The Kesh Temple Hymn, a Sumerian praise poem composed circa 2600 BCE, is often cited as the earliest religious text. The words were inscribed on clay tablets and were associated with worship in ancient Sumer. The poem pays homage to the goddess Ninhursag (Nintu), praising her temple in the city of Kesh, while also highlighting the roles of the supreme god Enlil, who authorized the temple's construction, and the goddess of writing, Nisaba, who is credited with composing it, making it a multi-layered hymn to deities and their sacred space. The poem is recognized as the oldest surviving literature in the world. This makes sense, logically, considering Sumerian cuneiform script, emerging around 3,200 BCE, is regarded as the oldest written language. That the oldest known piece of literature...

Conundrum: Do I have a propensity for silence because I have powerful spiritual tendencies, or does my propensity to dwell in the spiritual drive my tendency to seek out and inhabit silent spaces? Of course, there is also the very real possibility that there is neither causation nor correlation between the two, and I am simply a malcontent unsuitable for human interaction. To be clear, in my mind, silence is a metaphor for solitude, even more so now that I am cursed with tinnitus and won't be able to experience complete silence until I am consumed by flames, at which time, both my silence and solitude will be as irrelevant to me as my ear affliction is to the rest of the world.

I stumbled upon literary works by Ojibwe Canadian author Richard Wagamese late in 2025. Of the 93 books I read and rated this year, I rated six with top marks. Five of those books were works of fiction penned by Wagamese. I don't rate many books this highly, let alone multiple books by the same author, unless said author is the deceased prophet, Edward Abbey, a scribe proffering extraordinary magic via the written word. Ed and Richard are two of my most highlighted authors. There are a few others with the ability to parse ideas and assemble words in ways whose beauty brings tears to my eyes and joy to my heart.

Other than war and romance movies, possibly the next most popular genre involves aliens visiting Earth. Almost all end with some type of epic battle from which the primitive earthlings emerge victorious over the advanced alien race. Primitive humans? Indubitably. Any beings who can master star travel have to be more advanced technologically than one whose most advanced exploration method is by remotely controlled, unpeopled vehicles. Advanced technology implies advanced cognitive abilities to harness and create technology that must be light-years ahead of human-designed machinery.

Religion and spirituality are both concerned with humanity's role in the sacred. Religion tends to be institutionalized, communal, and governed by dogmatic doctrines. Spiritually (but not religious) is geared toward the individual and heavily experiential, rendering it more fluid than the static state characterizing religion. The notion of the sacred typically revolves around god, goddesses, ultimate reality, or other transcendental dimensions governing life. Both can be expressed at multiple levels and powerfully shape values, identity, and the behaviors they define as ethical. Both have potential for profound good and devastating harm, especially when they devolve into fanaticism, exclusion, guilt, or abuse.

Despite there being not a smidge of evidence for the existence of an immutable, eternal soul, its existence is a deeply held belief, likely echoing from the dawn of modern man, perhaps even a conviction of our Neanderthal ancestors. This assumes the Neanderthal propensity for ritual burial is evidence of their belief in some sort of afterlife. There is a hidden presupposition in this question, namely that a soul exists, which leads me to believe it was postulated by a theist or a deist. The question, then, is missing one of the potential answers, rendering it more a trap than a quest to uncover truth. Theist camps claim each of the three answers to be the truth, depending upon the religion followed.

Religion was primitive humans' first attempt at pseudoscience, their first attempt to make sense of the mysteries encountered by the primeval brains of a nascent species with minds able to soar from the physical to the abstract on wings powered by imagination. As with any first attempt, it was clumsy and riddled with holes invisible to fledgling brains, rightly focused on satisfying physiological needs necessary for basic survival, such as building or finding shelters to protect them from weather and marauders. They formed small cooperative groups to share the hunting and gathering necessary to support the group, including the offspring scurrying about the cave and those soon to cross the threshold from mother's protective womb to Earth's suckling breast.

To level set: Superstition is a belief that attributes supernatural significance to specific objects, actions, or events despite lacking scientific evidence or logical connection. Faith is a profound trust and belief in someone or something, often transcending mere intellectual acknowledgement, to involve deep reliance and commitment. Both involve faith (a form of not knowing) in unseen, supernatural forces. These forces influence life. They rely on rituals, generally stemming from fear or a desire for control and meaning. The key difference is the object of their focus. One's magical thinking is targeted toward a sky daddy, while the other is not limited to a god. Both make space for the inclusion of amulets to bring about good fortune and to ward off evil.

Silence is typically defined as the absence of sound. Incomprehensible is the inability to understand. The question rejiggered would be "What does it mean to be an absence of sound that can't be understood?" Silence can also refer to a book omitting pertinent data, effectively silencing knowledge, ensuring the topic can't be properly comprehended or is purposefully manipulated toward nefarious ends. And there is the vacuum created when a group is silenced by institutional exclusion, epistemic injustice, and marginalization, bringing about loss of agency and the inability to influence the world around them. The oppression of people is a silence incomprehensible to me, who believes all humans should be equal participants in the game bookended by life.

There was a time when a child was meant to be seen, not heard. Told to stop crying or they would be given something to cry about. More often than not, they were instructed not to speak unless spoken to and, in even less enlightened times, were used to do menial and dangerous labor for a pittance, if any compensation, because they were viewed as more expendable than the more robust workers in the labor force who required higher wages to support their families. It wasn't until 1796 that an English radical published "Rights of Infants,"