A Very Eccentric Magic Wand "Travel the cities of Asia and Europe-- behold the ancient temples still standing, and the cathedrals of the Christian god in which his hymns are still sung. Walk through the museums of all countries; it is religious painting and sculpture that dazzles and humbles the soul. "How great seems that achievement; the very machinery of culture dependent upon the fuel of religious belief. "Yet what has been the price of that faith which galvanizes countries and sends army against army; which devides up the map of nations into victor and vanquished; which annihilates the worshipers of alien gods. "But in the last few hundred years, a true miracle has happened which has nothing to do with spirits or apparitions, or voices from the heavens telling this or that zealot what he must now do! "We have seen in the human animal a resistance finally to the miraculous; a skepticism regarding the works of spirits, or those who claim to see them and understand them and speak their truths. "We have seen the human mind slowly abandon the traditions of law based upon revelations, to seek ethical truths through reason; and a way of life based upon respect for the physical and the spiritual as perceived by all human beings. "And with this loss of respect for supernatural intervention; with this credulity of all things divorced from the flesh, has come the most enlightened age of all; for men and women seek for the highest inspiration not in the realm of the invisible, but in the realm of the human-- the thing which is both flesh and spirit; invisible and visible; earthly and transcendant. "The psychic, the clairvoyant, the witch, if you will, is no longer of value, I am convinced of it. The spirit can give us nothing more. In sum, we have outgrown our susceptibility to such madness, and we are moving to a perfection that the world has never known. "The world has been made flesh at last, to quote the old biblical phrase with all it's mystery; but the word is the word of reason; and the flesh is the acknowledgment of the needs and the desires which all men and women share." -Anne Rice, Queen of the Damned; page 423 | �Repitition of Hatred�Loveless Avenue�Burn Out (and) Fade Away �Plofile�Notes�Host�Archive� |