I have adored the works of Anne Rice since I discovered the Vampire Chronicles series in 1991.  While I have never been interested in her works outside of the Vampire Chronicles, the New Vampire Chronicles, and the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, I have consumed the vast majority of her books, some 25 written over 25 years, that fell within these three story lines.

Sadly, Anne Rice now says she will "…write only for the Lord."  I will not indulge fanatical religious insanity by quoting any further from her post-salvation phase.  I will just say I am terribly disappointed.

While I have been a fan of her creativity for more than a decade, I fear her non-missionary works have now abruptly ended.  I also feel tremendous disappointment that she was ultimately so weak-minded that she could not resist America's largest cult.  It's disheartening.

I sympathize with her emotional disorientation following the death of Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, who died of a brain tumor in 2002.  Having shared so much of her life with him, I can only try to imagine the devastation she felt after he passed away.  This is most likely the cause of her search for meaning in life since that time.  Sadly, what she found was not meaning, and her religious epiphany sheds light on a weak-mindedness that I did not know she possessed.

Religion is for those who cannot comprehend and accept life on its own merits.  Death is a natural part of living.  We're born, we grow old, and then we die.  Why must it be more complicated than that?

Reactionary though it may seem, the need to make it more complicated is an internal defense against a perceived threat.  In Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behaviour, Desmond Morris said:

Man can contemplate his own mortality and finds the thought intolerable. Any animal will struggle to protect itself from a threat of death. Faced with a predator, it flees, hides, fights or employs some other defensive mechanism, such as death-feigning or the emission of stinking fluids. There are many self-protection mechanisms, but they all occur as a response to an immediate danger. When man contemplates his future death, it is as if, by thinking of it, he renders it immediate. His defence is to deny it. He cannot deny that his body will die and rot — the evidence is too strong for that; so he solves the problem by the invention of an immortal soul — a soul which is more “him” than even his physical body is “him.” If this soul can survive in an afterlife, then he has successfully defended himself against the threatened attack on his life. This gives the agents of the gods a powerful area of support. All they need to do is to remind their followers constantly of their mortality and to convince them that the afterlife itself is under the personal management of the particular gods they are promoting. The self-protective urges of their worshippers will do the rest.

This is what drives people to religion — the fear that they will indeed someday die and will have absolutely no ability to fight it or run from it.  Since "fight or flight" is a genetically programmed response for all living things on this planet (it's basic genetic code that was handed down to all creatures from our shared evolutionary ancestor, just like two eyes, one nose and one mouth placed in the same arrangement on our faces).  Humans automatically extend this inherent response to threats in an attempt to compensate for death, a natural progression of life that someday will be visited upon each of us.

In their feeble attempt to compensate for this perceived threat, people have invented religion to provide an answer to this unanswerable challenge against our lives.  We are unable to save our physical body from the Grim Reaper.  We cannot stop the progression of age and its ravaging of our bodies.  We cannot yet cure or prevent a great many terminal illnesses.  We can neither predict nor prevent casualty-causing accidents.  What then can we do?

We can invent a soul, and we can define that soul as being more us than we are through our literal physical existence.  We can then grant that soul an afterlife.  Through this afterlife, should we be deemed worthy, we can circumvent the death which cannot be denied by our physical self.  The need for this is oftimes reinforced by the reminder of our own mortality as embodied by the death of someone near to us.  This is precisely the trap into which Anne has fallen.

Instead of seeing the death of her husband as the natural end of a long, full and successful life, she instead sees it as a sign of her own impending doom, a reminder that she is not long for this world when interpreted in cosmological terms.  She sees it as a direct threat against her own life.  How does one respond to imminent demise?  Fight or flight.

I'm sad to see her go in this way.  I'm sad she will no longer intrigue, entertain and otherwise engage me with her fictional worlds full of interesting and revealing characters.  I'm sad this represents the end of her socially-progressive works that helped reveal the best in humanity through inhuman encounters.  I'm sad that she is yet another casualty of Christianity's war against all things secular.