Word: eden
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...Israel was so utterly beyond human comprehension that devout Jews neither uttered nor wrote his sacred name.* At the same time, Judaism has a unique sense of God's personal presence. Scripture records that he walked in the Garden of Eden with Adam, spoke familiarly on Mount Sinai with Moses, expressed an almost human anger and joy. Christianity added an even more mystifying dimension to the belief that the infinitely distant was infinitely near: the doctrine that God came down to earth in the person of a Jewish carpenter named Jesus, who died at Jerusalem around...
...anti-Christian philosophers were ready to defend this paradise. The Encyclopedist Diderot warned that Europeans would despoil the Tahitians' Eden with "dagger and crucifix." The Rousseauian enthusiasts overlooked a few things: the Tahitians waged war and practiced human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism; they even had priests, an unamiable group who killed all their own offspring, apparently on trade-union principles...
...wildly impatient. Utopia was to be now. built on the flaming brain of Reason and the decapitated corpses of the misguided opposition. The Russian Revolution was another Utopia supposed to rise from blood and blueprints, though it looked to a longer time and more corpses before the socialist Eden would be achieved, and counseled strategic patience in following the drive of history...
...interview with survivors of a shipwreck at sea, had his dispatch thrown aboard a ship already under sail. Astride a spavined horse named Oahu, he viewed a bone-strewn battleground, exotic foliage, and "long-haired, saddle-colored maidens" with the rapt admiration of a Peeping Tom newly admitted to Eden...
...images were none too striking either. Witness his description of Vietnam as "an Asiatic Eden of Eden converted into a hell on earth by man's inhumanity...