Rara avis - Bay-backed Shrike

 

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

A Case of Conscience by James Blish
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

SF, being a hypothetical scenario, is an ideal forum for discussing religious conundrums and wrestle with spirituality vs religion dilemmas.

The Church is as hostile to the doctrine of evolution—particularly to that part of it which deals with the descent of man—as it ever was, and with good reason.

Karl Marx famously said “Religion als das Opium des Volkes” – after all that is what religion is all about – power and dominion over the subjects. Peter F Hamilton explored this in The Night's Dawn Trilogy: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God trilogy.
In this book I found the premise that Christianity is the main religion of our Universe rather far-fetched, stretching even the boundless boundaries of SF. The author concedes that Christianity was fourth in terms of adherents even on Earth, following Buddhism and Hinduism.
Satan, called the “Adversary,” is purported to have peopled the alien planet Lithia (due to an abundance of Lithium, that was being eyed greedily by rapacious humans) with reptilian entities in his image.
This is the observation made by of one of these aliens about the existential crises faced by humans

you teach them to be afraid of death—which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death.

Blish writes with a lot of obscure classical references that are not always clear to a non-native English speaker. But here is an alliterative gem

death in premedical days was always both imminent and immanent, impending and indwelling—but it was never transcendent.

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