Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe

as well as possessing a capacity for reason and reflection, we are also a highly suggestible species, prone to crazes, panics, conspiracy theories and other psychological spasms: in short, beliefs. Beliefs, like communicable diseases, are highly infectious.

And all this over something that never happened, except in the imaginations of a writer, except in the pages of a fiction. No serpent. No tree of the knowledge of good and evil. No innocently naked man and woman. Just a story. A myth that needs interpreting but should never be read literally. But that’s precisely how these Christian thinkers read i

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?

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these forms of consciousness quite disregarded . . . At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

When you are faced with two alternatives Choose both. And should they put you to the test, Tick every box. Nothing is ever single.

It dies hard, this old idea that God relishes punishment. And it takes us back to the fact that all our God theories are projections of our own cultures and their compulsions and cruelties. They are all our stories, endlessly told to help us figure out where we’ve got to in the haunted wood.

No, a fear of ourselves, because we know what we are capable of doing to each other when we are possessed by these convictions.

we are told that Job is undoubtedly righteous, so his prosperity could be said to lend support to the traditional view; but we also know that, for no reason other than his own whimsical interest in the test, God is about to deprive Job of the official rewards of genuine virtue.

It’s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification.