Man’s root condition is to stand babbling in terror on the precipice of an abyss into which he cannot see, and into which he knows he eventually and inevitably must leap. That he directs whatever intellect he has to finding palliative ontology and an explanatory theology to ameliorate his condition is small wonder. The chief difficulty is that, as far as I know, God has remained intractably silent on those subjects for all these many centuries. That said, I am told by religious friends that God does indeed speak to us, but that His lectures are extremely difficult to comprehend. However, I know of no reason a priori that God wouldn’t be just as good a lecturer as I am, and so I am left with my original confusions. Perchance it is that God’s assistant professors--the prophets and the Popes--missed a lot of classes during their own graduate days and then necessarily went forth into the great lecture halls of the world proclaiming faulty theory?

Only when someone offers a willingness to put to sword and flame someone else who doesn’t agree with his religious views do I get really uncomfortable. I also once wrote that to kill a man for a political reason is to insult humanity and to kill a man for a religious reason is to insult God. Both are mortal sins, there are those guilty by military order of the former and I can only hope, if the Christians have the right of it, St. Peter understands military law as well as the Pope claims to understand God’s law. St. Peter may be a corporal, for gatekeeping is the level of duty they get in the American army. If he is in fact a corporal he will be familiar with Article 99, Manual for Courts-Martial, United States 1951, para. 8 thereof, which deems it a death-penalty crime to fail do one’s utmost to "encounter, engage, capture, or destroy" enemy personnel, and, if not exonerated, should be able to take a plea in mitigation and get off with less than a Heavenly firing squad. I can say in passing that the "encounter" aspect is easily acquitted, since one rarely can avoid it, and the enemy usually "engages" relieving one of that burden. The capture or destroy part is the rub, and while "destroy" may be immoral, "capture" is mortally dangerous unless the enemy is willing to go along with it.