The religions all seem to me to be a veil we created, and put on, to come between the animal and the world. They are all slightly different colors and patterns, these veils, and are in some cases full hairshirt blankets, but all are something put upon us in our youth in the name of protection, of shielding, some obfuscation of something. It is a veil we are born without, and I never have been quite able or willing to put on. Nothing sticks to this greasy duck.
Well to be sure we invent from experience of living explanations for living. And to be sure there are false coins in circulation and gold coins in circulation. To each comes the coin and discernment is necessary to decide twixt fake and gold. In the end worldly coins are fake. We are more than animal by birth as a human being and yet less than animal when we choose inhumanity. Max Picard writes: "In every age man has been in flight from God. What distinguishes the Flight today from every other flight is this: once Faith was the universal, and prior to the individual; there was an objective world of Faith, while the flight was only accomplished subjectively, within the individual man. It came into being through the individual man's separating himself from the world of Faith by an act of decision. A man who wanted to flee had first to make his own flight. The opposite is true today. The objective and eternal world of Faith is no more; it is Faith which has to be remade moment by moment through the individual's act of decision, that is to say, through the individual cutting himself off from the world of the Flight.”
The religions all seem to me to be a veil we created, and put on, to come between the animal and the world. They are all slightly different colors and patterns, these veils, and are in some cases full hairshirt blankets, but all are something put upon us in our youth in the name of protection, of shielding, some obfuscation of something. It is a veil we are born without, and I never have been quite able or willing to put on. Nothing sticks to this greasy duck.
Well to be sure we invent from experience of living explanations for living. And to be sure there are false coins in circulation and gold coins in circulation. To each comes the coin and discernment is necessary to decide twixt fake and gold. In the end worldly coins are fake. We are more than animal by birth as a human being and yet less than animal when we choose inhumanity. Max Picard writes: "In every age man has been in flight from God. What distinguishes the Flight today from every other flight is this: once Faith was the universal, and prior to the individual; there was an objective world of Faith, while the flight was only accomplished subjectively, within the individual man. It came into being through the individual man's separating himself from the world of Faith by an act of decision. A man who wanted to flee had first to make his own flight. The opposite is true today. The objective and eternal world of Faith is no more; it is Faith which has to be remade moment by moment through the individual's act of decision, that is to say, through the individual cutting himself off from the world of the Flight.”