James K. Morrow - Only Begotten Daughter (1990)

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I can't help suggesting that a God who communicates through leukemia is at best deranged.

James K. Morrow
You see God as an engineer? asked Urpastor Phelps.
I don't see God as anything at all.
An engineer, you said. An incompetent engineer.
Incompetent, perfect, who knows? God is whatever we agree to pretend God is. God is our image of God.

James K. Morrow
There's something else, Beverly. I'm a minister of the Lord. This will be unusual for me, a kind of experiment.
I know all about it, Reverend. You folks do more experimenting than Princeton's entire physics department.

James K. Morrow
Pop, do we have heaven? he'd asked on the day he discovered the (dead) cat. You want to know a Jew's idea of heaven? his father had replied, looking up from his Maimonides. It's an endless succession of long winter nights on which we get paid a fair wage to sit in a warm room and read all the books ever written... Not just the famous ones, no, every book, the stuff nobody gets around to reading, forgotten plays, novels by people you never heard of. However, I profoundly doubt such a place exists.

James K. Morrow
Although Bix Constantine disbelieved in hell as intensely as he did in heaven, he knew what the place would be like. Hell, for Bix, was jealousy. It was failed journalists seeing their enemies receive Pulitzer Prizes. It was compulsive gamblers seeing jackpots gush from adjacent players' slot machines and sex-starved young men seeing their friends piled high with naked cheerleaders.

James K. Morrow
I'm really interested in this stuff. Julie rubbed a carton labeled ELEMENTARY PARTICLES.
Physics?
Physics, biology, stars, everything.
Howard said, Good for you. These days most people prefer to impoverish their minds with mysticism.

James K. Morrow
He smiled. Julie's wedding, exquisite thought. Would his grandchildren be free of godhead? Was divinity a recessive trait?

James K. Morrow
What good is it having God for a mother if she never sends you a birthday card?

James K. Morrow
The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.

James K. Morrow
The wonders of nature, she learned, from wing of bee to sonar of bat to eyeball of baby, were not so much perfect machines as adequate contraptions. If nature bespoke a mind, it was a confused and inchoate one, a mind incapable of locating the optic nerve on the correct side of the retina, a mind unable to accomplish much of anything without resort to jerry-building and extinction.

James K. Morrow
Her libido blazed to life. She smiled, impressed by the party-crashing shamelessness of sex, its willingness to show up anywhere—a funeral, a sermon, a final farewell. This was the way to go out, all right, thumbing your labia at the cosmos.

James K. Morrow
—Then there is the final possibility, my favorite.
—Yes?
—The final possibility is that I'm God.
—You're God?
—Just a theory, but the data are provocative. I mean, look at me. Faceless, shapeless, holey, undifferentiated, Jewish, inscrutable... and a hermaphrodite to boot. Years ago, I told you sponges cannot be fatally dismembered, for each part quickly becomes the whole. To wit, I am both immortal and infinite.
—You're God? You're God herself? You?
—The data are provocative.
—God is a sponge? A sponge? There's not much comfort in that.
—Agreed.
—Sponges can't help us.
—Neither can God, as far as I can tell. I'd be happy to see some contrary data.

James K. Morrow
There are none so blind as those who see angels... None so deaf as those who hear gods.

James K. Morrow
He was a devout believer in the second chance. To the man who asked, What's the point of closing the barn door after the horse has been stolen? Murray would answer, The point is that the door is now closed.

James K. Morrow
When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.

James K. Morrow
The universe, says Wyvern, is a Ph. D. thesis that God was unable to successfully defend.

James K. Morrow
Murray held his daughter at arm's length. Does God... er, visit you?
She doesn't even whisper to me. I listen, but she doesn't talk. It's not fair.
God didn't talk. The best news he'd heard since Gabriel Frostig announced his embryo. Look Julie, it's good she doesn't talk. God asks her children to do crazy things. It's good she doesn't whisper. Understand?
I guess.
Really?
Uh-huh. Where'd the crab go? Is he looking for his friends?
A profound weariness pressed upon Murray. Yes. Right. His friends. It's good God doesn't whisper.

James K. Morrow
People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like?

James K. Morrow
Her eyes sprang fully opened, and she beheld Howard's rickety bookshelves. P-h-y-s-i-c-s. A coil of radiant energy shot from the word, flooding into her skull like a sunbeam passing through glass. She closed her eyes. Her dendrites danced. Her synapses sparkeld.

James K. Morrow
Hell was not perfect, but it was paradise compared with New Jersey.

James K. Morrow
Better a citizen in hell than a slave in New Jersey.

James K. Morrow
Actually, the answer's quite simple. Two red eyes floated in the mist.
Really? Tell me. Why does God allow evil?
The red eyes vanished, leaving only the lantern and the night. Because power corrupts, said Wyvern's disembodied voice. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

James K. Morrow
Myriad contradictory worlds, lectured Professor Jerome Delacato, forever splitting off from each other like branches on a tree, so that, somewhere out there, I am presently giving a lecture explaining how the many-worlds hypothesis cannot possibly be true.

James K. Morrow
Babies are like kittens, Julie, they grow into something much more sinister.

James K. Morrow
You're not very religious, are you? said Irene.
I'm more into gravity.

James K. Morrow
Right before bed, I spend twenty minutes in this place. Then I can sleep.
You mean you simply sit here, staring at everybody's pain? All you do is look at it?
Uh-huh. Just like God.

James K. Morrow
The Sermon on the Mount—it never ends for you, does it? If somebody kicks your right buttock, turn the other cheek.

James K. Morrow
I've been good, I've been bad—nothing gets her attention. What am I supposed to do, sacrifice a goat?
Perhaps you should start a religion. You know—reveal your mother to the world.
How can I reveal her when I don't know what she's like?
Use your imagination. Everybody else does.

James K. Morrow
She asked, Do you believe science has all the answers?
Huh?
Science. Does it have all the answers?
Everybody thinks he's being oh-so-deep when he says science doesn't have all the answers.
Done. All of it. Virginity gone, flesh ratified, mother spited, mission discovered—the gospel of empirical truth! Yes! Oh, yes!
Science does have all the answers, said Howard, withdrawing. The problem is that we don't have all the science.

James K. Morrow
Don't believe everything you hear about hell. Next time you run into some anti-hell propaganda, consider the source.
You inflict eternal punishment on people, Julie countered.
Merely because it's our job. And remember, we persecute only the guilty, which puts us one up on most other institutions.

James K. Morrow