The One True Religion

I would like to serve myself
And in all ways preserve my health
And in all things my conscience be
In all its force designed by Thee
The One True God of all there is
i.e. e.g. to wit and viz
The unity of pen and sword
Of mind and might
Of deed and word
Of Heaven's light in mankind's soul
And virtue's everlasting role. 

Harold Bloom has put forth one of the few genuinely new ideas I've heard. It is this, he centers our ideas about humanity in the Western Canon, in Shakespeare primarily. That is not too surprising. What is truly surprising and new is that he compares the authors of the Bible to Shakespeare. In other words, he implies without insistance that the Bible, as a canonical work of literature has its merits as any other work of literature. 

Absorbing this implies that everything about the best ideas human beings are able to absorb can be found expressed in the best literature. Therefore the Bible should be read as literature and that the ideas presented therein should be judged on their literary merit and in the ineffible way that critics like Bloom and all readers must deal with the text. Bloom warns not to read too much into the author by way of the text but to read everything the text says and implies about its subjects, especially how it makes us think as it directs our thoughts. I take this to mean that reading is a sort of possession, it is ours to consider the nature of the possession itself, not the nature of the spellcaster.

This aligns with my early polytheisms and the meme of religion as mankind's first education. It therefore transmutes in every way the roles of the religious and those institutions built around them. There is no difference between that moral instruction of any human author, and thus no lesser greatness in those who identify our spirit in their writing work. Writing literature, teaching literature is ministry. The secular professor of English, professes his faith in the literature he teaches to liberate the souls of the readers. 

I say this just having finished Charles Stross' fourth in the Laundry Series - the Apocalypse Codex. And so a new circle is complete for me (wow), linking literature, science fiction and religious texts all in the business of creating in humanity its own humanity. And in so doing, the framework for all of the humanities has become clear. I have Voltaire's realization confirmed again. There is one true religion. 

God,  it takes a lot of time to program a proper mind.