The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten [Paperback]

"The careful reader will tease out many solid truths from the tangle of humor, history, surrealism and speculation. The density of ideas packed into this short book is as impressive as Disch’s mastery of his craft."  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Amusing and subversive . . . veteran [Thomas M.] Disch fires another salvo in the ongoing debate between atheists and believers.  —Booklist

"Thomas M. Disch isn't afraid of backlash for what some might consider the writings of a heretic  .  .  .  extraordinarily funny."  —Kirkus Reviews

"While Disch's frequent references to suffering and the afterlife can be painful to read after his recent suicide, they make for a fitting coda to a career spent perfecting the art of the unsettling.  A-."  —Entertainment Weekly

"Constructs a more complex relationship between the reader and what is read, between the implied author and the real author and the implied reader and the real person . . . between reportage and fictionality, between text and pretext, than any book I can remember encountering."  ——SCI FI Weekly

Revealing the intimate details of his sudden elevation to Godhood, this shockingly mischievous satire follows one of America’s most intellectually-radical science fiction authors as he takes on the most coveted and misunderstood position in the universe. Wearying of the world’s religious schisms, doctrinal heresies, and manifold sins, Thomas M. Disch has taken it upon himself to embrace divine authority, unless his outlandish enemies emerging from the depths of a dissatisfying hell manage to prevent him. Revealing the hidden conspiracies that link the author with Philip K. Dick, Mel Gibson, Santa, L. Ron Hubbard, and eternity itself, this darkly comedic polemic holds nothing sacred and is as controversial as it is incontrovertible.

So is this Holy Writ or isn’t it? Am I being serious? Yes, and then some. What I propose to write about in these sacred pages is what the whole God business looks like to someone who not only doesn’t believe in God but who, moreover, doesn’t believe in the belief of those most aggressively pious, most loudly devout. The only way effectively to convey my own sense of the matter is to arrogate to myself the same absolute authority, the same more-than-papal infallibility, the same maddeningly smug chutzpah that True Believers of all varieties have armed themselves with: the Jesus freaks and Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Tartuffes and Elmer Gantrys, the imams and ayatollahs, the redneck judges with two-ton Tablets of the Law they want to plunk down on the courthouse lawn and the archbishops campaigning against abortion all the while they  play three-card monte with their cadres of pedophile priests. To paraphrase a popular song, if they loved God half as much as they say they do, they wouldn’t do all the things we can see them do.