David Gowey > Recent Status Updates

“Man’s ‘original sin,’ perhaps, is the plurality of equally valid rules he imposes on himself, so that whatever virtue he may display in obeying one is negated by the fact that he is in all honesty transgressing another. Original sin is perhaps not merely a mistake of logical sorting, but man’s status as an evolving life form."

“Europeans envisioned a root-and-branch transformation of indigenous culture from one based on the worship of Lord Maize Cob to one built around a god made flesh in a wheaten wafer... [T]he transformations entailed in this vision were profoundly disquieting for colonists, priests and officials alike, for they implied, ultimately, the complete elision of the very differences that separated colonizers and colonized.”