A nontheist stumbles into a country so infested with godworship, that his claim to have a nonexistent sense called "reason," enabling him to see that their beliefs are falsifiable fairy tales, causes the inhabitants to assume that he is insane. When he falls for a female godworshipper, his need to belong prompts him to yield to their demand that he be surgically cured by having the organ responsible for his delusion, an organ they do not have that he calls his "brain," amputated. At the last minute, he realizes that no woman or society is worth a lifetime of brainless conformity, and flees.

Answer: The Country of the Blind by H. G. Wells.

A man living under theocratic Anglican Christianity rebels against its masochism, its sky Führer whom nobody has ever seen and who probably does not exist, and its totalitarian prohibition of everything that makes life worthwhile. He forms a sexual relationship with a female dissenter, who sees their recreation together as pleasure giving rather than an onerous duty to "be fruitful and multiply," as the sky Führer's domesticated livestock are required to believe. The hierarchy hunts them down and, by threatening the man with his personal concept of Hell, persuades him to denounce his lover as a dirty Antichrist on whom the threatened torture should be inflicted rather than on himself. He is converted, and finally realizes that he loves the sky Führer.

Answer: 1984 by George Orwell.

Published in the 2002 November/December issue of the American Rationalist ©.

Po przeczytaniu tego tekstu, czytelnicy często wybierają też: Filozofia Władcy Pierścieni

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