The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Love the One You're With

Most of Vonnegut's enduring tropes start life in Sirens :
- Time and its distortions
- Places like Newport and Indianapolis
- People such as Rumfoord and Ben and Sylvia
- The planet Tralfamadore and its inhabitants
- And of course the Volunteer Fire Department

What holds these oddities together is what holds everything of Vonnegut together, an ethical theology. His sci-fi is a way of displacing talk about God just enough to do some serious thinking. And he may indeed have inspired a new generation of thinkers about God as a consequence.

Vonnegut's Church of God the Utterly Indifferent follows a teaching remarkably like a Christian theology developed almost 40 years after Vonnegut's novel. This theology of the Weakness of God rejects the idea of God as the all-powerful fixer of the universe. And it rejects the idea that power flows downhill, as it were, from the divine source to spiritual and secular leaders. Its ethical import is that all of us are engaged in a search for God, and that the only help we have in this search comes from our fellow human beings.

This is essentially Vonnegut's Titanic Theology. “The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God." God does not interfere in human affairs; he is what in traditional theology is called 'apathetic'. He is not affected one iota by human action. In short "God Does Not Care." Whatever morality there is in human life comes not from His interests or the possible benefits from pleasing Him, but from the necessity for the community life of human beings.

So the ethic of Vonnegut's theology is direct and clear. There is only one commandment: "These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself." This mandate requires no complicated exegesis or commentary. Nevertheless it's profundity takes a while to sink in: “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

In a world ruled by such an ethos there is the possibility of pain, but of a particular sort: “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “would be to not be used for anything by anybody.” So-called ‘Weakness Theologians’ like John Caputo are apt to agree: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

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