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They believed in nothing; there was no right and wrong.
They enjoyed nothing but the absence of pain.
There was no love for the Empty Ones. No obsession.

  In the beginning, God had many children.
And they had His spark in them. They were full of joy,
creative, alive.
  And God decided to send them to Earth, to
see what they would become. And they thrived.
  But the children were not infinite in number.
God would eventually run out of sparks to clothe with
muscle and heartbeats.

  Eventually the Soulless began to be born. No
sliver of divinity sparked their intellect. No passion drove
them.
  These were the Empty Ones.

  As God slowly phased out His own children, the
Empty Ones multiplied. They could see that they were empty,
for they saw fullness in the Children’s lives.
  Though all-but-devoid of desire, the Soulless did
not want to be the way they were; it was their only clear drive.
  They tried to copy the others but, of course,
could not. So the Empty Ones settled with studying the Children,
consuming everything that could let them feel, if but for a
moment, that borrowed passion.
  But the feelings never lasted. And the Soulless were
again left empty, even more aware of the void.

  And the Children began to number fewer and fewer.

Writing truly is magical! Once you put pen to paper, thoughts that once seemed insightful and necessary immediately are transfigured obvious and insipid.

Maybe it all has to do with the format. The fact that these thoughts are lurking in the dark alleys of your head is what gives them that perceived uniqueness and mystique (similar to why vampires are inexplicably “sexy”). Basically, because they’re in a unique format (ie – your own consciousness), they seem wonderful by default. However, as soon as the medium shifts from the unique to the mundane, your perspective shifts and (after having conquered the vertigo), you unconsciously compare your creation to the millions of similar experiences you’ve had with words-on-paper.
I guess that’s why the vampires stay in the dark: better mysterious than dust.

The truth is that thoughts of creation are dark thoughts, expanded while lying in bed, roving the misty scape of near-dreaming. These thoughts are left for the dark, unable to withstand the burning even of the muted light filtered through your eyelids.
The bright aura of a computer screen scalds the mists clear, each strike of the keyboard an earthquake to that wild, serene birthplace of words and ideas.

It does not take genius to see the fae on midsummer’s night; all children do that. The genius is in coaxing them out of the shaded wood and into the sunlight.

Those who adhere to universals – who insist that axiomatic living is ideal – want us to become machines. We would operate to specification, staying within our parameters, never deviating from the algorithm.

But our humanity is found in trying to reconcile the dark and the light, in seeing the good in both. It is not until we experience the pull between all of our facets that we are truly ourselves.

Milton could not have been righter:

Our nature is to exist between extremes. But this is not some cosmic joke, like Milton intimated, but the most essential requirement to our humanity.

Without indecision, we truly would be robots. Whenever someone tries to argue about the uniqueness of sentience to biological happenstance (or to divine lineage), the most-often used recourse is to indicate that replicating human emotions is impossible. However, it’s not hard to imagine a time when we can program a machine to love, or to worry (or, at least, copy said emotions). But it is, by definition, impossible for a machine to doubt. Either the algorithm continues and the next step is clear, or it is done.

The idea of irrationality (that man reasons about the notion of his tendency to ignore reason) has an implicit unsureness. The very fact that self-awareness has this natural inclination toward doubt… well, that is where humanity lies. If not, it’s where the beauty lies.