what the original authors of the Greek and Hebrew myths we’ve been looking at thought they were doing is impossible for us to tell. Whether they were consciously crafting myths that were intended to carry hidden meanings we cannot now say for sure, but that does not stop us reading them that way today.

imagine what looking up at the dome of the sky felt like for him. It must have been a combination of awe and intimacy. When we look up, there is awe certainly, but no longer any intimacy.

They told themselves stories to explain the mysteries of their own existence. But they also told them because humans loved listening to them. That’s why it is not always easy to figure out exactly what they thought they were doing when they were doing it.

they are both obsessed with questions of meaning. Sometimes I think this is just a way of winding up those atheists who betray a religious or evangelical intensity in promoting their atheism.

When the dance spread to the Lakota tribe, the bureau’s agents arrested the most respected of the Lakota leaders, Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull’s death in December 1890 and the massacre of two hundred Native Americans at Wounded Knee,

That, and because Jesus also invites us to active sympathy for those who become the casualties of the planet’s propulsive and indifferent force – those who suffer. Not in order to find an answer to the problem of suffering, but to respond to those who do the suffering. Maybe there never ever was any love behind the universe.

Their own experience of their own nature might have contributed something to this idea of a self within but somehow independent of the body.

The intensive, industrialised farming of poultry is humanity’s own version of the Ichneumonidae wasp.

this way of talking about God in negatives is called ‘apophatic’ theology, from the Greek for deny or negate. We can never say what God is, only what God is not – and that includes anything we try to say about the divine mystery.