Gods are nothing
but eternal bearers of meaning.
They make the world meaningful and significant, make sense.
They will tell us about the way things and events are related to each other,
And these narrated connections create sense.
Out of nothing, narration makes world.
Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration.
The world becomes readable, like a picture.
…everything has its place.
Time is order. Time is justice.

Historical time knows no lasting present.
Things do not remain arranged in an immutable order.
…The past and the future drift apart.
What makes time meaningful is not its sameness
but its difference.
Time is change, process, development
…the present is only a transitional point.
Nothing is. Everything becomes. Everything changes.
…What animates history is the idea of ‘the progress of human reason.’
That God which,
as the source of an eternal present,
had long had a stabilizing effect,
now slowly takes its leave from time.

Time,
like a colossal engine is unleashed towards the future,
which is expected to bring salvation.
Not God but the free human being
is the master of time.
…but this regime change from God to human
de-stabilizes time because God,
is the authority which confers finality
and the seal of eternal truth upon the prevailing order.

Now
history gives way to information.
…a proliferation of information and events
which whizz around without direction.
It is a phenomenon of atomized time
namely of point time.
Between points there necessarily yawns
an emptiness,
in which nothing happens, no sensation takes place.
The intervals in which nothing happens
cause boredom,
or they appear threatening,
where intentionality can find no object
there is death.

Social practices
such as promising, fidelity or commitment,
which are temporal practices in the sense
that they commit to a future and thus limit
the horizon of the future,
thus founding duration,
are all losing their importance.

— Excerpt, The Scent of time by Byung-chul Han chapt . 2