The Three Sisters Read Free Page B

to reduce their demands from fifty good men to ten in order to save the cities. This convinced me that if God says no, renegotiate. Then, Lot offers his virgin daughters to the crowds so the perverts won’t attack the angels (therefore, men and angels can have sex?), but best of all, when Lot’s family—the only pious souls in the city—escape the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s dear little nympho daughters rape their father. Perhaps the crowds knew more about Lot’s daughters than he did. Otherwise, the Old Testament is pretty mirthless, unless of course one improvises by reading between the lines.
    Religion gets pretty old after a while, so I moved on to ideas that mattered. I never planned what I would read from one week to the next. Some author or some subject would attract my attention, and I would read every book by that author or on that subject I could get my hands on until I had devoured the subject completely. By then I would find something new to study or would wait until the spirit moved me in some new direction.
    Abjuring books about the oxymoronic truths of the Catholic Faith, I went straight to the hardcore intellectual material I knew my Catholic mentors hated with a passion. Since I was required to eat supper with my dad each night, I decided to use him as a sounding board for my intellectual discoveries. Whenever I read something exceedingly blasphemous or anti-Catholic, I brought the idea up at dinner, reproduced the philosopher’s argument perfectly, and boxed my father into a corner until he would throw a fit and stomp down to O’Malley’s to forget his insulting daughter. After he left, I stepped out to enjoy the pleasures of the night, and in this manner, Nietzsche, Voltaire, Marx, Russell, Renan, and others became the unwitting accomplices to my sexual adventures. During my senior year, I wrote my unpublished memoir of life in Catholic School, which I called From Abstinence to Obstinance: The Life of a Lapsed Catholic. Inquiries are welcome.
    Finally, after twelve years of Catholic school, I graduated and entered college, that center for consumers of conspicuous cogitation. Let me tell you, the secret of college life lies not in learning how to toady to your favorite professor so you can learn all the recondite intricacies of their chosen micro-field of study, but in making new friends and learning to teach yourself about life.
    I read even more voraciously in college than I had in high school. At first, everything I read was terribly interesting and informative. I could never get enough, but the more I read, the more cynical I became. No surprise there. What amazed me about so much of what I read was the inanity or naïvety of the writers’ ideas. I’m not talking about the thoughts and conceptions of the followers who could only copy the ideas of others to prove their lack of originality, but of the biggies, the philosophical masters who replaced the mistakes of their predecessors with mistakes of their own. Almost everyone had some asinine idea that formed the foundation for their philosophical system, but once you removed those pillars, their superstructure came crashing to the ground.
    My skepticism was justified when I took my first philosophy class in college. Every week we covered a great philosopher’s ideas on Tuesday and tore them apart on Thursday. With only a couple exceptions, the philosophers usually had as many stupid ideas as intelligent ones. Reality was whatever philosophers perceived it to be. Spinoza was condemned as an atheist in the eighteenth century, but was posthumously converted into a God-intoxicated philosopher for his pantheism in the nineteenth century.
    How could an intelligent woman lend any credibility to Descartes’s vortices, Plato’s cave, existentialism, Leibniz’s Optimism, Freud’s sexual psychology, or Hegel’s dialectical eccentricities? Of course, I always assumed the good ideas had come from their wives and the absurd ones from the