On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon

other half are on an egregious power-trip.
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    You know, this always stops me. I try to think how you would translate your metaphysics, your cosmology, into an ethical system. It’s not just the Fundamentalists. Most religious systems say: “OK, we have the theology, now let us show you how that translates into ethics.” But what you tell me over and over again is, “We can’t be sure.” It would be very difficult to construct an ethical system by which to live one’s life based on your scheme of beliefs. Have you thought of that?
    I accept your point. I do search for an ethic I can believe in. And that is where I go back to trusting the authority of my senses. They can also be—what’s the word I’m looking for?—traduced. To the degree that the Devil may affect our senses, they can become a perfect place for Him to get to us. That would be the Devil’s aim exactly—to enter our senses, make us feel we are having a godly emotion, when in fact we are being inspired by the Devil.
    So I hope I never construct an ethic by offering a few bones. The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. If a good dog is upset, give it a treat.
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    Fundamentalism is comfortable.
    It’s comfortable, but it is limiting. I keep going back to Kierkegaard, who, for my money, was probably the most profound Christian. He searched into the complexity of our relation not only to divinity but to diabolism as well. He knew that we must take nothing for granted in the moral firmament. We cannot kneel forever before the neon sign that purports to be God’s mystery: “Don’t ask, just obey!”
    We can, of course, for the sake of this argument, pay another visit to the subject of Fundamentalism. After all, a good many Fundamentalists do function with vigor. Their lives have been simplified. They don’t worry over questions that are debilitating. They function very well—at their medium level. No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist. To my knowledge, very few talented actors came out of Fundamentalism—or stayed with it for long. Never a genius of any kind, not since Augustine and Aquinas.
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    So perhaps Fundamentalism is for the less daring, the less bold, the less gifted? But aren’t you living on an ethical razor’s edge, listening to inner voices to find the right word? That’s not something everyone can emulate.
    Yes, people want to live in such a way that they will feel secure. But there may be no such security available. Right now, parenthetically, we are living in a time where we have to wonder if we will even see the end of the twenty-first century. Or will we destroy ourselves? In that sense, directly, there is no spiritual security.
    So the Fundamentalists, beneath everything else, feel the same fears that existential thinkers suffer—that the whole thing can come to an end. Fundamentalists look to alleviate that fear by way of what I would call their desperate belief that it’s “God’s will” and at the end they will be transported to Heaven. Well, once again, this supposes that God is All-Good and All-Powerful and will carry the righteous right up there. Of course, that offers nothing to the idiocies of human history, particularly that the more we develop as humans, the worse we are able to treat one another. Why? Because we now have the power to destroy one another at higher, more unfeeling levels. This can be epitomized again and again by repeating the familiar example I take from the concentration camps—telling poor wretches that they’re going to have a shower to get rid of lice, and instead they die with a curse in their hearts. That’s more hideous, in a certain sense, than dropping a bomb on one hundred thousand people—on