On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon

or you’ll increase his desire to take advantage of others. So what’s your ethos at that moment? It’s to reduce ugliness in the world system—by a little.
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    In one of our earlier conversations, you spoke of a time in the distant future when, after some “definitive metamorphosis of existence,” human vision would join God’s vision—perhaps—and travel across the heavens.
    When did I say that?
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    In one of our earlier conversations.
    Was that toward the end of
Ancient Evenings
or in
Of a Fire on the Moon
?
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    Elements of that were there. You were looking around the corner, so to speak; you were anticipating, rare for you, how things might possibly turn out. A “definitive metamorphosis of existence” was part of the phrase, as I recall. Human nature would shift into a completely different level; human vision would become married with God’s and, I assume, would then split off from the demonic. At that point, something would happen—we would “travel across the heavens.”
    Well, that’s apocalyptic. I do not see any way we’re going to separate drastically or quickly from the Devil as well as from God.
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    So you would not see—
    At present, I am more concerned that we do not destroy ourselves.
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    What would be the necessary conditions for this metamorphosis of existence to happen? What would human beings have to become?
    Some of it may be obvious: more and then even more self-awareness. More freedom from Fundamentalism. More readiness for humans to accept the heroic demand that they stop leaning on God, stop relying on God, and start realizing that God’s needs could be greater than ours, God’s woes more profound than our own. God’s sense of failure may be so deep as to mock our sense of failure. God, I believe, is, at present, far from fulfilling His own vision. He is mired in our corporate promotions all over the globe, our superhighways, our plastic, our threats of nuclear warfare, our heartless, arrogant, ethnic wars, our terrorism, our spread of pollution all over His environment. How can God’s sorrow not be immeasurably greater than ours?
    Before we can approach any thoughts of apocalypse, we have to become human enough, brave enough, to recognize that we cannot rely on God. Rely too much on God, and we are comparable to a tremendously selfish child who drives a parent into exhaustion, deadens the parent through endless demands. “Save me! God, please, can I have that beautiful dress I want for the high school prom? Thank you, God, deliver it to me, God.”
[Pause]
“If you don’t, God, I’ll be angry at you,” is the underlying element in so many of the prayers. Or the abject beseechment—“God, have pity on me, I’m a poor worm.”
    I think we become a hint more heroic if we recognize that we do have to stand on our own. So I can feel a certain respect for atheists. I have huge disagreements with them—the first might be the absolute refusal of a majority to consider the notion of karma for even a moment. Or any kind of Hereafter—their determined intensity that there will be nothing after life. This creates its own sort of trouble. It fortifies the liberal notions that we have to take care of people we know nothing about and enter strange countries and provide them with democracy, whether they desire it or not. Needless to say, Christians have been doing the same for a long time.
    I have a tremendous distrust of what people think is the good. At any given moment, 90 percent of that is fashion. The war in Iraq is a perfect example of fashion—the bright idea that we are there to inject democracy into any country that needs it. That was a political fashion; it had no real basis in political reality. Of