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Bokononism - All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.
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- --Bokonon
Bokononism is the fictional religion practiced by many of the characters in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle. It is based on living by the untruths that make one happy, called foma. Bokononistic sex is a union of two souls achieved by placing the soles of two people's feet together. Bokonon is the founder of the religion. He was born Lionel Boyd Johnson. "Bokonon" was the way the natives of San Lorenzo, the tropical island where the shipwrecked Johnson started his religion, pronounced his family name. The religion uses several equally fictional technical terms: - A karass is a group of people who, unbeknownst to them, are collectively doing God's will. A karass is driven forward in time and space by tension within the karass.
- A wampeter is an object which is the focus of a karass; that is, the lives of many otherwise unrelated people are centered around a wampeter (e.g., the Holy Grail). A karass will always have exactly two wampeters: one waxing, one waning. The term first appears on p. 52 of Cat's Cradle (in the 1998 printing by Dell Publishing). It is analogous to a MacGuffin.
- Foma are "harmless lies". Bokonon describes his own religion as foma, created for the purpose of bringing comfort to the people of Bokonon's island. The people of San Lorenzo live under a poverty-stricken Third World dictatorship, but thanks to the comforting untruths of Bokonon's foma they are better equipped to face reality (following Vonnegut's early theories about the true usefulness of religion).
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