Read Online On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon - Free Book Online

what happens if God does win? Suppose the Devil is totally vanquished.
    God, at that point, after such a war, has been seriously wounded. And whatever happens, whatever goes on, it’s not going to be God, fully resplendent, awaiting us in Heaven.
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    That makes you close to Manichaeanism. Evil loses, but evil takes a considerable amount of good with it as it goes under.
    I can believe that. Once again, I will say, I’m a novelist. We tend to think that way. Nothing is 100 percent. The point of writing novels is to show what the costs are in human activities. If I may quote myself again, at the end of
The Deer Park,
Charles Eitel is asked by a former wife, “Do you know you have real dignity now?” “It was a decent compliment,” Eitel thought, “for what was dignity, real dignity, but the knowledge written on one’s face of the cost of every human desire.” I’ve always liked that line because for me it’s the essence of the novel, the frightful cost of human desire.
    So why not extend that to the frightful cost of divine desire, where the loss is greater? God might have had an earlier conception of human existence more beautiful, much more beautiful than the one He’s left with now.
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    Let me give you another model. A friend of mine has been sending me stuff on Simone Weil. I don’t know if you—
    I know her work slightly. Dwight Macdonald used to write about her with adoration in the years right after World War II.
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    Well, she’s not afraid to think in bold terms—but I don’t know if you’ll agree. Here’s one of her ideas: She believes that God became limited in the course of creating the universe. She saw the act of creating the universe as an act of renunciation, one of power sharing with humans.
    I accept the power sharing; that’s implicit in everything I’ve said.
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    Before that, God existed alone in His endless powers. Then suddenly He created something—He gave something away. Weil believed that humans had a role to play because of this power sharing, as did the Devil, who profited immensely by God’s creative act. She’s saying that God lost by doing this.
    God lost, and God gained. In creating us, God acquired knowledge that could not have been obtained otherwise. So it’s not just that God lost. That gets us into reverential notions of God again. Ideally, what I’d like to keep is huge respect for the fact that we were created by something or someone marvelous, who is not wholly unlike ourselves. Therefore, we can identify with that God, identify with God’s drama as well as our own and thereby feel larger. Not, “Oh, God, oh, God, don’t punish me, please!” Or, “God, dear God, please help me!” The reason I’ve never found Islam the least bit attractive is, you know, the prayer ritual. Kneel down, present your buttocks to the sky, and recognize that you are totally weak before the wrath of God. Well, we’re totally weak before anything and everything that is vastly larger than ourselves. If this is what religion consists of—the recognition of being totally weak and that God will take care of us, provided we never cross any one of a thousand carefully laid-out lines of behavior—then I have to believe that existence is knotted up. And of course, the unspoken root of the nightmare in so much of Islam is precisely their present deep-seated fear. “What if we’re wrong?” they have to be thinking. “We’ve been doing it this way for 1,500 years—and now, where are we?” It’s like someone who’s been married for fifty years saying, “Have I been with the wrong woman all this while?” Conceive of the hate people could have for a church or a marriage if they left it after that many