Abstract
“‘Might not we do without religion entirely?’” asked Kurt Vonnegut when he gave the commencement address at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1974 (Palm Sunday 181). Should we assume, simply by his raising the question, that Vonnegut believed humanity would be better off without any formal religion? If we consider that Vonnegut often claimed that he approached his work as a series of jokes, as he noted directly about Cat’s Cradle (1963), we may feel even more inclined to accept that Vonnegut wished humans would evolve toward either secularism or atheism.
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© 2009 David Simmons
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Thomas, P.L. (2009). “No Damn Cat, and No Damn Cradle”: The Fundamental Flaws in Fundamentalism according to Vonnegut. In: Simmons, D. (eds) New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100817_3
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