https://vegasharmon.com/tags/religious-and-philosophical/ Recent content in Religious-and-Philosophical on Vegas Harmon Hugo en Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/evolution-s-purpose-humanity-as-superintelligence-s-birth-canal/ However, somewhat surprisingly, “creating digital superintelligence” has all of the features of a “real” meaning of life, with no supernatural elements needed to square the circle. In the most minimal sense, the “need” for evolution to create digital intelligence explains why humans are here at all, in the particular form that we are, and what we are “made to do” with our time on Earth. And the expected outcome of creating digital superintelligence is certainly cosmic-scale; even the AI “doomers” — people who believe that creating superintelligent AI will likely result in human extinction — think that our AIs will fulfill the long-term science fiction goal of “colonizing the universe,” and fill the cosmos with something. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extinction-isn-t-theirs-to-offer/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/extinction-isn-t-theirs-to-offer/ My problem with anti-natalists is not that they don’t mean well in trying to grant suffering creatures the gift of extinction. My problem is that it’s simply not their gift to give. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/honest-doubt-beats-dogmatic-certainty/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/honest-doubt-beats-dogmatic-certainty/ If we recognise that a kind of inner honesty and a genuine relation to experience is what constitutes religious existence, the fundamental enemy to good religious dialogue or apologetics becomes dogmatism and projected certainty, not a lack of assertion about any argument we may have. A believer can and probably should have more affinity with an atheist who struggles with divine hiddenness or genuinely finds the problem of evil too much to overcome in order to believe than they can with a fellow believer asserting that the fine tuning argument or psycho-physical laws proves theism. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanity-as-bootloader-searching-for-meaning-we-may-never-grasp/ It is possible that there is no “meaning of life,” no ultimate “point,” in which case, we did no harm by trying to find one. It is possible that the “meaning of life” is in fact something very simple: like “love,” or “beauty,” or “joy” — in which case, this will have been a long journey to “know a place for the very first time,” and we will have to trust our AIs to realize some aspect of the meaningfulness of human life more fully. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/magic-and-machine-tolkien-s-two-kinds-of-power/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/magic-and-machine-tolkien-s-two-kinds-of-power/ To ask this question is to answer it—at least for any attentive reader of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings. Although set in a pre-technological mythical world of wizards and dragons, Tolkien’s trilogy is, more than anything else, a profound meditation upon technology. Nor should this surprise us; for as C.S. Lewis has argued, the modern enterprise of “technology” and the medieval pursuit of “magic” are two versions of the same quest: to manipulate the world through the discovery of hidden knowledge, the perfection of arcane techniques. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/managerial-liberalism-can-price-everything-but-covenant/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/managerial-liberalism-can-price-everything-but-covenant/ Managerial liberalism is defined by its rejection of illegible human bonds. Everything must have a price, so that anyone is free to buy it, and the state can judge the transaction to be transparent and fair. What we would call “loyalty” or “honor” or “covenant” can only exist in a managerial society as meaningless ideals — the kind of thing that you are free to daydream about at church. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/powerful-tools-wield-their-users-in-return/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/powerful-tools-wield-their-users-in-return/ Second, Tolkien understood that the more powerful the tool, the less likely that an ordinary user could use it effectively, rather than being shaped or controlled by it. Thus, when Pippin looks into the palantir of Orthanc, he is almost immediately captivated by it and wholly under the domination of Sauron’s will operating through it. Only Aragorn, the rightful possessor of the stone and a man hardened by battle and seasoned with wisdom, is able to “wrench the stone to his own will,” and that only through “a bitter struggle. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/purpose-without-a-designer-why-building-superintelligence-is-our-meaning/ However, there is also another, more functional sense of a “meaning of life,” one that preserves the clarity and singularity of the original question, but does not require life to have a creator in order for the question to have an answer. We can think of the “meaning of life” as the “purpose of life”: what life was “made for” and what life “in fact contributes” to our universe. And while the concept of “purpose” has many latent associations with intelligent design, in nature, many things — in fact, pretty much all things — functionally have a “purpose” without having been “designed” by anything at all (except, of course, the ongoing process of natural selection). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-good-approached-only-by-fleeing-the-evil/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-good-approached-only-by-fleeing-the-evil/ The good is that at which we aim, to be sure, and yet the good that we seek can only ever be asymptotically approached by avoiding the evil, which is always nearer and clearer. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-hubris-of-judging-a-life-unworthy-of-being-lived/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-hubris-of-judging-a-life-unworthy-of-being-lived/ This is my greatest objection to anti-natalism. Beyond the absurdity, beyond the pessimism, beyond the cowardice—it is the hubris that disturbs me most. The belief that because you have judged another creature’s life to be unworthy that this somehow gives you the right to extinguish it. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-everything-touched-was-mortal/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/when-everything-touched-was-mortal/ In “The Gods,” the book’s coda, Pavese converses with himself about “how grueling it must have been for people living in a time when everything they touched was mortal,” when the world was filled with the presences of unseen beings. “Do you believe in monsters, believe in animal people, in living stones, divine smiles, and in words that annihilate?” The poet, Pavese implies, is a creature of Chaos—that anarchic state in which good is mixed with bad and monsters mingle with men and gods. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/on-mallarm%C3%A9-s-perfectionism/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/on-mallarm%C3%A9-s-perfectionism/ Throughout much of Mallarmé’s adult life, he yearned quixotically to create a magnum opus that could encompass the entire world and render it into words. He wanted to collapse the gap between representation and what is represented. