But the serpent said to the woman:
"You certainly will not die! No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."
The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Genesis 3:4-6
New American Bible
They stirred things up, and stirred and stirred, and those stirrings gave a conceptual weight to that crazy nameless something in the air, that greater stirring that the movement, too, was caught in: good-crazy and bad-crazy both, dangerous, unpredictable and alive with raw possibility; when all our light and all our darkness danced with all our hope and all our fear. Some people call that state "love."
Michael Ventura
LA Weekly, August 11, 1989
20th Anniversary of Woodstock
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment
United States Constitution
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that NO official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are ANY circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."
United States Supreme Court (1943)
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
Life, teeming, greedy life
That grows, cell by swelling cell,
Divides, devours, unites and changes,
Filling your ocean belly,
Flinging a green cloak over the land,
Learning to swim, crawl, run, stalk, fly, caress, and stand erect,
Made of earth, air, fire, water
And what goes between these and unites these
The mystery.
Starhawk, Truth or Dare