A Letter Makes Ordinary Things Seem Important.

You See How It Is Godlike To Love The Being Of Someone. Your Existence Is A Delight To Us. I Hope You Never Have To Long For A Child As I Did, But Oh, What A Splendid Thing It Has Been That You Came Finally, And What A Blessing To Enjoy You Now For Almost Seven Years.

Religion, If It Is Genuine, Is So Profoundly Interwoven With Individual Thought And Experience That It Is No More Exhaustible Than Consciousness Itself. And Fiction Whose Purpose Is Didactic Is Bad No Matter Whether The Matter To Be "taught" Is Christianity Or The World View Of Ayn Rand. It Seems Often To Be Assumed By Writers That Religion Is A Pose, Meant To Deceive Oneself Or Others, Or That It Is A Bad Patch On Doubt Or Complexity. This Is Only Convention, However. The Writers I Know Have A Much Deeper Engagement With The Real Issues Of Religion.

If You Read Calvin, For Example, He Says, How Do We Know That We Are Godlike, In The Image Of God? Well, Look At How Brilliant We Are. Look How We Can Solve Problems Even Dreaming, Which I Think Is True, Which I've Done Myself. So Instead Of Having An Externalized Model Of Reality With An Objective Structure, It Has A Model Of Reality That Is Basically Continuously Renegotiated In Human Perception. I Think That View Of Things Is Pretty Pervasively Influential In Protestant Thought.

And There Is No Living Creature, Though The Whims Of Eons Had Put Its Eyes On Boggling Stalks And Clamped It In A Carapace, Diminished It To A Pinpoint And Given It A Taste For Mud And Stuck It Down A Well Or Hid It Under A Stone, But That Creature Will Live On If It Can.

If These Laws [in The Bible] Belonged To Any Other Ancient Culture We Would Approach Them Very Differently. We Need Not Bother To Reject The Code Of Hammurabi. Presumably It Is Because Moses Is Still Felt To Make Some Claim On Us That This Project Of Discrediting His Law Is Persisted In With Such Energy. The Unscholarly Character Of The Project May Derive From The Supposed Familiarity Of The Subject.