What if Judas didn't do it?

[Belacqua]

use reason

This is the part that seems surprisingly hard for some people. 

I once had a conversation with a rich and successful computer scientist who said he couldn't read the Bible or novels because there was no "reliable algorithm" for determining which sentence is a metaphor and what a symbol might refer to. I actually backed off talking to him because I thought he might be genuinely autistic. 

Another woman told me that she'd read a page or two of James Joyce in high school, decided it was "horrible," and never tried again. The idea that maybe a book isn't accessible to someone in high school, that you might have to make an effort to discover qualities that aren't obvious to a 16-year-old, hadn't occurred to her. If there are serious people who know a hell of a lot about literature and devote years of their lives to James Joyce, it might serve as a hint that there is something worthwhile there. Not that dissenting opinions aren't possible, but that one should remain skeptical of one's own first impressions. 

Likewise the fact that reading the Bible demands an engagement that's different from reading TV Guide seems lost on some people.