Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

game, it wins outright. Which is a very religious, spiritual and uplifting message. And sound evolutionary sense. What more could we ask?

Quite a bit, actually, because now it all starts to get nasty. The reasons, however, are admirable.

Every culture needs its own Make-a-Human kit, to build into the next generation the kind of mind that will keep the culture going -and, recursively, ensure that the next generation does the same for the one that comes after that. Rituals fit very readily into such a kit, because it is easy to distinguish Us from Them by the rituals that We follow but They don't [56] ... which can be applied so overpoweringly that the people who aren't Us aren't anything. See the Imperial China parody -the Agatean Empire -in Interesting Times, and a number of Roundworld cultures, too. Being Them is quite a step up by comparison. . It is also an excellent test of a child's willingness to obey cultural norms by insisting that they carry out some perfectly ordinary task in an unnecessarily prescribed and elaborate manner.

Now, however, the priesthood has got its ideological toe in the cultural doorway. Rituals need someone to organise them, and to elaborate them. Every bureaucracy builds itself an empire by creating unnecessary tasks and then finding people to carry them out. A crucial task here is to ensure that members of the tribe or village or nation really do obey the norms and carry out the rituals. There has to be some sanction to make sure that they do, even if they're free-thinking types who'd rather not. Because everything is founded on an ontically dumped concept, reference to reality has to be replaced by belief. The less testable a human belief is, the more strongly we tend to hold on to it. Deep down we recognise that although not being testable means that disbelievers can't prove we're wrong, it also means that we can't prove we're right. Since we know that we are, that sets up a tremendous tension.

Now the atrocities begin. Religion slides over the edge of sanity, and the result is horrors like the Spanish Inquisition. Think about it for a moment. The priesthood of a religion whose central tenet was universal love and brotherhood systematically inflicted appalling tortures, sick and disgusting things, on innocent people who merely happened to disagree about minor items of belief. This is a massive contradiction and it demands explanation. Were the Inquisitors evil people who knowingly did evil things?

Small Gods, one of the most profound and philosophical of the Discworld novels, examines the role of belief in religions, and Discworld undergoes its own version of the Spanish Inquisition.

One twist is that on Discworld, there is no lack of gods; however, few of them have any great significance: There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshipped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don't demand much in the way of miracles.

They are the small gods, the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way.

Because what they lack is belief.

Small Gods is the story of one rather larger god, the Great God Om, who manifests himself to a novice monk called Brutha, in the Citadel at the heart of the city of Kom in the lands between the deserts of Klatch and the jungles of Howondaland.

Brutha's attitude to religion is a very personal one. He runs his own life by it. In contrast, Deacon Vorbis believes that the role of religion is to run everybody else's life. Vorbis is head of the Quisition, whose role is 'to do all those things that needed to be done and which other people would rather not do'. Nobody ever interrupts Vorbis to ask what he is thinking about, because they are scared stiff that the answer will be 'You'.

The Great God's manifestation takes the form of a small tortoise. Brutha finds this hard to believe: I've seen the Great God Om ... and he isn't tortoise-shaped. He comes as an eagle, or a lion, or a mighty bull. There's a statue in the Great Temple. It's seven cubits high. It's got bronze on it and everything. It's trampling infidels. You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise.

Om's power has waned because of a lack of belief. He tests his strength by silently cursing a beetle, but it makes no difference and the insect plods away unperturbed. He curses a melon unto the eighth generation, but with no evident effect. He inflicts a plague of boils on it, but all it does is sit there, slowly ripening. He vows that when he returns to his rightful state, the Tribes of Beetle and Melons will regret not responding. For on Discworld, the size of a god is determined by the strength, and amount, of belief in him (or her, or it). Om's church had become so corrupt and powerful that the fearful belief of the common people had been transferred to the church itself -it's very easy to believe in a red-hot poker -and only Brutha, simple soul, still truly believes. No god ever dies, because there is always some tiny pocket of belief remaining somewhere in the world, but a tortoise is pretty much as low as you can get.

Brutha is going to become the Eighth Prophet of Om. (His grandmother would have made it two generations before, but she was a woman, and narrative imperative forbids female prophets.)

Vorbis's job is to ensure that all Omnians remain true to the teachings of the Great God Om, which is to say, they do what Vorbis tells them. The presence on the Discworld of the god itself, causing changes to all the old teachings and generally making trouble, is not greatly to Vorbis's taste. Neither is the presence of a genuine prophet. Vorbis is faced with the inquisitor's spiritual dilemma, and resolves it in the time-honoured manner of the Spanish Inquisition (which, basically, is to tell oneself that torturing people is fine because it's for their own good, in the long run).

Brutha has a much simpler vision of Omnianism: it is something for individuals to live by.

Vorbis shows Brutha a new instrument that he has had made: an iron turtle upon which a man or woman can be spreadeagled, with a firebox inside. The time it takes for the iron to heat up will give them plenty of time to reflect on their heresies. In a flash of prophecy, Brutha realises that its first victim will be himself. And in due course, he finds himself chained to it, and uncomfortably warm, with Vorbis watching over him, gloating. Then the Great God Om intervenes, dropped from the talons of an eagle.

One or two people, who had been watching Vorbis closely, said later that there was just time for his expression to change before two pounds of tortoise, travelling at three metres per second, hit him between the eyes.

It was a revelation.

And that does something to people watching. For a start, they believe with all their heart.

The Great God Om now is truly great. He rises over the Temple, a billowing cloud shaped like eagle-headed men, bulls, golden horns, all tangled and fused into one another. Four bolts of fire whir out of the cloud and burst the chains that fastened Brutha to the iron turtle. The Great God declares Brutha to be Prophet of Prophets.

The Great God gives Brutha the opportunity to make some Commandments. The Prophet declines, having decided that 'You should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time'. And he tells Om that there will be no Commandments unless the god agrees to obey them, too.

Which is a new thought, for a god. Small Gods has many wise words to say about religion and belief, and it makes the point that in their own terms the Inquisitors believe they are doing good.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has a scene in which the Grand Inquisitor encounters Christ, and explains his point of view, including why Christ's renewed message of universal love couldn't have come at a worse time and will only cause trouble. Just as the presence of Brutha, a genuine prophet, was not at all to the liking of Deacon Vorbis.