Library of Babel

SOURCE:  https://maskofreason.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/the-library-of-babel-by-jorge-luis-borges.pdf

KEYWORD:  truth, lie, false, fiction, art, profane, reason, madness, foolish, confusion, 

This is the challenge of our day:  An infinite library, with infinite truths and infinite falsehoods, and a complete inability to tell those two things apart.

This is straight from the 1941 Jorge Luis Borges story “The Library of Babel”. In it, he imagines an infinite library made up of books of random letters.

Because it is infinite, it contains not only every book ever written, but every book that could possibly be written. It contains every possible truth as well as an infinite number of falsehoods.

The secrets of the universe, of life, of everything, are hidden somewhere in that library.

The only issue is that the magical book is impossible to find. And if you found it, how would you ever know you found the book of truth, and not one of the infinite books of lies that surround it?

Laughter and Prayer

SOURCE:  Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times: Sermons for Today and Tomorrow

KEYWORD: Humor, Faith, Laughter, Prayer, Play, Wonder, Comedy, Joke

QUOTE:

“Humor is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer. Laughter must be heard in the outer courts of religion, and the echoes of it should resound in the sanctuary; but there is no laughter in the holy of holies. There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith.

The intimate relation between humor and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. ... Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence, which threaten the very meaning of our life.”