A Spirituality Bracketed by Fear: The Old Testament God was an external being, distant and cold … threatening. The New Testament internalized God. As with “Enthusiasm” for the Greeks, it signified “the god within you.” These are not completely in contradiction. And indeed, from deep within, a doctrine of an afterlife sprang out of culture with the energy and determination of a fish on a cutting board.
A valuable book, A Human Strategy, aphorism 387
387 A valuable book may be torn to pieces without diminishing the human spirit, just so long as the words have already been read and understood. To feel the loss of the book — at its material destruction, even though one had already digested its contents fully and had aligned oneself toward its overall direction — is evidence that one values the non-human being over human becoming , the static thing over the dynamic process . In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism