Circle V
Overview

Dante and Virgil come to the river Styx, and there they meet the boatman Phlegyas. This poor fellow was sentenced to eternal torment in Hades by the god Apollo for setting fire to his temple. (Why did Phlegyas do such a reckless thing? Because Apollo raped his daughter.) The Styx and its marshes comprise the Fifth Circle, a place for the Wrathful and the Sullen.
MainMap
The Book
"… a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy time seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!…"
The Mysterious Stranger is a short work, but in it you will feel a lifetime of the great man's anger, frustration, and contempt for so much baloney (baloney that was taken even more seriously in Twain's day than it is in ours). This story belongs in the same class as Voltaire's Candide and Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan as the best of the fictional attacks on traditional beliefs.
My Fifth Circle is also set in the river Styx, which I've dotted with an archipelago of islands. Users of different types of Fallacies of Acceptability inhabit different islands, and some inhabit the waters of river itself. The origin of the islands is discussed in the book.

Since the Styx is the principal river in Hell, I thought it fitting to put some of Twain's river characters in there, namely, the "Duke" and the "King" from Huckleberry Finn. In some ways they deserve placement in the Seventh Circle, since they were primarily conmen, but I needed someone to do the ferrying.

Comments

Hemmingway once said that American literature really starts with Huck Finn, and many writers and readers would agree. Unfortunately, some of Twain's finest works remain relatively unknown, undoubtedly because of their irreligious and sarcastic themes. The best of these are Letters From Earth and The Mysterious Stranger, the latter of which I will review briefly here.

The Mysterious Stranger was published posthumously in 1916 and is not going to be on any of the official reading lists of the various public schools named in honor of Twain. It is an absolutely hilarious and caustic little book that will be of interest to anyone suspicious of religion in general. For nontheists that have grown accustomed to the standard academic treatments of the reasons for rejecting belief, as well-written as many have been of late, this book provides a fresh perspective and change of pace. The force of the satire that this irreverent, scathing genius brings down upon the entire Christian conception of God and Moral Sense is really something to behold.

In late sixteenth century Austria, a group of boys meet an angel that has appeared one day. The angel's name is Satan (no, not THE Satan, merely his cousin, hence the same family name). Satan gives them an education, both through words and deeds, about some Ultimate Truths. Here's a brief excerpt of his conclusions about God Himself: