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It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.
Behind the Sphinx, on the wall of the plateau above the Valley of the Time Tombs, an impossible tree shimmered into existence, its huge trunk and sharp steel branches rising into the glowing clouds and above.
in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith—true faith—was trusting in that love.
The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.
“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
“Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other? Neither part of the symbiote can now tell.
if only you knew! We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides.
In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.
“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”
“Old Chinese curse,” he said. “May you live in interesting times.”
Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.
Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do.
