bloodygranuaile

Today in being enormously behind on book reviews: So Mark Oshiro finished reading Terry Pratchett's Small Gods like five-ever ago, and I finished catching up on it about forever ago, and now I've forgotten what I was going to say because I've read a couple of other books since then. Oops.

Small Gods has been one of my favorite Discworld books for a long time because it's the one that satirizes authoritarian monotheistic religions, and as such is Relevant To My Interests. But just because it's one of my favorites doesn't mean I've actually read it any time in the past several years, because there are too many books for that these days.

What I mostly remembered about it from days of yore was that the main character, Brutha, was kind of dim; the monotheistic God in question, Om, was a right arsehole and was stuck in the body of a tortoise without any of his godly powers; and that the Spanish Inquisition knockoff was just called the Quisition, with the guy in charge being called the Exquisitor and the regular Quisitors being portrayed as a bunch of regular Joes whose jobs just happen to be torturing people.

These things were all still there! But there was also a lot that I really couldn't believe I'd managed to forget, like all the wonderful jokes about Greek philosophers. And the motif with the eagle. (How could I possibly have forgotten the eagle?) And somehow I'd completely forgotten all about the ongoing question of whether the Discworld was carried on the back of a giant turtle, which is exceptionally dumb of me, since that particular conflict ties in closely with Om's manifestation as a lowly (but apparently delicious) tortoise.

While belief works a lot more literally on the Discworld than it does here, the Discworld books that focus on subjects such as belief and narrative are some of the strongest, in my opinion, because Pratchett does a very good job of literalizing the ways in which belief does actually shape our lives and our realities. Just because we have no way of knowing if various gods objectively exist or not in our world doesn't mean that the gods with the most and most fervent believers don't have the most power after all. Although this book goes even farther than that, discussing the difference between belief in a god and belief in its Church--an issue that has plagued Catholics (especially defected Catholics) and the Catholic Church since the Reformation.

Reading this along with Mark and the community (if constantly several weeks after the fact) was especially enlightening because Mark and many of the community members were raised in much, much more strictly and conservatively religious households than I was.

Anyway, if you like the Spanish Inquisition number from History of the World: Part One, this is a little bit like that, only more.