Pursuant to my last post, I have to share this quote from T. H. Mitchells essay on the nature of of the judeo-christian definition of ‘god’…
This is from Carl Sagan’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” [p5-6] :
We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who it’s antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan’s file. Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invent reassuring fantasies about our parents–about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were. As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep. As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for 5 centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.
Just beautiful.
Thank you!
I must read this book.