Indignation has been a staple of Roth Novels from the beginning. Indignation over class, over puritanism, Roth I'm convinced could manage indignation over indignation. I almost skipped this book thinking he's just rehashing early themes nearly exhausted in books such as "Goodbye Columbus" and "Portnoy's Complaint", I'm glad I didn't. I'm not going to review the book other than to say it's worth reading, but I did want to share some dialogue that onegoodmove readers will enjoy.

The exchange is between the Dean Caudwell and the protaganist Marcus. Marcus has changed rooms for the third time and the Dean has called him in for a conference. The Dean has reveiwed his personal information and has just inquired as to why Marcus didn't list his religion as Judaism. I've included quit a bit of the dialogue from this section, but there is much more on the same topic in the book.

"If you're asking me, sir, if I was trying to hide the religion into which I was born, the answer is no." "Well, I certainly hope that's so. I'm glad to hear that. Everyone has a right to openly practice his own faith, and that holds true at Winesburg as it does everywhere else in this country. On the other hand, under 'religious preference' you didn't write 'Jewish,' I notice, though you are of Jewish extraction and, in accordance with the college's attempt to assist students in residing with others of the same faith, you were originally assigned Jewish roommates." "I didn't write anything under religious preference, sir."

"I can see that. I'm wondering why that is." "Because I have none. Because I don't prefer to practice one religion over another." "What then provides you with spiritual sustenance? To whom do you pray when you need solace?" "I don't need solace. I don't believe in God and I don't believe in prayer." As a high school debater I was known for hammering home my point—and that I did. "I am sustained by what is real and not by what is imaginary. Praying, to me, is preposterous." "Is it now?" he replied with a smile. "And yet so many millions do it." "Millions once thought the earth was flat, sir."

"Yes, that's true. But may I ask, Marcus, merely out of curiosity, how you manage to get by in life—filled as our lives inevitably are with trial and tribulation—lacking religious or spiritual guidance?" "I get straight A's, sir." That prompted a second smile, a smile of condescension that I liked even less than the first. I was prepared now to despise Dean Caudwell with all my being for putting me through this tribulation. "I didn't ask about your grades," he said. "I know your grades. You have every right to be proud of them, as I've already told you." "If that is so, sir, then you know the answer to your question about how I get along without any religious or spiritual guidance.

I get along just could I capitulate when he was wrong and I was right? "I object to having to attend chapel forty times before I graduate in order to earn a degree, sir. I don't see where the college has the right to force me to listen to a clergyman of whatever faith even once, or to listen to a Christian hymn invoking the Christian deity even once, given that I am an atheist who is, to be truthful, deeply offended by the practices and beliefs of organized religion." Now I couldn't stop myself, weakened as I felt. "I do not need the sermons of professional moralists to tell me how I should act. I certainly don't need any God to tell me how to.

I am altogether capable of leading a moral existence without crediting beliefs that are impossible to substantiate and beyond credulity, that, to my mind, are nothing more than fairy tales for children held by adults, and with no more foundation in fact than a belief in Santa Claus. I take it you are familiar, Dean Caudwell, with the writings of Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell, the distinguished British mathematician and philosopher, was last year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One of the works of literature for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize is a widely read essay first delivered as a lecture in 1927 entitled, 'Why I Am Not a Christian.' Are you familiar with that essay, sir?" "Please sit down again," said the dean. I did as he told me, but said, "I am asking if you are familiar with this very important essay by Bertrand Russell. I take it that the answer is no.

Well, I am familiar with it because I set myself the task of memorizing large sections of it when I was captain of my high school debating team. I haven't forgotten it yet, and I have promised myself that I never will. This essay and others like it contain Russell's argument not only against the Christian conception of God but against the conceptions of God held by all the great religions of the world, every one of which Russell finds both untrue and harmful. If you were to read his essay, and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would find that Bertrand Russell, who is one of the world's foremost logicians as well as a philosopher and a mathematician, undoes with logic that is beyond dispute the first-cause argument, the natural-law argument, the argument from design, the moral arguments for a deity, and the argument for the remedying of injustice. To give you two examples.

First, as to why there cannot be any validity to the first-cause argument, he says, 'If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.' Second, as to the argument from design, he says, 'Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?'

He also discusses the defects in Christ's teaching as Christ appears in the Gospels, while noting that historically it is quite doubtful that Christ ever existed. To him the most serious defect in Christ's moral character is his belief in the existence of hell. Russell writes, 'I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment,' and he accuses Christ of a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching. He discusses with complete candor how the churches have retarded human progress and how, by their insistence on what they choose to call morality, they inflict on all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering.

Religion, he declares, is based primarily and mainly on fear—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, and fear of death. Fear, Bertrand Russell says, is the parent of cruelty, and it is therefore no wonder that cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries. Conquer the world by intelligence, Russell says, and not by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from living in it. The whole conception of God, he concludes, is a conception unworthy of free men. These are the thoughts of a Nobel Prize winner renowned for his contributions to philosophy and for his mastery of logic and the theory of knowledge, and I find myself in total agreement with them.

Having studied them and having thought them through, I intend to live in accordance with them, as I'm sure you would have to admit, sir, I have every right to do." "Please sit down," said the dean once more. I did. I hadn't realized I had again gotten up. But that's what the exhortation "Arise!," stirringly

I admire your ability to memorize and retain abstruse reading matter even if I don't necessarily admire whom and what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position for his antiwar campaigning during the First War and imprisoned for that by the British authorities."

I must call to your attention that your argument against Bertrand Russell was not an argument against his ideas based on reason and appealing to the intellect but an argument against his character appealing to prejudice, i.e., an ad hominem attack, which is logically worthless

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