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-destiny-of-nations/ Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-destiny-of-nations/ Auspicious Reverence! Hush all meaner song, Ere we the deep preluding strain have poured To the Great Father, only Rightful King, Eternal Father! King Omnipotent! To the Will Absolute, the One, the Good! The I AM, the Word, the Life, the Living God! Such symphony requires best instrument. Seize, then, my soul! from Freedom’s trophied dome The Harp which hangeth high between the Shields Of Brutus and Leonidas! With that https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-devil-owns-the-world-anyway-dot-dot-dot/ Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-devil-owns-the-world-anyway-dot-dot-dot/ The devil owns the world anyway. Our job is to make it through the best we can. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/escaping-heteronomy-gives-up-on-skill/ The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things, to the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/why-jesus-healed/ Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/why-jesus-healed/ But it’s not only such scenes that inspire my faith. Terrifying storms and catastrophes can have a beauty to them too. Sere wilderness and lowering mountains that overawe the mind can remind us of that God whom to fear is the beginning of wisdom. But this is true if, and only if, we are watching these sublimities from afar. When the lightning strikes us, when the wilderness swallows us, when the catastrophe falls on us or on those we love — then the revelation tends to vanish, the inspiration fades, and sometimes our faith dwindles away as well. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/taste-as-shared-response/ Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/taste-as-shared-response/ The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there doesn’t seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The argument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a work of art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is a property of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But it doesn’t seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads of each of the observers. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-changing-heaven-keeps-earth-the-same/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-changing-heaven-keeps-earth-the-same/ As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will remain exactly the same. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-grumbler-or-only-a-grumble/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-grumbler-or-only-a-grumble/ The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-stronger-angel-a-fiercer-devil/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/a-stronger-angel-a-fiercer-devil/ It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-hell-is-smaller-than-a-pebble/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/all-hell-is-smaller-than-a-pebble/ ‘Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/artifacts-are-defined-by-purpose/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/artifacts-are-defined-by-purpose/ What defines a human artifact is its goal or purpose. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/brass-is-mistaken-for-gold/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/brass-is-mistaken-for-gold/ There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/caring-for-proofs-of-god-more-than-god/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/caring-for-proofs-of-god-more-than-god/ There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/color-play-is-not-a-finished-work/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/color-play-is-not-a-finished-work/ There’s nothing wrong with [being excited about the interesting contrast of colors]… But that’s the kind of thing you enjoy when playing around with colors on your palette! It is not a finished work of art. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/darkness-cannot-infect-our-light/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/darkness-cannot-infect-our-light/ Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/did-mind-create-matter/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/did-mind-create-matter/ The core of the evolution controversy can thus be phrased in simple terms: Did mind create matter? Or did matter give rise to mind? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eternal-reality-must-be-lived/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/eternal-reality-must-be-lived/ Ye can not know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all acts and events that fill Time, are the definition, and it must be lived. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/faces-full-of-impossibilities/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/faces-full-of-impossibilities/ They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities… https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/from-keeper-to-gardener/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/from-keeper-to-gardener/ Upholding God’s design and keeping the boundaries of nature and culture under supervision were thus the ideals of pre-modern utopian endeavors. With modernity came the urge to control and manipulate nature, resulting in the gardener’s approach as a concept of utopianism. (…) In gardening utopias, man took control over his garden, giving it ‘constant attention and effort,’ forcing ‘his preconceived design on the plot’ (Bauman, Liquid Times 99) by selection, cultivation, and exclusion of unwanted elements. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-is-reality-itself/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-is-reality-itself/ Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-works-backwards/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/heaven-works-backwards/ They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-as-endless-quarrelling/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-as-endless-quarrelling/ ‘Not at all,’ said my neighbor. ‘The trouble is that they’re so quarrelsome. As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour. Before the week is over he’s quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled with their neighbors—and moved. If so he settles in. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-cannot-veto-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-cannot-veto-heaven/ ‘The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-or-purgatory-if-you-leave-it/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/hell-or-purgatory-if-you-leave-it/ You have been in Hell: though if you don’t go back you may call it Purgatory. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanism-and-cartesian-reason/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/humanism-and-cartesian-reason/ Humanism claims that there is a unique and absolute difference that sets humans apart from the rest of creation: the difference of Cartesian reason. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/inability-does-not-erase-obligation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/inability-does-not-erase-obligation/ Our complete inability to do what is right does not erase our obligation to do what is right. