What few folks have bothered to appreciate was just how sincere those of the Hebrew persuasion were about coming to understand God. They knew enough to realize that this was not going to be the quest of a single lifetime, nor even a single epoch: this quest could potentially last for centuries.

Project management, indeed.

Try arranging the books of the Old Testament in their original order, as Jack Miles has done before us.

The old Testament that Jesus taught from ended with Job. All that searching and experience ended with Job getting thumped on the nose by his own God explaining to him what had been explained to many heroes in many spiritual-religious traditions: sacraments and silverware only work for a while. The active ingredient of spirituality isn't piety, it's justice. It's not rigidly adhering to dogma, but allowing that faith to move and change a person from within. In any direction. At any time. For any reason.

Jesus' one and only commandment was that we love one another. That is what God would want from His children and that is what we have to get right.

2,000 years later, we're still throwing mud at each other while Rome burns to the ground.

Grab a banana and a remote and watch the show. Hiding our intelligence so that we don't have to appear responsible for what's going on is a deeply unintelligent thing to do.

Wins. May the best person win.

Predictably, if I am not that person, the best person will not have won. The game will then have to move to a best two out of three competition.

Unless of course I win, in which case the game will be over, Salon will have its bandwidth back, and we can breathe a sigh of relief as Saturn will be restored to its proper orbit and axis.