![\"towing2\"](\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/files\/2014\/08\/towing2.jpg\")
<\/a>The 2-mile long corpse of God is found floating dead in the ocean. The Kingdom of Heaven and the Vatican quickly move to give the body a proper burial and hide it from public view; the angel Raphael tasks Anthony Van Horne to captain the supertanker Carpco Valparaiso on a mission to tow the body to safety in the Arctic. Meanwhile, literally militant atheists (from a group suspiciously resembling CFI-NY<\/a>) mobilize to bomb the corpus dei into oblivion using a private airforce composed of WWII vintage aircraft, and a series of natural disasters threaten to ruin everything for all concerned.<\/p>\nAn array of characters from all faiths and none each struggle to cope with the death of god in their own way. To quote the author:<\/p>\n
Anthony Van Horne’s cargo becomes a kind of three-dimensional Rorschach test. For radical feminists, a male Corpus Dei implicitly ratifies the patriarchy and must be blown out of the water. For the Catholic Church, God’s body is both a sacred trust and a thoroughgoing embarrassment; the sooner it’s secluded in its tomb, the better. For atheists and humanists, the corpse is no less of a scandal; if God is dead, then He once existed, and the secular worldview is therefore invalidated.<\/p>\n
In this sense, Towing Jehovah<\/i> evokes “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” the Hindu folk tale in which each member of a troupe of blind men reaches a different conclusion about the same pachyderm depending upon which part he encounters: trunk, tusk, tail, ear, leg, or side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If you’ve ever wondered whether an omnipotent being has the power to permanently off himself, and how humanity would learn to live with that loss, then probably you should read this book<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Edit (15-Aug) –<\/strong>\u00a0If you’d like to hear more from James Morrow, I have an old interview of him up here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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If you intend to take my advice about what books to read only once, forget all the previous posts in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,12,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-freethought-in-popular-culture","category-friday-reads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}