Framing the Question 19
ties, in order to secure the initial offense against reason within
a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of cor-
roborating nonsense. Sooner or later, it will all seem to make
sense, simply through ceaseless repetition and restatement
and rhetorical reinforcement. The most effective technique for
subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the
contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept inco-
herence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If
this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy,
it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire life-
time. In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like
the White Queen, learn to believe as many as six impossible
things before breakfast.
Not that I am accusing anyone of consciously or cynically
seeking to manipulate the minds of faithful Christians. The
conspiracy, so to speak, is an entirely open one, an unpremedi-
tated corporate labor of communal self-deception, requiring
us all to do our parts to sustain one another in our collective
derangement. I regard the entire process as the unintentional
effect of a long tradition of error, one in which a series of bad
interpretations of scripture produced various corruptions of
theological reasoning, which were themselves then preserved
as immemorial revealed truths and, at the last, rendered im -
pregnable to all critique by the indurated mental habits of gen-
erations - all despite the logical and conceptual incongruities
that this required believers to ignore within their beliefs. So I
really do take all parties at their words. For instance, I think
that traditional Thomists are entirely sincere when they argue
that God could not have forborne to create souls he had pre-
destined to eternal torment, and certainly could never now
allow them peacefully to lapse again into nonexistence, on the