Moses 1:34: And the first of all men have I called Adam, which is many.
As man now is, God once was; As God now is, man may be.
Each one of us in our organizations is endowed with the germs of every faculty requisite to constitute a god or a goddess.
For a wise and glorious purpose Thou hast placed me here on earth And withheld the recollection Of my former friends and birth; Yet ofttimes a secret something Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,” And I felt that I had wandered From a more exalted sphere.
Genesis 3:5 (NRSV): for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man.
Freeman Dyson has famously written that the idea of sufficiently evolved mind is indistinguishable from the idea of the mind of God.
Human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, ... and, in general, common sense. They also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags, and loyalty parades.
Psalm 82:6 (NRSV): I say, “You are gods, children of the Most High, all of you;”
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations.
Lyndon Johnson
C.S. Lewis