"Uh. God wrote a book? Called The Bible. Everyone's supposed to interpret it for themselves."

:Although of course if you interpret it for yourself in a way the Gileadites don't like you'll regret it.:

"Oh. Why did you not say that immediately?"

"Having some context of the broad story of salvation can make the Bible easier to understand and interpret."

:Because it's thousands of pages long and an appalling percentage of it is devoted to genealogies and instructions for the treatment of leprosy.:

"I see." :I...was not sure what to expect a book literally written by God to be like, but not that: 

Leareth is trying to figure out if there are inferences to be made about this God's goals from His interest in...geneologies, and leprosy? While mysteriously glue-headed is probably not the best time to try to analyze a god's psychology. 

:There are also poetic bits.:

Lev's surface thoughts are a jumble of memorized Bible verses. Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. Test all things; hold fast to what is good. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path. For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that it may be saved. And there are images-- of a shepherd hunting endlessly for his lost sheep, a father rejoicing at the return of his long-lost child, a man helping a stranger at the side of the road.

:Your God cares a shocking amount about marriage: Leareth sends. :The rest... Yes, I suppose that is more how I expect a deity to communicate:

Privately, he’s thinking that this is a God with an incredible level of ego. A weakness that can be exploited, maybe?

:Not... as much as you might think? Those are the verses I happened to memorize because I'm same-sex attracted.:

Surface thoughts: OVERWHELMING SHAME.

:Oh: 

That...makes sense of a number of small notes of confusion - in particular, all the thoughts that cut off into NO.

He really ought to say something, he disapproves of shame existing as an emotion and he especially dislikes picking it up from Lev. He’s not at his most eloquent right now, though, and he’s...still trying to catch up with the fact that those mystifying cut-off thoughts were mostly about him.

:Needless to say: he sends, :I think that your God forfeited any right to have sane people care what He values when He decided to create an entire torture realm for people who do not love Him fervently enough. Can we agree on that?:

:He still made us. It's not... good to ignore the user manual for being a human, even if the person who created it was a torturer.:

When will this conversation be over.

Leareth can make the conversation be over now. They’re nearly back to Lev’s house, anyway.

Leareth has a feeling he failed to handle that especially well, but he doubts any additional attempts will improve it.

Lev's surface thoughts are all SHAME, SHAME, HUMILIATION AND SHAME as he shows Leareth where the bed is.

(The bed is somewhat absurdly soft.)

Leareth is so, so poorly equipped for being reassuring about this. He...doesn’t understand shame, as an emotion. It seem so unhelpful and pointless to him.

He’s pretty sure that telling Lev ‘I think your emotions are stupid’ will not make anything better.

He...can go to sleep and give Lev some space to process without Leareth watching his brain. That’s probably the respectful thing to do here.

Lev does not actually process in any sort of useful way.

He does buy Leareth his own clothes, get himself an air mattress, and leave the Bible, the Moody Bible Commentary, An Introduction to the Christian Faith, and Mere Christianity by his bedside table.

Leareth wakes up a number of hours later, and finds himself alone in the bedroom. With books!

Remembering Lev’s comments on the Bible’s length and dry content, he decides to start with Mere Christianity. (He wonders briefly how it works that he can read the written language of Lev’s world without difficulty. It’s probably some sort of world-shifting-magic thing, and is one of the less interesting parts of the current situation, so he sets it aside.)

Before he starts to read, he discreetly Reaches out to see if Lev is nearby, and if the content of his surface thoughts is still OVERWHELMING SHAME.

The contents of Lev's surface thoughts are about whether you get better results if you have spiders crawl on arachnophobes regularly or instead conspicuously don't show them spiders, and if it's the second thing whether you should additionally roll a cart of spiders past them occasionally while talking about how you're going to be putting them on someone else.

...At least it’s different than before? Leareth decides that reading the book is easier than trying to trace down exactly what kind of ‘better results’ Lev is hoping to obtain via strategic deployment of spiders.

The first section of the book explains that everyone in every culture agrees that there are certain moral laws that go beyond arbitrary opinion. These moral laws could only come from God, who created humanity and put it in them. But this creates a problem, because everyone has failed the moral law, and perfect justice can't make an exception for one person. We certainly wouldn't want it to make an exception for other people!

Leareth does not think this is at all an obvious argument. Certain ethical principles are agreed-upon as more than arbitrary opinion because they are consistent - because they involve treating all beings with minds and preferences with equal value. Isn’t that all you need? 

He considers this sufficiently self-evident that it’s hard to even figure out where he disagrees with the book’s premise.

He’s also confused by the claim that everyone has failed the moral law. This seems like a maladaptive way for morality to be set up even if, in this world, it somehow was metaphysically created by God. Maybe the book will explain more clearly if he keeps reading.

The book considers "everyone has failed the moral law" to be extremely obvious and does not elaborate on it.

The next section discusses the identity of God. Some people believe God is the universe, but this seems incorrect, because the universe is obviously not perfectly good. Other people believe God is separate from the universe. Some of the people who think God is separate from the universe believe evil is just as powerful as good, but this seems wrong, because evil is clearly just spoiled good. Christianity is clearly correct because it is the only religion that is right about both of those things about God. It is hard to imagine why an all-good God would make such a fundamentally broken universe, but the answer is free will. God has to let people choose to make mistakes, because if you can't make mistakes, then you can't actually become a good person. At the end of the section, Jesus Christ is introduced. The book believes that the only way to be truly virtuous is to worship Jesus Christ. 

The book makes a large number of assertions that it seems to consider very obvious, but which are not at all self-evident to Leareth. In particular, he can’t figure out how worshipping this ‘Jesus Christ’ is supposed to, by definition, result in behaving in more virtuous ways. There must be some additional cultural gulf that he’s still missing.

(Leareth also hates the concept of ‘virtue’ in general, but that’s really a separate disagreement.)

He considers trying the primary source material, the Bible itself, but decides to put on the clothes left out for him and go find Lev instead. 

Lev is surrounded by papers. It looks something like a tornado swept through a library.

(Most of his house gives you that impression, actually.)

He's progressed to writing a letter about how they should really let him do randomized controlled trials of, for example, what the best way to torture people with their phobias is. It has the potential to contribute greatly to science and he'd be a lot better at torturing people if they let him.

Leareth clears his throat. “Good morning - is it morning? I read this book and I have questions. What are you working on?” 

(He can see what Lev is working on, from the splayed papers and surface thoughts; the actual question he wants answered is why.)

Blink blink. 

"--Sorry. I'm doing my job."

“I see.” He switches to Mindspeech. :I assume you need to keep performing your role to avoid suspicion. Unless you would prefer to simply disappear now, that is. My magical reserves are sufficiently recovered that I am confident I can keep both of us undercover:

(This is what Leareth has gathered to date: Lev’s professional role involves...understanding minds, in order for the ‘Eyes’ of the authoritarian government to use more effective torture. It’s actually a clever idea; it probably stabilizes their power over the nation. Lev finds his job intellectually interesting. Lev, however, does not like torture or people suffering. He avoids thinking about it and when he does think about it the flinches are obvious. Leareth knows that he doesn’t fully understand Lev, but his current theory is that Lev has believed he is powerless - against the government or God - for a long time, and so is resigned to it. Leareth wonders if he’s open to changing his stance on this, now that he has a new ally and resource on his side.)

:Having contacts in the Eyes seems extremely useful to your plans. I don't know how we'd get money unless we ran to Cascadia:

Lev is vaguely concerned about all the sex trafficking and murder in Cascadia, and has vague mental images of people having sex in public next to redwoods and eating their pets and similar uncomfortable behavior.