Tom Pemberton a character in E. L. Doctorow's "City of God" says:

"But then I asked myself: Must faith be blind? Why must it come of people's need to believe?
We are all of us so pitiful in our desire to be unburdened, we will embrace Christianity or any other claim of God's authority for that matter.

Look around. God's authority reduces us all, wherever we are in the world, whatever our tradition, to beggarly submission" (14).

Doctorow insists that a society will be humane only if it encourages multiple interpretations of truth. "In the course of my own life I have observed that the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt," he writes, using the words he gave to Sarah in City of God

Doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grievous skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers of whatever stamp, religious or religious statist, have done the murdering. (115)