If you were capable of thinking of an object from more than one point of view, you could imagine it doing all sorts of things. For Mother, consciousn… - Stephen Baxter

It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted.

One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet—at least up to our nineteenth century—the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep—it has sometimes seemed to me—capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher.
The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.

The river of time flowed unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.