Thanksgiving - an excerpt from Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Thanksgiving

Tasks to the Text

1.

"I'm probably just as good an atheist as you are but even I feel that we all have a great deal to be thankful for and that we shouldn't be ashamed to show it."

This is an opinion of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife.

“To us of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, there is nothing more cruel, more dangerous, more blasphemous that a man can do than to believe that - that luck, good or bad, is the hand of God!”

The above quotation is from Kurt Vonnegut’s book “The Sirens of Titan”.

1.1.What is the difference between the two opinions?

1.2.What kind of people may share the first opinion?

1.3.What about the second?

1.4.Mention the most important features of these people.

2.

“That's the kind of God you people talk about”

Explain Yossarian’s opinion about God as simply as you can.

3.

“But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."

3.1.    What is the phenomenon Mrs. Scheisskopf’s words illustrate?

3.2.    How would you explain it? Which problems does it help to solve? (Formulate!)

3.3.    Find similar examples in our life. (Formulate the problems they solve)