Scourged (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #10)

by Kevin Hearne

You have an English word for this that escapes me now. This blending of faiths without conflict.” “Does Sifu Sun perhaps refer to religious syncretism?” “He does! I mean, I do. This might be strange to you from the West, where people think you must believe only one thing, but in the East we have no problem with this.”

I suppose what I’d really like to understand is our collective urge to focus on differences rather than similarities. I know our brains sort and categorize by default because that’s a survival mechanism—that mushroom’s good to eat, that one will kill you, that one will have you seeing wacky shit like mangoes and papayas complaining to pineapples that millennials are killing the fruit-juice industry. But despite this hardwiring, there has to be a way of thinking that will allow us to see nonlethal differences and celebrate them rather than point at them and judge them unworthy. For we seem to be ever running toward dystopias rather than the other way.

Fragile egos are at the root of almost every conflict.

The danger of growing old is growing comfortable and complacent at the same time. We should seek out the new and strange and applaud it and throw wild fecking parties whenever it walks into our lives. We should be building roads in and out of our own wee heads rather than erecting walls around them.