Maybe it is the pain of their meaning we run from because they also tell us there is no escape from ourselves.

They so fear the human capacity for idolatry, for making god in our own image – and the horrors and cruelties that too easily follow that self-identification – that they refuse to accept any of our descriptions or definitions of God.

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.

while it had never occurred to Hofmann that his discovery would become a ‘pleasure drug’, he also . . . came to regard the youth culture’s adoption of LSD in the 1960s as an understandable response to the emptiness of what he described as a materialistic, industrialized, and spiritually impoverished society that had lost its connection to nature.

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was converted from an enduringly useful fiction into a dangerous assertion of historical fact. In their account, it wasn’t the fact that it went on happening now that mattered.

What forgiveness is intended to do here is to interrupt and redirect the normal retaliatory impulse that would otherwise add exponential strength to the original offence and push it further into its unstoppable and destructive career.

Jazz happens when musicians respond to each other and make unscripted music never heard before. Mabey had heard birds doing that. They weren’t just feathered robots programmed to pour out their songs. They were capable of making new music in response to other birds. They did jazz. They had agency.

He wondered whether certain animals might not share some kind of ‘group mind’, which he described as a ‘sort of psychic blueprint between members of a species’. Might not all species, he suggested, be linked together in a ‘cosmic mind’ that was capable of carrying evolutionary information through time and space?

faith systems are usually authoritarian in their practice and self-definition and, with one or two exceptions, they tend to believe that their own version is the perfect and final word on the subject.