Falling like angels cast out of a place in the past perhaps heaven or whatever it was no doubt some serious hell should we call ourselves Gabriel appearing to some latter day Daniel in some feverish dream revealing specifics beyond the tablets the fine print of the Commandments consoling him with the 11th edict Do not fuss and keep your own counsel the way a lawyer would to a client who couldn't afford to pay it is doubtful that Daniel feared the visions or the night Lucifer had not yet been invented Milton had not yet penned that portrait of pride and Satan was also far from Daniel and when Gabriel came to Muhammad he said he was reciting from a book so for all of us Christian and Muslim and Jew the back story was written first and read later rewritten to the best of the recollection of prophet whether friend or foe and repeated thereafter to help us trade places with the prophets and hear the words they heard for ourselves that's the...

On the bus today I heard two suits getting into it on physics one guy was talking about string theory and how we and every part of us down to the atom and subatomic particle might as well be connected and pulled like wires by some master puppeteer only the guy didn't like the idea of a puppeteer sounded too much like natural theology he said the holy rollers liken God to a potter shaping woman out of Adam's rib and the moderates see the hand of a watchmaker in all of life either way what happens and how it all works is down to some higher power he liked random and was happy to be intrigued by how much like order it all looks when you are not looking through a microscope the other guy didn't seem to know much physics and his thinking was more Greek than Christian he said string theory sounded an awful lot like Zeus or Apollo having all of us and everything on a golden chain which he is free to let out fo...