive, and he went on with it after he thought he was civilized, and later on just before the Dispersion he was still doing it, making war like crazy, while praying for peace the whole time, of course.
“Most of the monotheisms were tribal, pastoral, retributive religions that committed holocausts and built pyramids of skulls and conducted organized murder for a few thousand years, so there were lots of opportunities for one guy’s god to fight some other guy’s god. Each tribal religion claimed that its god was the One True God. Every prophet had his own idea about what that meant, of course, and as a result man was always being jerked around between different people’s ideas of god, depending on who’d won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle.
“This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or even hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached persecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygyny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you-rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let’s kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, they weren’t any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares.”
Tandle was deeply regretting she had ever asked the question, but by this time Spiggy was in full spate and couldn’t be stopped.
“For example, during the middle years of the Dispersion, the three largest of the surviving tribal-retribution religions left Manhome, to unite and eventually become Voorstod. Nobody ever accused them of having a god that worked. And so far as I know, nobody has accused any human society of having a god that works!” Spiggy took a mouthful of stewed poultry-bird and dumplings and chewed, sadly, grieving over the state of mankind. “The ones on Phansure are among the best. They don’t do anything, but there’s always one of them around to blame.”
Tandle, who had until now always believed herself to be quite respectful of religion in
