My son doesn’t like my Kindle. It was his suggestion that the family give it to me for my birthday, but he doesn’t like it. “It’s not the same he says, the bits and bytes are not substantial. I like the smell of the book, and how it feels in my hand,” he said. “You’ll be the ruin of the book as we know it,” he added.

I made my arguments about that bastard Gutenberg who put the monks out of business with his cold lifeless print, but my son was not persuaded. I even argued that his computer games have put board games out of business.

WoW, he said. . .

I went to see Bill Maher’s documentary last night, on a balmy Miami night. Afterwards the rains came down in Biblical proportions, thus announcing God’s displeasure at the film and my attendance (I thwarted His wrath under a convenient restaurant umbrella). It’s an enjoyable and instructive film, especially if you enjoy groaning at people’s amazing credulity and nastiness, not the mention the silly outfits. What the film conveys better than any book is the sheer nuttiness of it all: the weird fantastical beliefs, the mental contortions, the verbal slipperiness, the flickering wild eyes. Each religion seems determined to outdo the others for sheer bizarreness—the less credible the better. The Mormon religion took the grand prize for me, with God relaxing on his nearby planet and Missouri the site of the Second Coming. But there was plenty to root for in the realms of the Higher Charlatanry, e.g. the portly Hispanic guy who fancies he is Jesus Christ (and thousands agree with him). My question afterwards was who was the most repulsive of the religious fanatics on display: Christians, Moslems and orthodox Jews had their strong contenders. This was equal-opportunity religion-bashing; except that Maher didn’t do much bashing, leaving that to the proponents of the various sects themselves. What a gallery of pious rogues! A book almost inevitably takes its subject seriously, but a film like this can simply let the camera record the gaudy tapestry of human delusion and manipulation. What they all had in common was that when testing questions were raised so were their hackles--and the whiff of violence was suddenly in the air. We knew all this before, of course, but seeing and hearing so much of it brought the whole terrible farce home.