For over a thousand years, [Roman religion] satisfied the spiritual urges of a wide range of peoples, because it offered an intelligent and dignified interpretation of how the world functions ... True religion for them, as opposed to superstition, was to honour the gods fitly in accordance with custom ... It was a fine, yet tolerant religion whose adherents committed very few crimes in its name and who were healthily free of neuroses.
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On Sunday, I saw what was most likely a mink(!) in the narrow valley below the mountain I like to hike on. It could very well have been a weasel, or something else. Even if it was, as someone who hardly ever sees interesting animals compared to other people (my sister and both of my parents have seen bears), I felt pretty lucky.
In other news, the mountainside was covered with raspberries. I mean, covered. I had the urge to gorge myself, and I probably ate too much, but then I started to feel guilty. I am, after all, not the only living thing that might like to eat berries. So I thanked the mountain and stopped.
I am about twenty pages or so short of being finished with Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. I recommend it to everyone. It's positively brilliant! The individual sections are good; the way he weaves them together to tell a holistic story is even better. Many smaller-scale ideological squabbles are put into the context of larger patterns of human development, from which remove the inadequacy of their explanatory power is readily visible.
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