Six Easy Steps (Harris)

How to Believe in God
Six Easy Steps

1. First, you must want to believe in God.
2. Next, understand that believing in God in the absence of evidence is especially noble.
3. Then, realize that the human ability to believe in God in the absence of evidence might itself constitute evidence for the existence of God.
4. Now consider any need for further evidence (both in yourself and in others) to be a form of temptation, spiritually unhealthy, or a corruption of the intellect.
5. Refer to steps 2-4 as acts of “faith.”
6. Return to 2.

Sam Harris

The universe

The universe, life included, is not based on expertise but on concatenated accident.

A turmoil of regrets (Mitchell)

In the summer of 1902 I came real close to getting in serious trouble with a married woman, but I had a fight with my conscience and my conscience won, and what's the result? I had two wives, good Christian women, and I can't hardly remember what either of them looked like, but I can remember the face of that woman so clear it hurts, and there's never a day passes I don't think about her, and there's never a day passes I don't curse myself. "What kind of a timid, dried up, weevily fellow were you?" I say to myself. "You should've said to hell with what's right and what's wrong, the devil take the hindmost. You'd have something to remember, you'd be happier now." She's out in Woodlawn, six feet under, and she's been there twenty-two years, God rest her, and here I am, just an old, old man with nothing left but a belly and a brain and a dollar or two.

Joseph Mitchell, Old Mr. Flood

A lie

It is easy to lust for a lie, impossible to love one.

A cosmic blunder (Banville)

Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us?

John Banville, The Book of Evidence

An explanation

An explanation is not a justification. Many things can be understood that cannot be excused.

2 quotes (Bly)

Parents take their children into the deepest Oregon forests,
And leave them there. When the children
Open the lunchbox, there are stones inside, and a note saying, "Do your own thing."

...

If I am not
With you when you die,
That is grievous
But just.

Robert Bly

Poetry

Poetry is the provocation of birdsong,
not the proclamation of divinity.

Spontaneity

Ideally, spontaneity should occur within established parameters.

Of tears and vision

Cry occasionally
or go blind.

LAOT

Government should exist to administer society's responsibility to maximize its members' liberty, autonomy, opportunity, and time. In practice, however, it more often works to diminish them.

Truth vs. Reality

Increasingly I sense a divergence between the engagement of my written words, which describe my truths, and my growing distaste for humanity, which reflects my reality. With reality and truth at odds, how does one proceed? For our grandparents there came an expansion of literacy and education; then, in the generation prior to mine, an expansion of consciousness. During mine, an expansion of communication and interconnection. And next? One would hope for an expansion of autonomy and self-determination—but all signs are to the contrary. Fear is antithetical to freedom. Superstition is reactionary and deadly to reason. Can it really be that the whole world would forswear sanity to convince one mind it was mad?