At Last: The Kind of Post People Presumably Expect when Coming to a Blog Called The Church of Rationality

I found Michal Chabon's short adventure novel Gentlemen of the Road, about a bunch of do-no-gooders travelling the middle east ca. A.D. 950, thoroughly disappointing. Chabon's written three of my favourite novels, but I never really got into this one - which I suspect is because neither did Chabon (4/10). Very quotable, however (p. 160):

She had always found a paradox in the crime of blasphemy, for it seemed to her that any God who could be discountenanced by the words of human beings was by definition not worthy of reverence

The paradox disappears, of course, when you assume that anti-blasphemy rules were not made by and for gods, but by and for believers.