I Am the Work

Karen Armstrong has written a number of fascinating treatises on the spiritual in human history—the nature and purpose of religion itself. In her newest she looks at how God has been changed by our modern world, and how this new God seems to serve so many people so poorly that they’ve eschewed him/her/it.
I like Karen [...]

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Here is a note I wrote to myself a few weeks back. I guess I should have put it on “I Am the Work”:
02-01-08: What is our purpose?
Continuity — to live on beyond catastrophic events and mass extinctions. To carry knowledge and experience beyond the limitations of a few generations and build as an entity. [...]

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The reason christianity and islam were both able to make such huge inroads into dominating the cultures of the world is that it’s much easier to ask large and difficult work of people who believe in an ideal, and it’s much easier to engender belief in a mystical ideal than a practical or ethical one. [...]

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I was blurbing Cormac McCarthy’s book No Country for Old Men and was impressed (not in a good way) with the idea that there really are different breeds of human, and some of them prey on the others. This isn’t completely a new idea, but I had never thought of it in terms of being [...]

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History and ancestors are the same. To learn history is to honor your ancestors; to take lessons from it is to value their contribution to humanity.

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All things are “god,” all existence, every vibrating atomic particle. We are all part of it.
Unconscious, or of a higher order that defies the concept of “conscious,” the only indivisible, undeniable god is existence itself, not as a fact but as a totality. We remain part of it, in a continuum that stretches back [...]

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I was thinking about me and Heather, whether we will grow together enough to have no division — how you can spend a lifetime unlearning the layers of social crud, trying to become again the pure soul you were to begin with — and I began thinking about arcs: from the time you can first [...]

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