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« Our metropolises make two mirrors available to the emancipated man, which should lead him to think more often about what he is, not about what he would like to be: the zoo and the cathedral. You never waste your time walking around, and especially going back and forth (between Notre-Dame and the Jardin des Plantes, when you are Parisian, the journey can be done on foot). 'Man passes man infinitely': and the menagerie confronts us unceremoniously with what goes beyond the monkey side, and 'Messiah' by Handel, to what goes beyond the angel side. If our species were ever to give itself a flag - to distinguish itself from the neighbors - it would be blood and gold. At home, bipeds without feathers, we kill the congener, and we love the All-Other. You quadrupeds, you don't worship anyone and only kill strangers. The human mammal is better surrounded by the All-Other and the near. Following the evolution of hominids, from Homo erectus (-700,000) to Sapiens sapiens (-35,000), forces to unite the two ends of the chain, the chimpanzee and the ascetic, the den and the crypt. Whose cross-section produced the vertically stationed omnivorous primate, you and I. Let's say that we must take the god Ra or the Brahman seriously, as well as the rhesus macaque or the little bonobo, if we want to be able to spot without fuss or pretences by which the vertical monkey, with its nimbe and its smears, differs from the non-human cousin. »

« Each variant of the father of the Eternal Father has its spells, an electromagnetism specific to this or that kind of spirit. Among the attractions of Judaism: the absence of dogma, family worship (the table making altar), the practicality of misvoth, observances without obligation of belief, cohesion in perils, an unparalleled seniority. Among the seductions of Islam: doctrinal simplicity and flash conversion (a sentence to pronounce), polygamy (for men), the absence of clerical monopoly, free competition from schools, ignorance of original sin, comfort of legal consultations, the amenity of paradise (houris or ephebes). More familiar are, in Europe, Christian amenities: a God to tuttut, the sensuality of images, the openness to the feminine, the least weight of the Scriptures, which are not divine diktats but only inspired, the valuation of the individual and the ability to negotiate with the absolute, less unknowable, inaccessible and implacable than Allah. Those who suffer in their shoe may look for another one at their foot. And it is not the shoe that will be attacked, in case of misfortune, but the foot. An obsessive will feel comfortable in a religion of the Law, Judaism or Islam; christian faith will get along better with an imaginative or a whimsical. The individual who likes to act in conscience will rather find his happiness in Luther. The conformist, the man of order, at the mosque. The hazard of characterology, mystery of affinities..."p.417 in Folio »