" . . . every sense splayed open to the absolute."

Okay, now it is time for a little viewpoint from the "other" side of the theological debate (see #8 below). If you are not so preordained to turn to obscure prayers to assuage your need for some assurance of the divine, then perhaps, for you, you should look in the other direction for something less quaint and archaic but still terribly powerful, a contemplation of YOUR place in the scheme of things. These are just six photos, but they illustrate the absolutely colossal scales of difference that mark our observations, neither end of which, tiny or large, we are truly capable of either comprehending or imagining. Too small, too large, too close, too far for conceptualization.


(http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/09/25/germs.in.space.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories)

Six simple stages, and can we really understand the progression/regression? The reality is no.



And we are the unique inheritors of "grace" in the entire universe? Are you sure?
I would not be, if I were you . . . and I am.



1) atom 2) bacterium 3) man 4) solar system 5) galaxy 6) deep-field universe.

To quote outrageously, and out of context, from an author I enjoy very much, Alastair Reynolds;

"To feel oneself so tiny, so fragile, so losable, was at first spiritually crushing. But, by the same token, this realisation was also strangely liberating: if an individual human existence meant so little, if one's actions were so cosmically irrelevant, then the notion of some absolute moral framework made about as much sense as the universal ether. Measured against the infinite, therefore, people were no more capable of meaningful sin - or meaningful good - than ants, or dust.
Worlds barely registered sin. Suns hardly deigned to notice it. On the scale of solar systems and galaxies, it meant nothing at all. It was like some obscure atomic force that simply petered out on those scales." Alastair Reynolds, Absolution Gap (2003)

So, let us all get a grip on ourselves, shall we?
Leducdor