Babble on religion and Boffo. Don't you feel special.

Now, I was raised a good little liberal left wing Catholic girl by my parents, daddy dearest being a long time Irish Catholic and mumsy being a convert from Russian Orthodox. My dad taught Sunday school before he had a heartattack and the workload was just too annoying. Plus, having all those seventh and eighth graders running around the house was really just annoying. Anyway, I sort of took the existence of God for granted and never questioned anything or really thought about anything for the first ten years of my life. Then I read Stranger in a Strange Land in sixth grade, and whoosh! there went all of my confident beliefs in God. The fact that my oldest brother had gone agnostic atheist and refused to go to church anymore might have helped a bit. (Some of you may be wondering why an eleven year old was reading Stranger in a Strange Land; suffice to say that I liked it a hell of a lot better than The Three Musketeers at the same tender age. And, surprisingly, Heinlein was not the cause for my twisted, perverted, and downright strange tendencies; all of those started in second grade, but I'll get to that later.) So, for a while I was completely and utterly against religion. And then...well, now I'm not really sure what I am, since I do still go to church but I have a dissassembled Pagan altar on my computer desk and have lost more books on religion than you can shake a stick at.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I was agnostic for a while, until I figured that I did believe in something, I just couldn't quite pinpoint what it was. Most of my characters are like that, the exceptions (Boffo-wise, anyway) being Dei, Tyler, and Jubal. And the entire Celestial host, both sides, I suppose. Dei is a devout Christian- biased towards Catholicism, but non-denominational for the most part. He just likes the Catholics for the cathedrals, to be perfectly honest. (He considered being an architect for a while...but since there isn't much of a market for cathedrals, he scrapped that idea.) Of course, the whole mess with the shades and all the horrible things that have happened to him have made him a tad bit jaded (well, wouldn't you be?) but for some reason he still believes in God. (The fact that this isn't evidenced at all in the story is my fault, because I'm stupid.) He wears a black enameled silver cross thingee-doodad either around his neck or wrist; it's rarely in any place where it can be seen, not because he's ashamed or anything, but just because he likes keeping secrets and tends to be fairly quiet about his faith anyway. Needless to say, he's about as completely unlike a screaming fundamentalist as one can get. And he'd sooner shoot himself in the foot than start preaching; not his style, you know.

Tyler is a strict and devout atheist. Always has been, always will be. He doesn't talk about it much, and he isn't obnoxious about people who discuss God-stuff around him; you know the type, the ones who get offended if you say something like "Thou shalt not kill" because it's Biblical and anything Biblical is automatically Bad News. (I can't figure out which annoy me worse, the fundamentalists or the agressive atheists.) His reasons for this are a little hazy...something to do with Lilian, I'm sure, and his own station in life. Jealousy, mostly, probably. Maybe bitterness, or simply a refusal to believe something unless he sees it. Tyler has always been very grounded in this reality- slightly psychotic, yes, but he knows which way is up. A lot of the demons and (unsurprising, really) most of the angels are also strict atheists. Their point of view is that they created the world; they are gods. Only they aren't, but try telling them that. Stubborn, stuck up buggers, they are. The angels tend to feel this way more than the demons, if only because the demons are logical enough to know that nothing ever just happens; someone or something has to start it all. The angels have shorter memories so they assume they are responsible. Silly creatures, really.

And Jubal would technically be Jewish, only not quite and he isn't really a practicing Jew and even if he were his methods and beliefs would be six thousand years out of date, give or take a century. I'truth, though, he isn't really considered to be anything, since all he really worships anymore is Radueriel...God when he gets the chance, or feels the need for a change of pace, but mostly just a fallen angel with a harp. But...I think by the end of the story he'll be a little more concrete about his religion (horribly out of date as it is) or at least his thoughts on God. (Jubal: Hey. Hey! Yeah, you, the All-Father! What the fuck is up with this? I mean, come on, whose idea was it to make this shit-ball in the first place? Come on, own up!) Oi. Yes, that's more or less exactly what Jubal would do. The question is whether or not he'd get an answer...

As for religion in general in the story, well, it's there, sort of. I mean, it's a little hard to avoid what with the angels and the race of Cain thing, but...These are not angels of any sort of god. They only call themselves angels, because they like convenient titles and it sounds impressive. Whether they stole all their ideas off humanity, or the other way around is unknown; a little of both, I think. Time is less of a linear thing and more just 'there', so it's quite possible that the angels (who have been around for longer than the sun) stole all their ideas from human religion and have been using them for the past three billion years. (For the record, in my opinion God does exist, she/he just won't be making an appearance in Birds of a Feather.)

So, there you go. A great deal of babble that didn't say much, aside from the fact that I'm rather sacriligious. But we all knew that already, didn't we?