Free Empire V by Victor Pelevin

scattering for safety …
    I developed quickly and without particular effort, but at the same time lost my sense of inner space. Jehovah warned me that my studies would make me older, since the true age of a person is determined by the sum of his knowledge. The acquisition of vicarious experiences must be set against the loss of my own inexperience, which is to say of my youth. But in those days the changes I was undergoing caused me no regret, because my reserves of this capital seemed to me inexhaustible. Parting with some of it was like jettisoning unwanted ballast while an invisible aerial balloon was raising me high into the sky.
    Baldur and Jehovah assured me that my study of Discourse would reveal to me the hidden essence of contemporary social thought. An important element in the programme was concerned with human morality, conceptions of good and evil. However, our approach to the subject was not extrinsic, an investigation into what people were saying on the record, but internal, via an intimate acquaintance with what they actually thought and felt. Needless to say, this investigation severely shook my faith in humanity.
    Looking at a wide variety of human minds, I noticed one interesting general characteristic. Every individual possessed within him his own personal court of moral judgment, to which the mind would unfailingly appeal whenever a dubious decision needed to be taken. This personal moral court malfunctioned on a regular basis – and I began to understand why. This is what I wrote in my notebook on this subject:
    People have long believed that in this world evil triumphs while good receives its reward only after death. For a while this equation produced a kind of balance, providing a link between earth and heaven. In our time, however, the balance has become imbalance because the idea of heavenly reward has come to be seen as an obvious absurdity. At the same time no one has succeeded in challenging the hegemony of evil on earth. As a result, any normal human being seeking the positive here on earth will naturally incline towards evil: a step as logical as becoming a member of the ruling political party. The evil to which the person has thus affiliated himself is contained exclusively within his head. But when everyone has enlisted in the ranks of evil, which is located nowhere else but in the head, what need has evil of any other victory?
    The concept of good and evil inevitably ran up against religion. But what my lessons had to teach me about religion (a ‘localised cult’, Jehovah called it) genuinely surprised me. As revealed by the preparations I imbibed from the rack of test tubes labelled ‘ Gnosis+ ’, at the dawning of Christianity the God of the Old Testament was regarded by the new teaching as a devil. Subsequently, in the early centuries of our own era, the interests of strengthening Roman hegemony and political correctness led God and Devil to be united in a single object of veneration to whom the orthodox patriot of the declining Empire was obliged to bow the knee. Primary texts were chosen, transcribed and painstakingly redacted to conform to the new genius, while all those not so selected were, as is customary, burnt.
    I wrote in my notebook:
    Each nation, as each individual, must work out its own religion and not simply continue wearing out the rags of others, swarming as they are with the lice from which all diseases come … The peoples who are on the rise in our own time – Indians, Chinese and so on – import no more than technology and capital; their religions are purely local products and they keep them that way. A member of these societies may be quite sure that the gods he is praying to are his own loony deities, not the latest totemic importations, scribe’s misreadings or mistakes in translation. But for us … to base our world view on a mishmash of texts written by unknown hands in unknown places at an unknown time is equivalent to