Godless Read Online Free PDF Page B

communion wafers.
    Hosts are little white disks that do not resemble any kind of real food. The closest thing I can think of would be a flattened, sugarless marshmallow. They have almost no taste, just a faint sourness, and they require no chewing. I think they’re made out of some kind of digestible paper.
    My point is, the miracle of Holy Communion is when the priest turns these little white disks into the flesh of Jesus Christ. They call it transsubstantiation. So, if you buy that, then the host the priest places on your tongue is actually a sliver of Jesus meat. But they make the host as different from meat as they can, so that even though communion is a form of cannibalism, nobody gets grossed out. Like with the sausages.
    Anyway, the reason I hate communion isn’t the meat-eating component. I get hungry enough, I’ll eat anything. The reason I hate it is because everybody in the church except me, Jason Bock, stands up and gets in line for their little snack. I sit there alone in the pew while everybody stares at me as they file past. I sit there and burn under the hellfire and damnation stare my father gives me. And I feel awful. But what choice do I have? According to Father Haynes, if a nonbeliever takes Holy Communion, he’ll be damned for all eternity. Of course, being a nonbeliever damns me anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but I figure it’s safer not to partake. Just in case I’m wrong about the whole God thing.
    So I sit and endure the stares and the pangs and twinges of Catholic guilt, knowing that I am doing the right thing if I’m right, and the right thing even if I’m wrong.
    Being Catholic is hard. Being ex-Catholic is even harder.

 
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    B UT A TIME CAME WHEN EVEN THE PLENITUDE OF LIFE FAILED TO SATISFY, AND SO THE O CEAN INSTILLED I NTELLIGENCE AND F REE W ILL IN CERTAIN OF ITS CREATURES, AND IT CALLED THEM H UMANS, AND IT WATCHED AS THE FIRST CRUDE TOOLS WERE FASHIONED BY H UMAN HANDS, AND IT WATCHED THE FIRST WARS BEING FOUGHT, AND IT WATCHED AS THESE LARGE-HEADED APES BEGAN TO RESHAPE THE LANDS AND THE WATERS IN NEW WAYS .
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7
 
    In the CTG, Tuesday is the Sabbath. Why, you ask? Because nothing else ever happens on a Tuesday. Shin, Dan, and I honor the Sabbath at Wigglesworth’s, where we all order Magnum Brainblasters. Never had a Brainblaster? You should try one. It’s a Wigglesworth specialty.
    A Magnum Brainblaster is about a foot tall, green, foamy, and numbingly cold. For maximum impact, you drink it through a straw. Wigglesworth keeps his ingredients secret, but a Brainblaster certainly contains massive amounts of sugar, enough caffeine to wake up a corpse, and I think he throws in a chunk of dry ice just before serving. Think of it as Mountain Dew on steroids.
    So we’re sitting in the window table at Wigglesworth’s Juiceteria, charging up on Brainblasters, and Shin, First Keeper of the Sacred Text, is showing us the Secret Dimensions he has calculated using Trigonometry, Guesswork, and other Holy Mathematical Techniques.
    Overall height: 207 feet
    Distance from ground to bottom of tank: 154 feet
    Circumference of central column: 22 feet, 3 inches
    Diameter of tank: 67 feet
    Volume of tank: 1 million gallons
    Weight of water: 8 million pounds
    Distance between legs: 24 feet
    â€¦ and so on. After Shin completes his presentation we stand up and bow in the direction of the Ten-legged God. Magda Price, who works for Wigglesworth part time, wanders over. She is wearing the official Wigglesworth Juiceteria uniform: a tight pink T-shirt with
Juicy!
printed across the front in lime-green script. On her it looks good.
    â€œWhat are you guys doing?” she asks. Magda can’t stand to be left out of anything.
    â€œHonoring the Sabbath,” I tell her.
    â€œIt’s Tuesday.”
    â€œWe are aware of that.”
    Magda wrinkles her forehead. For some reason it makes her look extra sexy. Not that she needs