Matthew “Witch Finder” Hopkins, 1647, read as a ManyBooks.net publication of a Project Gutenberg text.

A little too scary for Halloween, this short missive is the earliest FAQ I’m aware of. But it’s chilling — it’s a series of answered questions justifying the author’s methodology for identifying witches.

The answers, and their oh-so-reasonable tone, are completely unbelievable. They didn’t use sleep deprivations on the suspects — the suspects refused to sleep, for fear that their familiars would visit. Hopkins didn’t accuse women based upon marks such as moles, “devil’s teats,” or other “unnatural” markings — it was a committee of learned people who could differentiate between the natural and unnatural. And they didn’t drown witches — the waters would reject a witch just as a witch would reject baptism.

He goes on in this vein, and each answer is more depressing and disturbing than the last.

It’s a potent reminder that people will do terrible things for power or money, and attribute their motives to religion.

Rohinton Mistry, McClelland and Stewart, 1995.

Looks like I’m keeping to the theme of literature about grief, suffering, religious violence, and terrible situations here.

A Fine Balance is the interwoven story of four major characters and a handful of secondary characters, all trying to survive in an unnamed city that is almost certainly Mumbai. These characters, a widow trying to live an independent life in the city, a college student who pines for his home and life in a Himalayan hill station, and two chamaar “untouchable” villagers who have become tailors, all end up living together for a brief time in an apartment in the city against the backdrop of military law.

Mistry is a very good writer, and he creates an engaging storyline that shows the continuous struggles of life in India, whether an internal struggle (as in the case of Maneck), a financial struggle (Dina), or a struggle with roles dictated by tradition (Dina, Ishvar, and Om). The struggles continue in the face of overwhelming bureaucratic apathy, caste warfare, exploitive companions, official corruption, grinding poverty, religious conflict, and common thugs — yet, the continuation of the struggle is fueled by the will to survive, all-too-rare acts of kindness, and the finest gossamer strands of hope.

My only criticism would be that the various plots of the book revolve around a large number of improbable coincidences involving meetings of people. In a country of a billion people, having the same few individuals repeatedly running into one another in disparate locations felt a little forced. Obviously, fiction is fiction, and Mistry is interested in making some strong points about power, corruption, cruelty, and kindness, and by giving us characters we know, the situations gain that much more power. Still, he manages with a remarkably light touch in places (the Sikh cab driver when Maneck returns, for example), where we feel an individual’s plight when we scarcely know a thing about them. This is especially true in contrast to the many appearances and reappearances of Rajaram the hair-collector or the Monkey Man.

Erin Vincent, Delacort Press, 2007.

Say you’re fourteen years old, and your parents are involved in an accident. Your mother is killed instantly, and your father is severely injured. A month later, your father succumbs to his injuries. You, your older sister, and your toddler brother, now need to strike out on your own. Along the way, you deal with unsympathetic family friends, thieving relatives, insensitive news reporters, nattering classmates, questionable school counselors, predators of many stripes, and, thankfully, a few helpful friends and neighbors.

Vincent writes her true story in the frank, direct voice of her fourteen year old self. She not only describes her navigation of the emotional rapids, but also gives honest voice to the thoughts and feelings that one is not “supposed” to have. She includes enough humor to get the reader through the experience, although she made me cry several times before she was done.

Unlike most books billed as “uplifting,” Vincent’s doesn’t end with a triumphant epiphany, or a blazing message of hope for all humanity. There is a accomplishment, a victory of sorts, but it’s a much shakier, more human: an emerging-from-the-crucible kind of victory. There really is a message of hope for humanity there, but it’s not writ large, nor accompanied by the swelling of the orchestra. The message is much quieter. People experience terrible things. And people can, and do survive them, but it’s not easy and there are no guarantees.

P. H. Ditchfield, 1894, read as an e-book from manybooks.com

This litany of imprisoned, tortured, condemned, burnt, exiled, hounded, bankrupted, beaten, abused, reviled, and otherwise rejected authors is a fitting followup to god is not Great. While Ditchfield gave brief histories of authors doomed for their writings in a range of fields (which he groups as Theology; Fanatics and Free Thinkers; Astrology, Alchemy, and Magic; Science and Philosophy; History, Politics and Statesmanship; and Satire), the majority in all of these categories were condemned for ostensible violations of theological dogma. Some of these theological associations are pretty tenuous — for example, Ditchfield references “a recondite treatise on Trigonometry” that was condemned “because they imagined it contained heretical opinions concerning the doctrine of the Trinity.”

Ditchfield repeatedly waxes poetic on the plight of the writer, who nobly labors to share intellectual riches with a world that responds with scorn and violence. I can’t find much information about Ditchfield himself, other than that he was a prolific English writer and the Rector of Barkham Antiquary. His biases come through when he writes of critics, who hound poor authors to death. With regard to religion, he tries to maintain neutrality, but can’t help but chide some authors for their theological errors.

Even if the “fatal” of the title is not necessarily our modern usage of “leading to death,” reading this gives me renewed appreciation for where and when and how I live. I don’t have to think twice if I choose to blaspheme, criticize my government, or even write about trigonometry.

Christopher Hitchens, Twelve Books, 2007

Reading this book is kind of like coming into your first freshman seminar class where you are harangued by an extremely well-read and well-educated but overbearing, bullying, and quite possibly drunk professor. It’s intimidating, impressive, and, dare I say? amusing.

From the title on, Hitchens flaunts his disdain for religion. He offers up example after example of the philosophical contradictions of various religions, skewers beliefs by pointing out logical flaws, and condemns faith by describing crimes of organized religion. Hitchens spends most of his time on “the big three” of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but he is ecumenical in the contempt he heaps on other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism in the little time he devotes to them. He comes up swinging, winding up with a call for a new Era of Enlightenment, one without religion.

I can’t help but feel ambivalence. Yes, religious fanatics the world over are trying to create their own respective theocracies and suppress everything but their own threads of belief. I can oppose this without reservation. Yes, many of these same fanatics are ignorant, and don’t know much about their own religions. Attacking some of these people (like the kind who say “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me”) is shooting fish in a barrel, and doesn’t do anyone any good. The deeply faithful admire the believers for their faith, ignore their flaws, and take umbrage at the attack, while the nonbelievers already think of them as asinine idiots.

However, in what I feel is the weakest part of the book, Hitchens defends atheism from responsibility in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Nazi Germany by casting the personality cults as religions, and, in the case of Germany, by showing how religious groups lent early and vital support to the fascists. It comes off as awfully glib. Furthermore, it seems to me that the evidence supports the idea that religion is not the problem, but that the sins of religion are symptom of a deeper pathology. The universality of the crimes suggests that the accumulation and abuse of power is hard-wired in (at least a portion of) humanity. Religion is a useful tool to incite believers into evil behavior, but tribalism, nationalism, racism, or countless other means of division have done just as well.

As a devout and pious member of the Church of Sacred Doubt, I found some of the attacks on religion appropriate, I found some of them gratuitous, and I found many of them engaging. While the book could be dismissed as an atheist preaching to the choir, it is definitely thought-provoking, and, if nothing else, entertaining.