Pratchett's fiction is extraordinarily rich in allusion, incident, and ideas, and thus offers innumerable starting points for discussion. It would be both challenging and instructive to try to get past the jokes and identify the few principles in which Pratchett unequivocally believes. There is some danger of heated disagreements, in view of the subject matter and Pratchett's irreverence, but it is by no means necessary to confine the discussion to religion, since the book also has interesting things to say about politics and technology, to name only two alternatives.

1. What is the point of the mostrepeated line in the novel: "There's very good eating on one of these, you know"?

2. Commenting on Omnia's version of the Inquisition, Pratchett observes: "there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man." Are we to take this comment...