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When The Lion Lies Down With The Beach Ball

You can almost tell when it’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door, because the knock is polite but loud at the same time, deferential but invested with the supposed authority of doing God’s work.

The Trial

I used to make ninety bucks an hour as a lawyer doing part-time legal research and writing — hateful work I was nevertheless grateful for, as for ten years it had supported me while I tried to make my way as a creative writer. I’d found the job by sending out résumés to lawyers listed in the yellow pages.

Praying

A hundred-dollar bill, lemon cookies and a Wink soda, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey

Incredible Hulk Saving Souls

My father thought men who talked about being “saved” were weak, even feminine. Religion was the domain of women; he was too busy farming and working at the ceiling-tile factory to concern himself with salvation. My mother prayed and talked to me about God behind his back.

Abuelita

She nodded a greeting to my husband and me, and then her gaze landed on the baby in my lap. Her hands came together in a loud clap that silenced our polite chatter, and she began to chant to my son in rhyming Spanish. He froze, his eyes widening to the size of quarters as she swept him from my arms.

Sunbeams

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

George Orwell

Sunbeams

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you will always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

H.L. Mencken

The Temple Of Reason

Sam Harris On How Religion Puts The World At Risk

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario. I think we do the world a disservice when we suggest that religions are generally benign and not fundamentally divisive.

God’s Day

Still, there is one day in the year when I go plumb God-happy. It’s a made-up holiday pulled randomly from the calendar, as far away from the retail conspirators and their chocolate bunnies and sawed-off pine trees as I can get; a twenty-four-hour period of gratitude, humility, and atonement I call “God’s Day.”

Cry In The Wilderness

Unless I tell people about the voices, they don’t know. I’m not sure how this can be: that they don’t hear them, too. It’s suspicious, in fact. I want to crawl inside their heads and listen, see for myself where their thoughts come from.