"“I really couldn’t see the point of the whole business, to tell you the truth. Shouting, smiting, getting angry all the time...don’t think anyone was getting anything out of it, really. But the worst part...You know the worst part? The worst part was that if you actually stopped the smiting, people wandered off and worshipped someone else. Hard to believe, isn’t it? They’d say things like, ‘Things were a lot better when there was more smiting,’ and ‘If there was more smiting, it’d be a lot safer to walk the streets.’ Especially since all that’d really happened was that some poor shepherd who just happened to be in the wrong place during a thunderstorm had caught a stray bolt. And then the priests would say, ‘Well, we all know about shepherds, don’t we, and now the gods are angry and we could do with a much bigger temple, thank you.” “Typical priestly behavior,” sniffed the Dean. “But they often believed it!” the god almost wailed. “It was really so depressing. I think that before we made humanity, we broke the mold. There’d be a bad weather front, a few silly shepherds would happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and next thing you know it was standing room only on the sacrificial stones and you couldn’t see for the smoke.” (pp. 163-164)"