Flaker of Flints

In the Book of Daniel, the Son of Man is not a personification of the righteous community, but is conceived, in mythological fashion, as its heavenly doppelgänger. Now it is characteristic of mythological thinking that such a doppelgänger is conceived to be more real and permanent than its earthly counterpart and prior to it in the order of being. (From a modern critical perspective, the reverse is true. It "is a question of men before it is a question of angels." The human community is the datum of our experience and knowledge. The heavenly counterpart is posited on the basis of this datum.)

The end of the world is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

[The angel answered], "Dream not of their fight as of a duel, nor [physical the] wounds of head or heel: [these do not] join the Son human to Godhead, with more strength to foil your enemy. Nor so is [Satan killed,] whose fall from Heaven, [deadlier a] bruise, disabled not to give you your death's wound, which [Christ], who comes your savior, shall [repair], not by destroying Satan, but, [in you and in your seed, destroying Satan's works.] .... [Triumphing] o'er his foes [will Christ] surprise the Serpent, Prince of Air, and drag in chains through all his realm, and there confounded leave. Then Christ will enter glory, and resume his seat at God's right hand, exalted high above all names in Heaven; then shall come when this world's dissolution shall be ripe.

...In my view, these simply aren’t the sort of outcomes that you expect from atoms blindly interacting according to the laws of physics.  These are, instead, the signatures of higher-level causation—and specifically, of a teleological force that operates in our universe to make it distinctively cruel and horrible...

Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination? And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

...Because the fulness is greater than any single human event can describe, the human realities involved can be superimposed one upon another. So at Jesus’ death in, let us say, 28 AD he pronounces the word “It is accomplished”. The loud voice which comes out of the Temple, from the Throne, as the seventh angel pours his bowl into the air in 70 AD says “It is done.” These are both that same word as its fulness reaches its maximal impact in human affairs. The same can be said for persecutions from the Maccabean period and those of the years immediately prior to AD70—the same beasts with horns could be seen at work with different imperial “drag”—Hellenistic or Roman. As at the time of Daniel the same beast could be the Greeks, or the Assyrians or the Babylonians...

...Please remember that the key element to the understanding of these rituals was that what we might participate in here below, the ritual event in the Temple, was not the real thing. The real thing was already lived out in heaven. And visions given to priests and prophets concerned elements of that which was already unspeakably full, outside time, space and narrative possibility in heaven. That fulness had been glimpsed by prophets and priests such as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel as something that was on its way in, was coming into the world and would eventually arrive as the terrible “day of the Lord” of which Zechariah speaks and which would lead to the end of the Temple. What we have in the book of the Apocalypse is the account of how that fulness, emerging from the Holy Place, interacts with time-structured sequential earthly reality in the form of the coming of Jesus, his teaching, his death and resurrection and the outworking of his prophesies concerning the destruction of the Tem...

There is no pain, you are receding: A distant ship, smoke on the horizon. You are only coming through in waves. Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying. When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse Out of the corner of my eye: I turned to look, but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown, the dream is gone. I have become comfortably numb.