Religion has never really worked for me, and that quite often taints the way I interpret films and books with religious themes. Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Liebowitz is a science fiction novel told in three parts, all of which are steeped in religious allegory and commentary. Each of the three parts takes place in a different time and place in a post-apocalyptic America, and each piece functions as a piece of a puzzle which eventually explains what happened to the world.
The first part, "Fiat Homo", deals with a group of monks living in a new dark age - they translate books and various pieces of written information from the times before the apocalypse, thinking that everything they find has some kind of deep religious meaning. The main character is Brother Francis, a young, naive, artistically talented man who begins the story in a desert wasteland. Through the aid of a mysterious wanderer, Francis finds a bomb shelter buried under the sand, and within this shelter he finds an ancient blueprint, which - for the rest of the story - it becomes his job to copy. While copying the blueprint onto a skin, he decides that he does not like the way the lettering on the blueprint is printed all over the diagram, and (since he cannot speak or read English), he decides it would be a more attractive piece of work if he were to strategically place the writing around the edges of his copy. Much of the story - and this work by Francis - says a lot about the monks of centuries past who would mindlessly copy "knowledge", never really paying mind to what they were copying. It is also quite a commentary on the idea that religious scriptures appear the same way they were hundreds (or thousands) of years ago. To think that these scriptures have retained the same stories, wording and meanings throughout these many years seems at least a tad ludicrous.
The second part of the book, "Fiat Lux", deals even more with these keepers of knowledge - monks who call themselves "bookleggers". In this middle chapter, a dire conflict is brewing between different clans of people, while this group of monks is divided within itself. A few of the more liberal and forward-thinking monks have managed to build a giant contraption capable of giving off light thousands of times brighter than any candle - ie, a lightbulb. But some of the other monks see this advancement as un-Godly, and as one more step towards a repeat of humanity's own demise. When the rest of the book is read, it's poetic and prophetic and has a nice "we're doomed to repeat our own mistakes" message in it.
The third and final part of the book is titled "Fiat Voluntas Tua", and deals with the world even farther into the future when man is back to a technological state around where it was when the book was written back in 1959. The entire world has declared nuclear armaments illegal, but in their infinite wisdom, the government decides that since we can't have nuclear weapons on Earth, what we'll do is develop a space program so that we can build nuclear weapons in space! It's darkly funny, but at the same time quite depressing because it doesn't seem like something too far out of reach for the governments of our own Earth.
The third part of the book is definitely the best and most powerful, as it is the only one to really evoke emotions past a feeling of pity for these people who seem so ignorant of their own stupidity. While the decision by the government to create nuclear weapons in spite of the knowledge they have of the world's past is frustrating, there are events here that are downright angering. The main event I speak of is an argument between a religious man and a medic, as they try to decide the best course of action to take with a woman and her daughter who have lost their whole family, and are both in horrendous pain due to burns which will eventually kill them. The religious man believes that they should be left alone to pray and to beg God for forgiveness for the sins of their lives, so that perhaps they can earn their way into heaven when they die. The medic, however, believes the only humane thing to do is to euthanize them, sparing them from the pain and misery of their last few hours.
I have always found this issue deeply troubling, because I cannot for the life of me understand why someone - religious or not - would ever want to subject another to the pain and indignity of that much paralyzing suffering. If a person is going to die, and is in such terrible agony that they are not really "living" anyways, it should not be someone else's decision that they must simply "wait and pray", nor should they condemn that person if they decide to end their suffering. But of course this issue poses quite a slippery slope - at what point does the "cut off" occur, where one no longer qualifies for euthanasia? And since people are all different and all have differing pain thresholds, where can we draw the line and say that someone's suffering is greater than another's? I suppose that in the end this is an issue without an answer (or at least not an easy one), but I don't believe that the answer posed by religion is appropriate in any way.
While I have spent most of my time focusing on the third part of the book, I don't want to dismiss the other two. The second was the weakest for me - as many middle sections of stories often are, because they function as a transition between "beginning" and "end" - but that is not to say it is not good. The whole book is a very well written piece of philosophical, theological science fiction. But while some other readers have said they found the book to be in support of religious beliefs and of the idea of organized religion, I found it to be a scathing commentary on the "fire and brimstone" beliefs of most religious institutions.
This is why I find religions such as Buddhism or Taoism to be much more appealing than pretty much any sect of Christianity. I still consider myself an agnostic, but this book has definitely helped me to strengthen my beliefs that a religion based around a vengeful God who is so unforgiving and dismissive of anything other than His own way could not possibly be the right path to take.
