I woke up from a dream, and it was beautiful, and I was filled with a sense of purity and goodness and I trembled from the memory of it. I guess that's how religious people feel, when they give themselves over to their faith, and that's why humankind has been inventing the Divine ever since we could. And there's a part of me that will always yearn for such solidity and comfort, to be held in the warm fastness of a belief that is complete and unquestionably right and promises so much, both now and in the hereafter. But I do believe we are so much more than our emotions, though they are wonderful and iridescent and define us to such an enormous extent, that we are also the creatures that raised the pyramids and tamed lagoons and painted gods and God and ordered reason upon chaos and made chaos understandable. And that if I were born but a century or two earlier, I would have had the most unshakeable belief, but it's a pity and an inexpressible wonder that fortune has made me exist in a time when science is able to explain, elegantly, so many things central to our being. And I shall always regret that I cannot rapture in an ecstasy of faith, or compare my deeds against a list of eternal commandments, but I know something as high and pure, as good and simple, so bold in its sometime egregiousness and humble in its unsleeping curiosity. And I cannot turn away from what I, in my limited knowledge, see to be the truth. |