The idea is for the religion and the government to constantly oppose each other, with Bokonon the saintly outlaw hiding in the woods. By this entire scheme Vonnegut makes the point that religion is formed out of lies in order to make the lives of the people living by the religion bearable. The cat's cradle relates to this because that is what a cat's cradle is, a game of nothing or emptiness between thin string. Newt Hoenikker says directly that:.

             "No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing by but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's.

             "And?".

             "No damn cat, and no damn cradle." (C.C. 114).

             The homegrown religion, Bokonism, is symbolically full of cat's cradles. Two such examples are the karass and the granfalloon, each of them an organization of people. The karass is God's grouping of people to move society; this grouping is a cat's cradle because it is pointless to try to discern who is in your karass and who is not, resulting in emptiness. Granfalloons are groups set up by mankind to try and add importance to the relationships between people, but these are groupings of people who are falsely set together by man, thus also resulting in emptiness. .

             Newt, in the story, is introduced to the game by his father, Felix Hoenikker, when he held the strings in front of Newt's face. This parallels religion because God is a concept passed down to each generation by the adults and parents of the world who were themselves force fed religion. Newt responds with terror and runs away, becoming an indication of what Vonnegut suggests people should do when faced with the empty and pointless games of the traditional world. John Simons points out, in his critical essay on the book, that this not only forced Newt to run in terror, but it also scarred his life forever, forcing him to paint dark pictures of the string figure to purge his troubled mind (Simons 97).