Now that we have, in addition to acquiring our basic tools, given consideration to designing our garden to fit the landscape, it is time to decide on the details of our garden. Dropping the garden metaphor momentarily again, we must find a case to plead or pick a topic to discuss, and start getting our hands dirty. Now the first rule in writing is "write about what you know"; and this sounds like good advice. But is it, really? I mean, if all that we wish to accomplish is merely to persuade, then it seems that as long as we can do this we needn't be truly informed of our topic.
A good example of this is religion. I think it is safe to say that, the truth be told, there has probably never been a single human being who really knew anything about God! I mean, think about it: if God really does exist, it is probably in such a manner as to be totally beyond the human comprehension, a comprehension that certainly is feeble in comparison to the grandeur of our definition of God. Albeit, this has not stopped hundreds of writers, myself included, from spouting countless pages of rhetoric about God. What audacity we humans have!
And yet, to tell by all the people who have believed (often only on the testimony of these prophets), many religious authors have been convincing; and this despite the fact that some fairly outrageous claims have been made by many of these authors. Among these claims, perhaps the most outrageous is the often implicit assumption that God is a male! Now, considering the means by which we determine someone's sex, it's a perfectly safe bet that no one has ever checked this assumption against the evidence. And it seems fairly obvious that there can be no evidence! Of course, I could be wrong. It used to be believed, by the Egyptians for instance, that the Sun and Moon were God's two eyeballs;²³ and it is possible, I suppose, that these two spheroids are in fact a different part of God's anatomy; one that might prove His sex; but more than likely this is not the case. What is more likely, however, as Protogoras was man enough to admit,²⁴ is that no evidence exists to tell us anything whatsoever about God's sex. Nevertheless, this has not stopped some people from writing persuasively upon a topic about which, ultimately, we know nothing.