When one’s world was impermanent, difficult endeavors, like procuring justice or balancing the ecology, need never be attempted. One need only make c… - Sheri S. Tepper

Man was always being jerked around between different people's ideas of god, depending on who'd won the most recent war, or palace coup, or political battle. This meant mankind was always being asked to accept deities foreign to his own nature. I mean, if your prophet was sexually insecure, or if his later interpreters were, that religion demanded celibacy or repression or hatred of women; if the prophet was a homophobe, he preached prosecution of homosexuals; and if he was both lecherous and greedy, he preached polygeny. If he was luxurious, he preached give-me-money-and-God-will-make-you-rich; if he felt put upon he preached God-of-Vengeance, let's kill the other guy; and no matter how much well-meaning ecumenicists pretended all the gods were one god under different aspects, they weren't any such thing, because every prophet created God in his own image, to confront his own nightmares.

He calls it the university of the Real One, and it teaches only things that are known to be true, which means it is largely devoted to mathematics and sciences.

Learning more was merely ordinary to me, but traveling—that was a wonderful treat.
At least so I thought until we had done some of it. Then it turned out that traveling was doing everything one had to do at home with none of the conveniences for doing it.