If you hadn't noticed, I'm the pub loony around here. This is my turf, and if there's any gibbering to be done, I'm the one who does it. If you want … - Tom Holt

I started from the premise, which sort of came with the brief, that priests and religion are full of shit; from there it followed naturally that the morality they espouse must be false or faulty. Having established the side I was on, I looked around for arguments to support it. I found they came quite easily to me. I started with various inconsistencies in religious doctrine, and found that they derived from compromises made by long-ago ecumenical councils to reconcile violent political disputes within the clerical hierarchy. I argued, if the priests make up bits of doctrine to suit themselves, maybe they made up the whole thing. From there it was no big deal to demonstrate that they’d done exactly that. The Book as we know it proved to be not a monolithic and unambiguous record of the word of the Invincible Sun, but rather a negotiated construct, patched together from four or five sources, revised and edited and redacted by generations of scholars, some of whom belonged to such and such a sect or interest group, others of whom supported diametrically opposite positions or interests. It was no bother at all to show that the Book was a political object with no real credibility. And once you’ve knocked out the Book, you’ve dealt religion a blow from which it can never recover.

Our lot may be all-seeing and all-knowing, but that’s a long way removed from all-understanding.

There is no word for artist in the Mysian language; instead there’s a long-winded periphrasis that translates as man-who-deceives-others-into-giving-food-by-spoiling-bits-of-wood.