Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and mean that this is something they have in common?—Just take a couple of schoolboys: one buys a pocket knife and his companion buys another exactly like it on the same day. And after a week they compare knives and it turns out that there is now only a very distant resemblance between the two—so differently have they developed in different hands. ("Well", says the mother of one, "if you must always wear everything out immediately—") Ah, so: Is it possible to believe one could have a God without using him?
Yes, it is possible.
—
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
(1910) (trans. M.D. Herter Norton 1949)
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