Sometimes you get the
neatest quotes from the fertile minds of the writers of crime fiction:
“It’s pretty arrogant,
calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that
Christians couldn’t see it themselves, they didn’t see the mechanism, the
regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a
superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which
the key — salvation — was restricted to those who were fortunate
enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink in the eye
of human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the
planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an
opinion about the concise sales pitch (‘paradise?’).”
Nesbo’s character is
wrong about two huge truths here, and both are worth thinking about.