Idolism Read Free Page A

the man, Jules!” I raised my hand, waiting for him to high-five me, but to no avail. He didn’t like touching other people either.
    “Excuse me!”
    Julian and I both lifted our legs to make room for Michael who came crawling through the small space between the sofa and the coffee table in front of it, still following his bloody cables.
    “The Bible,” Julian continued, “is a great book that reflects on a great number of human conditions; all our questions, insecurities, hopes, fears, and dreams. But of course that doesn’t make it infallible or, indeed, the word of God. I mean, look at all my song lyrics. Everything I write is inspired by the reality I happen to experience. I have to assume that the same is true for the Bronze Age peasants who wrote the Bible. I have to assume that the same is true for the Brothers Grimm, but just because I may find some truths about the human condition in Grimm’s Fairy Tales doesn’t mean I believe in cannibalistic witches or talking frogs that turn into beautiful princes when you kiss them. The purpose of the Bible, like that of any other book, is not to give you a pre-packaged, ready-to-use worldview. The Bible is not supposed to give you all the answers. It’s supposed to inspire you to ask the questions that you need to find the answers to in order to become the person you are meant to be.”
    “Amen to that,” Ginger said.
    I grabbed another handful of crisps and stuffed them in me mouth. “Sorry, but you lost me at the Brothers Grimm.”
    Julian stared at me for a second, and I could see how he was tempted to start over. Fortunately, the Pope came to the rescue.
    “Here he comes now,” Ginger said, and Julian leaned forward to stare at the TV. We were looking at a long shot of the runway of the airport in Tenochtitlan, or whatever the bloody capital of Honduras was called, and a small dot in the sky—the airplane carrying the Pope—that was slowly descending.
    I made a mental note to mention at me next confession that I had lied. Julian hadn’t lost me at the Brothers Grimm. People tend to think I’m a bit daft, but I’m not. I was perfectly able to follow Julian’s sermon, but I didn’t want to encourage him. You see, Julian had a tendency to preach if he could get away with it, at least when he was with us. When there were strangers around he usually was very quiet, and many people actually thought he was rather a shy person. But we weren’t strangers. We had known each other since forever, and when we were amongst ourselves Julian would often preach himself into some sort of ecstasy at which point it became almost impossible to stop him. That could be proper annoying, because one of his favourite topics to preach about was God, or rather the non-existence of God. For someone who supposedly didn’t believe in God, he talked an awful lot about Him, which always struck me as rather odd. I think deep down inside Julian actually wanted to believe. If you ask me, all his questioning and criticizing religion was really just a cry for help and enlightenment directed at those who did believe. Humble people such as meself.
    Of course I believe in God.
    I mean, what else is there to believe in?
    Me parents were Catholics. That made me a Catholic, too. I’ve been brought up to believe in God and in our saviour Jesus Christ. I’ve been taught that the Holy Bible was the word of God, and the word of God could be proper scary. I’ve believed in God all me life, because for some reason the scariness of scary things makes them not only scary but also very easy to believe.
    I don’t know. I just need to make sense of the world, and a world without God would be a lot scarier than God Himself. I mean, if there was no design to the universe, no purpose to life, and no one to look after us, wouldn’t that be incredibly depressing? Also, everything had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?
    In school they taught us about the Big Bang and about evolution. Some people thought