Awe is not a very comfortable standpoint for many people. . . Hence, all about us today, we see avoidance of awe-by burying ourselves in materialist science, for example or in absolutist religious positions; or by locking ourselves into systems, whether corporate, familial, or consumerist; or by stupefying ourselves with drugs.
The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
We have no functioning parliament in Egypt and months ago Mohammed Morsi assumed legislative functions. Now he's decided that there should be no opposition to the laws that he makes and that he is authorized to pass any national security measure. It is difficult to be more absolutist than that. And the constitutional convention - what a sad gathering; it threatens to send us back to the darkest period of the Middle Ages.
Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.
I don't think you should be too absolutist about what you play and what you don't play.
The absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the relativist sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles.
