The Voices of Heaven Read Online Free

particular hell of a crazyhouse you come out of it one of two ways—either you'll believe with all your heart in anything that sounds as though it gives you some kind of hope, or you won't believe in anything at all. I went the second way. I suppose I was helped in that direction by my main therapist, Dr. Schneyman, who was unregistered himself. (He liked to quote some old guy named Benjamin Franklin, who said, "In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it.") By the time they decided I could be allowed to go out into the world again I'd lost a lot of things. My religious belief was only one of them.
    Of course, you run into a lot of practical problems if you're not registered to some recognized religious denomination—like not having anyone to vote for, for instance. So when I came to start a new life on the Moon I let myself be registered as Orthodox, meaning what they used to call "Easter Duty Orthodox." What that means is that I went to mass on the main church holidays, sometimes—if I happened to think of it at the right time and if I couldn't remember any really private recent sins that I would be embarrassed to have to confess to.
     
    That brings us to the other part of your question, which is harder. There's no way I could name all the human religions for you. There are too many of them. There are maybe fifteen or twenty main groups, and all kinds of denominations within each group.
    You could start out with the Christians, which is what I more or less was. There are two main classes of Christians: There's the Protestants, which includes the Pentecostals and the Baptists and the Fundamentalists and about forty others, most of them divided into eight or ten different sects, including the Millenarists (like Captain Tscharka) and the four or five varieties of Quakers and Old Believers and Amish and Universalists and so on. Then there's the Orthodox wing of Christianity. The Orthodox have the two big sects, Western and Roman, but there are maybe twenty littler ones there, too, like the Lifers, the True-Lifers and the patriarchates. And somewhere or other you have to put in the Christians that aren't either one or the other, like the Gnostics and Mormons and so on.
    Then we get to the non-Christians, starting with the Jews—I think there are at least fifteen or twenty different varieties of those, ranging from Hassidim (including the Lubavitchers) and the Templars to the Church of Jewish Science—and to Islam, with its three major branches, Shi'ite, Suni and Reformed, and maybe half a dozen divisions of each. Then there are the Eastern religions and the African ones—I don't even remember the names of most of those, apart from Tao, Shinto and Kwanzaa and a few others like Buddhism (both Orthodox and Soka Gakkai) and Ryuho Okawa Happy Science. Most of those don't do much proselytizing, so they're pretty well confined to where they started—where, I guess, they have enough problems to keep themselves occupied. Still, they elect enough Congresspeople to be an important swing vote sometimes.
    Finally we wind up with the exotics—different kinds of Rosicrucians, Spiritualists, Scientologists, Reincarnationists, Astrologists and so on—and the ancient revivals—Druids, Olympians, snake-handlers, Osiris people, Wiccans, Odinists, Pyramiders, Zoroastians, Thugs and about a million others, right down to the devotees of the Karnut Temple Rat Cult. Of course, on the Moon some of the weirder denominations are out of luck (due, for instance, to a local shortage of snakes or rats), and others are hampered because it's against the law to practice some of their commandments. (Like the ZPG-Thugs. Their mixture of Zero Population Growth and Thuggee still has some churches in California, but you never see them on the Moon.) They all get along, more or less. The only sect that I remember making any real trouble in the lunar Lederman colony were the Odinists. That happened when an opera troupe doing