It is one of the worst feelings in the world when you say something you have seen or lived and people will simply refuse to believe you. You can even give your word of honor and try to convince in many ways that person but if he simply refuses he won't believe you. A similar thing happened to Billy. Vonnegut says: "It was now that Billy Pilgrim spoke up intelligently. 'I was there,' he said" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 191). He was talking to Rumfoord who was an expert in the subject and of course he did not believe Billy because he thought he was crazy. Sometimes people will not believe what they are told until they live it with their own flesh and see it with their own eyes. This reminds me of the story from the Bible where an apostle did not believe that Jesus had resurrected. All the other apostles had seen Jesus and were telling him that they saw him but he still did not believe. In the end Jesus did resurrect and that apostle was proven. The same thing happens in Billy Pilgrim's case where Rumfoord finally accepts that there is someone superior to him in that subject and reluctantly hears what Billy has to say. To believe is to think that something does exist without any proof of it. I have never seen a person that has believed that things that people say are true because we live in a world of lies. In the world in which we live in people bias information and manipulate it to fit their goals so therefore we can't trust everything people say. I really would admire a person who would be so trusting in a person to believe everything they tell you. Personally I need a kind of proof to believe in something except when it comes to religion. God or other gods is one thing that you can't question in a human being because they will always have the belief in a superior force that has the power to determine things that we humans are not able to do.
This chapter also had two other mentions of God. One of them was when Vonnegut wrote: "Billy cried very little, though he often saw things worth crying about, and in that respect, at least, he resembled the Christ of the carol" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 197). God is symbolized in this part of the book because it was the only time Billy cried in all the war and it was when he saw the state in which the horses were. A horse is a symbol for nature and God is the creator of all nature so it symbolizes that Billy realized all the nature destroyed during the war. Billy did not cry during the killings of his companions or the tortures they made to some during the war but did cry when he saw a horse bleeding. This shows that sometimes the simplest things in the world can have a lot of value to people but in this case it is like the key that opened up the hardened heart of Billy during the war. Vonnegut might have included this part of love of nature to symbolize that we still depend on nature and that we may think that as humans we have more power than God and nature but we are wrong. We will always depend on the resources nature provides to us and without nature we will die. Billy also depends on nature after war when he has to be carried by the two horses in the wagon. The other part that referred to God was when in the locket of Montana Wildhack these words were inscribed: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference" (Slaughterhouse-five pg 209). This is one of the quotations I liked most about this book and can really be used in real life. If you are not able to change things you simply will not be able to change them so it is better to live with it and learn to like it than to fight with it eternally. Courage is one of the most important qualities a person can have because it means that that person has the will and the intention to be able to make the world a better place. The last part of it is the most important part because it is the power that God gave us to know the difference between good and wrong.
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