Lateral theology

[scarfman]

Vonnegut died this week. I've read Slaughterhouse Five, and I think he wrote a story I remember about a community theatre actor. The thing that sticks in my mind is the true message of the Gospel. In Slaughterhouse Five (or in a story-within-the-story; I forget), an extraterrestial on Earth tells us that the true message of the Gospel isn't, "Love thy neighbor." It's, "If you want to kill someone, first make certain he has no important friends."

Comments

[angryricecooker.livejournal.com]

It's a story within the story. To be specific, it's a description of a novel by Kilgore Trout about an alien who makes a study of Christians. He wonders why it is that Christians find it so easy to be cruel. He decides that the problem is that the New Testament screwed up. It meant to teach people not to be cruel to anybody. But instead the point that people take out of the story of the crucifixion is "boy, they sure killed the wrong guy THAT time, he's really well-connected," with the logical corollary that there are people who are right to kill, so long as they're not well-connected. So the alien wrote a new version of the gospel in which Jesus is a total nobody bum who annoys people with his teachings. People decide to kill him, thinking nothing will happen because he's such a nobody bum that it doesn't matter. The book itself will have made the point repeatedly that Jesus is a nobody, so the audience is also supposed to think that nothing will happen. But when they kill Jesus, the heavens open up and God's wrath spills forth and he adopts Jesus and tells the people that from now on they should never be cruel to unconnected nobody bums.

I think my description is actually longer than the original version, and certainly less pithy. Slaughterhouse-Five is definitely worth reading many times.

[angryricecooker.livejournal.com]

The original passage is reprinted here