BLASPHEMY

The Gadfly said, “Who or what is God?  It is a true and royal freak, a vivid collage of weirdness and oddity, an explosion of absurdity which blasts beyond my human thoughts and feelings with forces and dimensions of incomparable measure.  God is a traitor to my common sense and a corrupter of my grounded reason.  God is a defiler of my pious forms and a spoiler of my learned sensibilities.  God is a lawbreaker who subverts my studied righteousness; and God is the ruination of my polished values. God is a fool who mocks my wisdom and a clown who makes profane my cherished sacraments.”

The Pope said to the Gadfly, “That is blasphemy.  Do not talk about God like that!  God well provides for his people through His church.  His holiness and presence are known through His church’s laws and sacraments, ”

 The Gadfly responded, “It is not blasphemy to realize that the forests and stars cannot fit into the mouth, that the ocean and the moon cannot balance upon our words, that the Universe will not rest content in the lazy hammock of our thought.  Blasphemy is to imagine that you can actually capture God in your pious nutshells, and then coercing the people to constrain their spirit’s dreams to your cracked nuts.  But God is not trapped by our need to live in a nutshell.  It is not oppressed by our lack of vision, nor violated by our fear.  God will dance to its own music and the Universe will sing its own song, no matter how much we try to bind its laughing feet or muffle the sound.   Fear not, your holiness, being a polisher of nutshells is not blasphemy against God.  But do you even care that it is blasphemy against humanity?”