Let's have some snippets - AND - don't be shy
“Since the Abrahamic monotheisms have inscribed the model of the willing sacrificial victim - be it Isaac, Christ, or Isma’il - within the moral conscience of three millennia of believers, what kind of children would they produce except those prepared to sacrifice their lives for their faith, or - in the secular version of the same Abrahamic reflex - for an ideology, a country, or a cause?”
(p. 194)
”Abraham’s curse is not inevitable, in my view, but continuing reliance on the failed responses of the past will inevitably bring failure, at an ever-escalating cost.”
(p. 195)
“The time is now for the same Abrahamic religions that have brought their followers to the precipice and beyond the precipice on many, many occasions, to find a safe way down from Mount Moriah.
(p. 195)
“The Scriptures of Israel, the New Testament, and the Qur’an have much in common, but they do
not share a conviction in the inevitability of sacrificial violence. The wisdom and power of these texts, read with attention, is that they contradict Abraham’s curse. The Abrahamic Aqedahs, together with their interpretive traditions, indeed articulate the impulse toward human sacrifice encoded within the myths and reflexes of many civilizations, but they also provide means by which that impulse can be, and has been, turned aside from what seems an inevitable holocaust.”
(p. 197)
”… the outcome of the Aqedah in the grounding sources of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - the Torah, the Gospels, and the Qur’an respectively - is not ineluctable slaughter, but the descent from the mount of sacrifice of both parent and child. That departure from Moriah is the sign of the blessing of Abraham. The clarity and power of Abraham’s blessing is designed to reverse the curse.”
(p. 198)