Lawrence Sutin is the author of A Postcard Memoir, the novel When to Go Into the Water, as well as biographies of Philip K. Dick and Aleister Crowley, a memoir of his parents' experiences in the Holocaust, and the history of Buddhism coming to the west. He teaches at Hamline University and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. What’s defunct in his life? “The confident maxim of my early schoolbooks that monotheism was a signal advance in civilization. What a fool I was, what a pup to read and believe. Now I realize that, back in the polytheistic days, peoples freely and creatively swapped and mingled gods. They killed for land, not for religion. How much land does a man need, Tolstoy asked. Less than the One True God needs say I.”