Wasting Food
What if the second coming was a Martian who liked free sex and free meat? Personally, I might become a believer.
In Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is a human raised on Mars, who has been taught it’s the worst kind of sacrilege not to eat the flesh of your fallen friends. It’s truly a sin to “waste food.”
In a later work, Heinlein would goof on himself about Stranger, pondering what some writers would do “for money.” But I actually think it’s quite a poignant novel that helped me to see my religious upbringing in a different light. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Stranger is my Bible, but I will say it was more fun to read, more sex, less violence, and it had Martians.
Even though all of Heinlein’s women were hot nurses, hot secretaries or hot strippers, he was quite the forward thinker. And he turned the words, “eat me,” into the greatest of compliments.
Can you grok?