John Updike (1932-2009)

"At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct - a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. (...) He was standing, at the moment of the ruinous pang, on the first floor of the manse, wondering if in view of the heat he might remove his black serge jacket, since no visitor was scheduled to call until dinnertime, when the Church Building Requirements Commit- tee would arrive to torment him with its ambitions. The image of the chairman's broad, assertive face (...) slipped in Clarence's mind to the similarly pugnacious and bald-crowned visage of Robert Ingersoll, the famous atheist whose Some mistakes of Moses the minister had been reading in order to refute it for a perturbed parishioner; from this perceived similarity his thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that Ingersoll was quite right; the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entire- ly misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be."
John Updike, In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996