There are way to many things to discuss in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Every time I read this novel there seems to be more and more to look at and I have a new interest each time. The way religion is portrayed captured my interest this time around.
The sheer fact that the novel begins with a quote from a fabricated religion says a lot. The religion is set up like the Bible with it’s chapters and verses, yet it has “religious” words which mimic religions like Buddhism or Hinduism whose sacred text was originally in Sanskrit. The word “foma” on the first page also sounds like it could have been derived from a Latin or Greek word. With all of the major religion references, Vonnegut is commenting on religion as a whole. He shows how religion is not founded on absolute truth because there is no way of knowing absolute truth as science, and the fact that there are numerous religions that contradict each other about absolute truth, tell us. I think that the existence of a fabricated religion shows the reader how easy it is for someone to make something up and gain followers because they state it as an absolute truth and the ideas are not obscenely eccentric. But Bokononism also shows us that just because the religion might not be founded on absolute truth or may be strange to some that it does not mean people cannot be happy.
I believe that while Vonnegut is commenting on the strangeness and how religion can be just as misleading as his own novels, he is also saying that religion can simply make one happy. The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is “’All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies’” (5). They are lies because no one can prove the existence or prove that a way of life is the “correct way,” but they are true because faith is honest. The first line of The Books of Bokonon that we see is in the pretext where it says that one should live be all of the harmless untruths as long as they make the person happy. I think that this quote is stating that religious readings are true for some, but not for others, and as humans we have the ability to chose what we want or do not want to believe and because we cannot know the absolute truth, there will always be “harmless untruths” that we chose to believe because they make us happy.
I found it interesting how Bokonon euphemized the word lie when he called them “harmless untruths” when he’s really just saying “Live by the harmless lies….” Maybe it’s just because the word “untruth” does not elicit as much negativity as the word “lie” does. But I also felt like Vonnegut was suggesting that religion often makes you look at things through rose-colored glasses, where “shameless lies” could be seen as “harmless untruths”.
ReplyDeleteI am actually a religious person but sometimes I feel like religion makes things look easier than they actually are. I feel like how we are supposed to live cannot be set down in black and white. It’s probably not because religious texts and messages are wrong or misleading. I just think that we cannot live life that is evolving every minute by a set of rules that were penned down thousands of years ago.