I recently finished Cat’s Cradle (second Vonnegut book after Breakfast of Champions) and I found it quite bad. All the characters were one dimensional cardboard cutouts Vonnegut uses to expound his views in a condescending and arrogant manner. This book just beats shallow nihilism over the reader’s head the entire time while ignorantly bashing on those with different views. Honestly, I’m shocked that this book is acclaimed. Its ideas and writing make it seem like it was written by an edgy high school student.
I wrote this for a comment you deleted.
I’m a bit surprised by this.
You sure know he was an atheist/humanist, so certainly he wasn’t going to say religions are true or praise religious people’s intelligence just for the fact they believe.
But besides that, granted I may have always misunderstood the meaning of the book, but it seems to say the next best thing: religions can be useful. False but useful. Like many other things, like Newtonian physics.
Some are more useful than others. Bokononism is a good religion, I think, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and has an epicurean take to it, right at the frontispiece:
Choose your own lies, and choose them such that everybody comes out better for it. What else do you want from someone who doesn’t believe in an absolute truth?
Perhaps my favorite quote is this:
That doesn’t seem shallow at all to me. That’s acknowledgement that humans developed in a peculiar way, that seems to require certain answers. God itself doesn’t have them (= the Author thinks that the mere need for them is not proof of their existence), but gives permission to come up with some. That are, by necessity, lies. Best if they bring about happiness.
When he says
Maybe you see just a witty turn of phrase. I see human life.