Every time someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say Amen - that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we're still praying to their gods.

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood.

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received.

I wondered if I might not be in the grip of demons, if they were not making me suffer for their own purposes, or simply for their enjoyment.

Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might even be more than life and death. It might be a struggle for my soul, my essence, or whatever part of me might have reference to the eternal. There are worse things than death, I suspected... so far the word demon had never been spoken among the scientists and doctors who were working with me...Alone at night I worried about the legendary cunning of demons ...At the very least I was going stark, raving mad.

In a reality made of energy, thoughts may literally be things. What if it was intended that we create our own realities after death?