"Because why, Daddy? Why are we polytheists?" she asks, scarlet juice running down her chin.

"Just because," I respond, skeptical that a three-year-old can understand our belief in a plurality of personified gods and goddesses.

To my wife and me, the world makes sense only when one accepts the existence of a dysfunctional family of gods and goddesses. The only possible explanation for any of this madness is the extremely maladroit meddling of extremely fallible gods.

Let's take something as banal as a pilonidal cyst. Now, most monotheists believe that God is very hands-on. A micromanager. So they believe that he's aware of — if not directly responsible for — every single pilonidal cyst on every human being now, throughout history, and into the infinite future. This obviously makes no sense. Just do a quick risk-and-benefit analysis. A pilonidal cyst does you no good, and it does God no good. But let's say Apollo is horsing around with his friends and he accidentally slays this nymph with a discus, and this nymph happens to be someone Zeus was hot for, so Zeus is pissed and he gets Hephaestus to shackle Apollo's son Asclepius to a cliff for a while, but now Hera feels sorry for Asclepius, so she gets Ares to set him free, and now Hephaestus is furious because he despises Ares, who once had an affair with his wife, Aphrodite, so Hephaestus gets Piloneus, this subsidiary deity in charge of cysts, boils, and carbuncles, to give you a nice big pilonidal cyst. Why you? Because back when you were in college — y'know, experimenting with all kinds of things — you once prepared a sacred hecatomb to Ares. See, if you think of your pilonidal cyst as the result of a whole nexus of petty divine vendettas that devolved down to you, it makes perfect logical sense.

Mark Leyner, Choosin' My Religion
Published in the Wild Kingdom column of Esquire magazine, December 1996
Copyright © 1996 by The Hearst Corporation. All rights reserved.

Posted 16 November 1996

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