All that needs to be said now is that the God hypothesis can be articulated in a thousand ways other than the Christian one, so it’s unfair to claim they are the same thing.

A symbol became something that stood for or represented something else. It made us re-member or re-call something else.

The Christians say they love Christ, but I think they hate him without knowing it; so they take the cross by the other end and make a sword out of it and strike us with it! You understand

It brings us back again to the ruthlessness of the idea of sanctioned truths, exclusive ways of understanding the mystery of existence, as ordained by the officers of religious institutions. Fortunately, priests have never had it all their own way in the history of religion.

The urgent task is to find a story that will help us face down our own compulsive destructiveness and save ourselves and the world.

This was called the ‘steady state’ theory. But it did not answer my naive question either: supposing it had always been here, how did it happen always to have been here?

Is there something about people who live on a frontier that renders them incapable of the decisive either/or and disposes them towards the indefinite both/and?

But the counterculture was about more than getting laid and getting stoned. It was also a pursuit of transcendence, even if it would turn into a transcendence of horror, another phantasmagoria.

Among the things he believed in was the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were pointed in our direction. We were told by others at the time, some of them with knowledge of the issue rather than beliefs, that there was little if any evidence that they existed.