Michael Hoffman's latest book is "Little Pieces: This Side of Japan" (VBW, 2010)."In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." — Genesis 1:1

"But after all, who knows, and who can say, whence it all came, and how creation happened?" — Hindu Rig-Veda, c. 1000 B.C.

Four thousand years ago, a great city — Ur in Mesopotamia, today's Iraq — was laid waste by nomadic invaders, and in the mind of a refugee from that vast destruction, in the course of long desert wanderings, there was conceived, in embryonic form, the notion that one invisible, immaterial, unnamable, universal, ethical, supernatural, omnipotent, beneficent, personal "God" ruled the world He had created.