My Life With The Spirits

“I am perpetually amazed that stable, intelligent people—people with drivers licenses and college degrees—people who can finish the New York Times crossword puzzle and run huge corporations—people who otherwise display the most superior powers of intelligence and insight can actually look me in the eye and tell me in deadly earnest that they believe:

* That all human beings have been cursed by the creator of the universe because of the very fact that we were born;

* That, because we are already guilty of committing life, the creator has condemned us to eternal torture after we die;

* That we can plea bargain ourselves out of this fate by perfectly surrendering to certain mental and behavioral parameters that are outlined in a book composed of sixty-six chapters written over a period of hundreds of years by an unknown number of authors in an assortment of languages—an unerring book that has been translated scores of times by individuals employed by intensely biased institutions;

*  That after we die our corpses (at some unspecified date in the future) will reanimate like zombies and fly up from our graves and hover in the sky at the side of our deity who, sitting on a flying horse, will slaughter one third of the population of the planet. Afterward, this same deity will preside over the ultimate kangaroo court in the clouds and issue one-way tickets to the lake of fire to the newly murdered and all others who in life did not unquestionably believe that all this was the only spiritual game plan in town.

I am sorry my friends. I cannot see how blindly accepting the above doctrine (or any of a hundred others just as ludicrous) could possibly be good for one’s mental health. As a matter of fact, it appears obvious to me that in order for a rational, intelligent person to subscribe to such silliness and still live a relatively normal life, he or she must set aside a small corner of the brain devoted exclusively to religious mental illness, and visit that area as infrequently as possible.”

Lon Milo DuQuette

This book is a treasure.

My Life With the Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician

Lon Milo Duquette