Lost in the Cosmos

the priesthood I can see, not counting my little malformed innocents, are these boys, your sons, Krishna, Vishnu, Siddhartha, Oppie, Carl Jung, Chomsky, and John. Whether or not one or another chooses to become a priest is his business and God’s business, but it is my business to be around, to stay here in case the human race survives and needs priests.
    And if it is the end, it is still my obligation to remain, because the Church will survive until the end of earth time and until Christ himself comes, and so, if I’m the putative head of the Church, as putative head I stay.
    My proposal: Will your craft fly like an airplane? Yes? Can you land it anywhere? Yes? Like a helicopter? Yes? Very well.
    I propose a variant of Dr. Jane Smith’s proposal. I propose that you fly Dr. Jane Smith and the children and my odd little brood here and my two monks, yourself, and me, and whoever else wants to go, to Lost Cove, Tennessee.
    There, as Dr. Jane Smith and I have reason to believe, the residual radiation is not so bad, that under the blue haze of the Smoky Mountains, the ultraviolet flare may not be excessive, and that your beautiful children may remain fertile.
    Accordingly, I propose to you, Captain, that you accede to Dr. Jane Smith’s wish that I marry the two of you properly—your marriage in space by yourself is canonically suspect to say the least—and that I baptize the children in Lost Cove Creek.
    I wish to come with you for one reason—otherwise, I would rather remain here in my beloved Utah and be let alone and die in peace—but I am obliged to be present to serve the survivors as priest and ordain as priest any one of them who might wish to become a priest, and to await the coming of the Lord if it is the end. I’d as soon wait for him here, but what can you do? Veh.
    Why should you of Copernicus 4 believe any of these things, which must surely seem preposterous to you? The only reason, from your point of view, is that you have no choice. You know now that if what I say is not true, you are like the gentiles Paul spoke of: a stranger to every covenant, with no promise to hope for, with the world about you and no God. You are stuck with yourselves, ghost selves, which will never become selves. You are stuck with each other and you will never know how to love each other. Even if you succeed, you and your progeny will go to Europa and roam the galaxy, lost in the Cosmos forever.
    I agree with Dr. Jones: we should leave as soon as possible—but for Tennessee, not for Europa.
    Question: If you were the captain, which of the two proposals would you accept? or would you accept neither? Do you have a better idea?
    (a) I’d go with Aristarchus Jones and the others to New Ionia.
    (b) I’d marry Dr. Jane Smith and take her and the children to Lost Cove, Tennessee.
    (c) I’d go to Qumran and fight with the Israelis.
    (d) I’d go to Jordan and fight with the Arabs.
    (e) I’d drop the abbot and Jane Smith in Tennessee, send the children to Europa with Jones and Tiffany, leaving me and Kimberly to take our chances in Uxmal.
    (f) I’d take no chances. I’d cover all bets, even the million-to-one shot that there might be something to Abbot Leibowitz’s preposterous claim. I’d go with him and Jane and the children to Lost Cove, Tennessee, wait for whatever he’s waiting for, monitor my sperm count—yet keep Copernicus 4 fueled and ready to go. (This, roughly, was Dr. Jane Smith’s response, in a rather vulgar aside to the Captain, after hearing the abbot’s proposal, in which she lapsed into a dialect of her Southern Methodist origins: “Well, why not? Who knows? The whole thing is preposterous, of course: two niggers and a Jew claiming to be Roman Catholics, a Jewish pope and two black monks. Popery and monkery in the middle of nowhere. But what have we got to lose? They’re Christians, after all. I’ll go along with it, especially the marriage ceremony and the baptism.”)
    (g) Other (specify).
    ( CHECK ONE )
    Thought Experiment: An experiment in shifting one’s perspective toward the end of determining the relative preposterousness of modern Cartesian consciousness vis-à-vis the preposterousness of Judaeo-Christianity—that is, whether they are two unrelated preposterousnesses or whether one preposterousness is a function of another, i.e., whether Judaeo-Christianity is preposterous from the point of view of the modern scientific consciousness precisely to the degree that the latter has elevated