Although not a religious person I am a dedicated reader of religious materials. Perhaps my favorite pocket reading material is Our Daily Bread published by RBC Ministries.

As most of my readers and associates are intelligent people with a tendency towards atheism I try and point them to the value of reading religious texts, particularly as a means of pluming the nature and evolution of the human condition.

For instance, about 200 of my regular readers are active or aspiring writers. One of the greatest mistakes a writer of historical or speculative fiction can make is to assume that other peoples have had and will share our liberal rationalistic worldview. This brief guide to prayer, reflection and contemplation by Dennis Fisher is an excellent example.

Dennis cites the case of Boethius, a ‘highly skilled politician’ of sixth-century Italy, which basically means he was the equivalent of a mafia counselor [Robert Duvall from the God Father] or presidential advisor. Boethius was eventually imprisoned, which gave him time to turn his scheming mind toward contemplation of the human condition—like an imprisoned lawyer taking up Zen. Boethius eventually learned to find contentment within even as the evil world devoured his social and physical being, gaining for him a kind of immortality, as we consider him now, 1,500 years later.

Mister Fisher links this to biblical passages and a hymn, which is the standard trope with this publication, and further lets the secular thinker consider the religious frame of mind, and how constants of mental reclusion emerge over the centuries. This also provides a fragmentary historic record. Perhaps you are writing a time-travel novel and would like to find an obscure 6th Century person to interact with your time-traveler?

The bigger point here is the value of pointing out the continuity of the life of the human mind, even as it crosses the vast conceptual space between theism and atheism. Do not think, even if you are a modern secular rationalist, that you do not have something in common with Boethius or nothing to learn from his experience.

The most tortured people I know are highly intelligent socially heretical atheists and agnostics who never know a moment’s peace as they are at odds with what they see as an evil world which assails them. Such people sit in the modern virtual equivalent of Boethius’ cell, behind this screen rather than behind bars.

Then there is the life of the mind to consider—the escape from that cell, currently used by dissident thinkers and speculative authors to escape the grinding materialism and politically correct conformity of our time. As we think our way around and through the ethical dilemma of making our way in an unjust coercive world recall that the modern corollary to the medieval monastic mind exemplified by Boethius are our own anarchist and right wing social heretics such Junger, Donovan, Molyneux and Nowicki who consider life from a ‘cell’ no less comprehensive than that dungeon wherein Boethius rotted, with the same ages old means of making themselves known to the world; the written word.

I highly recommend to my non-theistic readers that they take up a copy of Our Daily Bread—mine was given to me by a street corner missionary, who asked nothing in return—not as an example of a brain-washing matrix used to fuel crusades and jihads [for all things are co-opted by the predatory State], but for what mystical religiosity originally was, an alternative mental construct to the smelly blood-drenched game of chess that was and is politics, secular and otherwise.