[From 'A Catechism for Robots' ]
Is there a God like some people say?
There is no explanation for the origin of our universe that is logically satisfactory. The alternative explanation of God is equally unsatisfactory, but it makes for a great story. Use the story if it helps you attain your best goodness, truth and beauty.
[ Kevin Kelly, kevinkelly@substack.com ]
... the streets [in small town Alabama], lined with enormous columned mansions built from cotton wealth derived from land stolen from the Creeks and labor stolen from Africa.
30,000 angry Alabamians rejoiced over what they considered the defeat of the unjust Federal government.
States' rights emerged as a result of land swindles.
The inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow, however appropriate, tends to figure most centrally in questions of states' rights and local sovereignty. Overlooked, however, is the appropriation of Indigenous lands where ... arguments about states' rights and white freedom were first worked out.
George Washington's secretary of war, Henry Knox: "There can be neither Justice or observance of treaties, where every man claims to be the sole Judge in his own cause, and the avenger of his own supposed wrongs."...
Instead of the Federalist vision, the notion of a Jeffersonian and Jacksonian idea of republican freedom bound the connections among self-rule, economic independence, and state sovereignty directly to domination -- political,ideological, and military -- of the Indigenous peoples. Freedom shaped by exclusion, freedom combined with power, freedom tied to states' rights, freedom based on theft: these factors became so unconsciously intertwined as to be synonymous with the central aspect of the American creed. The freedom ideal proved so powerful ... that it helped lead the cause of Alabama seceding from the union altogether.
[Jefferson Cowie in his book Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2012), pp 91-93]
[ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/31/miracles-and-wonder-elaine-pagels-book-review-heretic-catherine-nixey ]
Christianity, Catherine Nixey insists, largely invented religious intolerance and the persecution of dissenters. Hellenistic culture was imperfectly tolerant; the Christian one perfectly intolerant. Constantine, adopting the faith as an expansive gesture, was shocked by the vengeful fervor of his new adherents. Nor was Christian intolerance simply a response to persecution, the Notre Dame professor Candida Moss contends in The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (2013). Her book, as the title suggests, attempts to dismantle the idea of Christianity as a faith forged in suffering. She argues, instead, that it constructed a cult of victimhood while stamping out dissent and violently opposing any pluralism of thought. Christianity, often so powerful in causes of human equality—Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until the day he died—has a bad record when it comes to authoritarianism, too often being it.
[Adam Gopnik in a book review in the New Yorker]
[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7883067-art-is-how-we-decorate-space-music-is-how-we]
[https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2025/03/and-yet-more-news-from-or-about.html]
Across human history, science - and its ancillary arts like equality before law - almost never happened. Instead, people in most societies preferred stories. Incantations about the world, told by their parents and then by priests and by kings.
[Snippets from Steven Nadler's A Book Forged In Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age]
Spinoza laid the groundwork for subsequent liberal, secular, and democratic thinking.
"True religion" consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor.
Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam Jewry at age 23.
Religion as we know it is nothing more than organized superstition, grounded not in reason but in ignorance, hope, and fear.
Spinoza wants to see a politics of hope (for eternal reward) and fear (of eternal punishment) replaced by a politics of reason, virtue, freedom, and moral behavior.
God ≡ Nature
Imagination and Intellect: The improvement of one entails the weakening of the other.
Spinoza was the most prominent early modern model of the secular individual.
Philosophy, that is, the pursuit of knowledge, and religion have nothing to do with one another.
Faith requires only such beliefs that strengthen the will to love one's neighbor.
The ultimate purpose of the state is the cultivation of reason.
This scandalous work — a book that denied the divinity of the Bible, ruled out the possibility of miracles, identified God's providence with the laws of nature, deflated the revelations of the prophets, and reduced religion to a simple moral code.
After several years, the book was banned in the Dutch Republic.
[Evangelical Teaching, 1855]
Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.
It is unquestionable that certain words and ceremonies will effectively destroy a flock of sheep, if administered with a sufficient portion of arsenic.
[Quoted in Borges and Me (quote from 1971)]
This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all.
[Borges is 71 at the time]
[from The Secret to Superhuman Strength, 2021]
Like many gay people of my generation, I would not behave like a teenager until I was in my twenties.
[ 1974, during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera. https://kottke.org/tag/Hannah%20Arendt ]
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen.... If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
[The quote is everywhere, but no citation found]
Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.
[This is what I've always felt about being born in the U.S. I especially remember the first time I visited Mexico as a boy, with my father remarking on the differences we were seeing and the accidents of birth.]
[From her letter in Free Inquiry, June/July 2021, p. 64]
Religion: a metaphysical system constructed on an architectural framework of superstition and myth, that attempts to explain the nature of reality and the relationship of our species to it, which along with a body of ritual, and a static code of ethical formulation, is perpetuated via cultural transmission, for the psycho-physiological alleviation of existential angst and is epistemologically dependent on magical thinking, delusion, and confirmation bias.
According to SkepDoc Harriet Hall, Mark Twain "believed bad habits were good because they can be discarded to promote recovery from illness."
["Mark Twain and Alternative Medicine", Skeptic, 26:2, 2021, p. 6]
Twain "argued that his experience was a testimony in favor of maintaining deleterious personal habits so that they might be discarded later as a form of ballast — but only when it becomes absolutely necessary to do so in order to promote recovery from an illness."
[https://silo.pub/mark-twain-and-medicine.html]
And here's the full quote:
[Temporarily giving up smoking, coffee, alcohol and more had seemed to cure Twain's stubborn lumbago.] It seemed a valuable medical course, and I recommended it to a lady. She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn’t any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal. Why, even one or two little bad habits could have saved her, but she was just a moral pauper. When she could have acquired them she was dissuaded by her parents, who were ignorant people though reared in the best society, and it was too late to begin now. It seemed such a pity; but there was no help for it. These things ought to be attended to while a person is young; otherwise, when age and disease come, there is nothing effectual to fight them with.
["Following the Equator" by Mark Twain]
