Wit & Attitude Quote by John Ralston Saul

Saul turns a supposedly cosmic question into a bureaucratic flowchart, then punctures it with a punchline. The setup offers two options that look like a respectful nod to theology: either God exists and will judge, or God doesn’t and we’re on our own. Then he springs the trap: if God is “dead,” the idea collapses under the absurdity of imagining a deity expiring like a pensioner. The crack about “old age” is doing more than joking; it’s a scalpel aimed at the lazy modern habit of treating “God is dead” as an edgy factoid rather than a metaphor for a shifting moral order.

The subtext is that the God question is often a proxy for dodging responsibility. If God is alive, we can outsource the moral accounting: he’ll “deal with us.” If God is dead, we can indulge the posture of emancipation, congratulating ourselves on our sophistication. Saul refuses both comforts. His logic compresses faith, disbelief, and nihilism into one uncomfortable point: you don’t get to use theology as cover for bad civic behavior, and you don’t get to use atheism as a victory lap.

Contextually, Saul’s broader project as a public intellectual has been to critique managerial technocracy and the hollow confidence of “rational” elites. This line fits that agenda: it exposes how big philosophical slogans become rhetorical shields in public life. The wit isn’t decorative; it’s a way of forcing the reader to notice how unserious our seriousness can be.