The following passage is taken from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. English translation copyright ©1984 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. You should buy this book!
Did you read part I?
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When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children
and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a
cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to
myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines.
But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a
family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine
to be sacrilegious.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the
incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of
Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God's image. Either/or:
either man was created in God's image -- and God has intestines! -- or God lacks
intestines and man is not like Him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century,
the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming
that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate."
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man
freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's
crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the
Creator of Man.
PROCEED TO PART III
