The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten - Softcover

Disch, Thomas M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1892391775 ISBN 13: 9781892391773

Publisher: Tachyon Publications, 2008

Synopsis

Not since The Da Vinci Code!
The only tome ever written by God Himself!
INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS!

In this compelling memoir, the first and hopefully the last of its kind, America’s most divine author reveals the intimate and shocking details of His sudden elevation to the most coveted and least understood position in the universe.

In early 2005 (A.D.), wearying of the world’s religious schisms, doctrinal heresies, and manifold editorial sins, Thomas M. Disch took matters into His own hands and became the Deity.

As controversial as it is incontrovertible, the moving true story of His awful transformation and its awesome aftermath reveals, at long last, the hidden web that links Disch, Philip K. Dick, Western wear, the Leamington Hotel, and Eternity itself. Read it in fear and trembling. But read it, or else.

YOU WILL LAUGH. YOU WILL CRY. YOU WILL PRAY.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas M. Disch was a novelist, poet, and book critic. His work was featured in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Harper’s, The Nation, and the Hudson Review of Books. Disch was a major figure of science fiction’s new-wave movement. His books included Camp Concentration, On Wings of Song, The Word of God, and The Brave Little Toaster. His nonfiction book about poetry, The Castle of Indolence, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. John Clute famously described Disch as “perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied, and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers.”

Reviews

With this odd blend of fiction and satiric philosophy, sf veteran Disch fires another salvo in the ongoing debate between atheists and believers. Not content to adopt the sober polemical stances taken by such prominent atheists as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Disch instead assumes the role of God himself. Taking the helm of the deity allows Disch free reign to channel his own long-standing atheism into a series of amusing and subversive rants about the intersection between religion and human folly. In irreverent, bite-size chapters, Disch correlates Santa Claus and a Christian God who knows if we’re naughty or nice, points out the absurdities of an everlasting hell, and imagines how appealing Jesus would be had he appeared 2,000 years later in the form of the Good American Cowboy. Historical musings mingle with pertinently illustrative stories and verse, and also a biographical reflection on Philip K. Dick’s semireligious, paranoid visions. Although Disch’s fans may find the philosophical departure somewhat startling, they will delight in his characteristically witty observations on human nature. --Carl Hays

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

So is this Holy Writ or isn’t it? Am I being serious? Yes, and then some. What I propose to write about in these sacred pages is what the whole God business looks like to someone who not only doesn’t believe in God but who, moreover, doesn’t believe in the belief of those most aggressively pious, most loudly devout. The only way effectively to convey my own sense of the matter is to arrogate to myself the same absolute authority, the same more-than-papal infallibility, the same maddeningly smug chutzpah that True Believers of all varieties have armed themselves with: the Jesus freaks and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Tartuffes and Elmer Gantrys, the imams and ayatollahs, the redneck judges with two-ton Tablets of the Law they want to plunk down on the courthouse lawn and the archbishops campaigning against abortion all the while they  play three-card monte with their cadres of pedophile priests. To paraphrase a popular song, if they loved God half as much as they say they do, they wouldn’t do all the things we can see them do.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1892391775
• ISBN 13: 9781892391773
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 180