human fabric in the hand of time

The supreme irony of religion is that it sells salvation by first teaching us to embrace shame as a virtue, which is like teaching us to embrace the cross - an instrument of death and suffering hewn from the carcass of a dead tree - as a way of life.

 We see this irony in our willingness to condemn all those who are different from ourselves, even as we ourselves feel a constant yearning to rebel against the ever creeping suffocation of conformity. We build our prisons, which lure us everywhere to obey, submit, and conform, to protect ourselves from that which we are taught to fear. And out of an abiding love for that fear, with songs of rejoicing in our hearts and freedom on our lips, we lock ourselves inside.

 It is the irony of worshiping the very God who flung us all into this temporary world of ours, brimming with chaos, violence, and contradiction, as the only one who can save us all from just such a world. Indeed, it is to argue that man has free will, but that he is saved not through using it to build for himself a better world - one which his fallen nature forever condemns him to strive for but never achieve - but by a decision to wish that it were so, and the "belief" that only God can make it so.

It is the contrast of seeing how often the ugliest is the most beautiful and how often the most beautiful is the most ugly. The Christian sees God as the one, while the atheists sees that same God as the other; and as one sees God as the source of all that is good, the other sees him as the seed of all that is evil.

It is to be born into hell, and worship a God in the hope that he will save us from it, and bring all those who cry to him enough about it (in the form of prayers and supplications) to heaven. It is to "look at things at second or third hand and look through the eyes of the dead" as Walt Whitman put it, because we are looking at the world through the eyes of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, rather than our own. 

It is for threads in a loom to argue which of them is made of the finest silk, even though genetically we are all cut from the same cloth, and knitted together into a single human fabric by the hand of time.