The Dervish Mission

The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets...and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them...Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth...

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

--Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, 491-492.