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/love-as-the-craving-to-be-loved/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/love-as-the-craving-to-be-loved/ But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/man-as-a-recent-invention/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/man-as-a-recent-invention/ The ultimate argument for this disappearance, though, belongs to Michel Foucault and his claim that ‘man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’ (The Order of Things 387). https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/measured-for-the-sake-of-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/measured-for-the-sake-of-heaven/ A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-affection-unconverted/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-affection-unconverted/ ‘What you have seen in the Guthries is what natural affection turns to in the end if it will not be converted.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-love-must-be-buried-to-rise/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-love-must-be-buried-to-rise/ Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-theology-rests-on-what-we-know/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/natural-theology-rests-on-what-we-know/ Natural theology is not based on what we do not know. It is based on what we do know about living things. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-need-for-one-another/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-need-for-one-another/ We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-needs-no-community/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/no-needs-no-community/ What’s the trouble about this place? Not that people are quarrelsome—that’s only human nature and was always the same even on Earth. The trouble is that they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it. That’s why it never costs any trouble to move to another street or build another house. In other words, there’s no proper economic basis for any community life. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-can-be-yours-by-nature/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/nothing-can-be-yours-by-nature/ ‘He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God Himself will be yours. But not that way. Nothing can be yours by nature.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/only-the-greatest-can-descend-into-hell/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/only-the-greatest-can-descend-into-hell/ ‘Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend—a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathize with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/reality-is-harsh-to-the-feet-of-shadows/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/reality-is-harsh-to-the-feet-of-shadows/ Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come? https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seeking-recognition-and-appreciation/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/seeking-recognition-and-appreciation/ He felt quite certain that he was going where, at last, his finely critical spirit would no longer be outraged by an uncongenial environment—where he would find ‘Recognition’ and ‘Appreciation.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/teach-me-how-to-repent/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/teach-me-how-to-repent/ Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good As if thou hadst sealed my pardon, with thy blood. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-critic-left-with-only-self-conceit/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-critic-left-with-only-self-conceit/ But he was at least intelligent: one could get some criticism worth hearing from him, even if he was a failure on the creative side. But now he seems to have nothing left but his self-conceit. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fact-value-split/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-fact-value-split/ Thus was born the fact/value split—the idea that humans can have genuine knowledge only in the realm of empirical facts. Morality was reduced to subjective preferences. The term values means literally whatever the individual happens to value. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-final-state-cannot-be-answered/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-final-state-cannot-be-answered/ But if you are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-grumble-going-on-like-a-machine/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-grumble-going-on-like-a-machine/ Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-human-as-a-fleeting-category/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-human-as-a-fleeting-category/ The human as category is a fleeting and historically specific concept, as Foucault famously argues at the end of his book The Order of Things, that could just as easily disappear, should the ‘fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ (387) shift once more as they did at the end of the eighteenth century, when the era of humanism as we understand it began. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-telos-of-man-and-capturing-gnon/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-telos-of-man-and-capturing-gnon/ And then there’s us. Man has his own telos, when he is allowed the security to act and the clarity to reason out the consequences of his actions. When unafflicted by coordination problems and unthreatened by superior forces, able to act as a gardener rather than just another subject of the law of the jungle, he tends to build and guide a wonderful world for himself. He tends to favor good things and avoid bad, to create secure civilizations with polished sidewalks, beautiful art, happy families, and glorious adventures. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-two-tenets-of-true-atheism/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-two-tenets-of-true-atheism/ But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-life/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-life/ ‘It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it, it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thirst-was-made-for-water/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thirst-was-made-for-water/ ‘You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.’ https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thy-will-be-done/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/thy-will-be-done/ There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-as-an-inverted-telescope/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/time-as-an-inverted-telescope/ Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would be otherwise too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/too-far-off-to-come-to-the-bus-stop/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/too-far-off-to-come-to-the-bus-stop/ They’re so far off by now that they could never think of coming to the bus stop at all. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-have-never-lived-anywhere-except-in-heaven/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/we-have-never-lived-anywhere-except-in-heaven/ And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly. https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/your-heart-on-trial/ Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://vegasharmon.com/commonplace/your-heart-on-trial/ What if, instead of God’s Word being on trial, your heart was on trial?