Last updated: 17 June 2025
Epistemology: I dream of a world in which everyone can distinguish between opinion, conviction and knowledge.
Problem: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” - Edward O. Wilson
Hope: Hope makes the mind suffer.
Horror: The worst atrocities mankind has committed have been to the sound of laughter.
Wanting: “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”— Sylvia Plath
Genius: “In the minds of geniuses we find our own neglected thoughts. In the minds of artists we find our own neglected feelings.”
Knowing: “Nobody really knows me. I don’t really know anyone. Nobody knows anyone really.”
Living: “We live so much, but we experience so little. We see so much, but we notice so little.” - Alain de Botton
Success: “Only a fool believes that success achieved alone is real.” - John Amaechi
Opinions: “Most opinions are justifiable with the wrong information” - Theo.gg
YEC: It’s unfortunate that Young Earth Creationism has deprived countless people of the awe-inspiring wonder of simply reflecting on how ancient life, the earth, and the observable universe are. Truly extraordinary to ponder. A minor, but not insignificant, cost of that worldview. - JPA (https://x.com/2Philosophical_)
Government: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” - Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Dogmatic: It’s hard to be dogmatic when you realize that a lifetime of being wrong feels exactly the same as a lifetime of being right.
Paradigms: Paradigms come and go, but legacy code is forever.
Think: “If few people think, even fewer think about thinking.”
Presence: “In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
Littered: “Human history is littered with people who think they know when they don’t know, who have utopian visions that cause immense amounts of misery. So I think there’s very good reason not to be too confident in yourself, always.” - David Benatar
News: It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for it’s own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. - CS Lewis
Gaps: Anything you don’t understand, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.
Change: You think you can change others but you can’t. You think you can’t change yourself but you can. - Naval Ravikant
Journey: The journey is not the reward. The journey is all there is. - Naval Ravikant
Insignificant: What is wrong with being insignificant?
Tradition: Don’t return to any tradition until you know why it was abandoned.
Writing: If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
Hindsight: It is easy to look at me now and think that my current beliefs are a result of my past self’s theological inadequacies. It is, however, important to note that my present and past selfs strongly disagree, and my present self has more clarity through hindsight.
Natural: You know how theists often say that science is biased against the supernatural? Well, in the same breath, theists are biasing themselves against the natural. They insist that God must be outside of space and time, outside of what we know of as reality. Is that not simply an attempt to place God outside of the reach of science, and the natural?
Dark: “You can’t learn what you think while focused on what you see, so periodically retreat from all stimuli and dwell a while in darkness, for the dark will cast your thoughts into sharp relief, exposing a hidden inner world, just as night obscures the earth but reveals the galaxy.” - Gurwinder
Pattern: The pattern is always the same. The effects are great entertainment while they’re affecting other people. Then your turn comes and it’s not so funny anymore. Then all of a sudden, the cruelty is felt. Your cruelty becomes a plea for mercy. Should we forget what mercy means to you
-Darkmatter2525
Order: Opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose-noun
Enthusiasm: Success is going from failure to failure with no discernible loss of enthusiasm.
Disappointment: “It doesn’t make sense to continue wanting something if you’re not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don’t want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment.” - James Clear
Disagree: “One reason people think their own side is more tolerant than the enemy side is that they never experience what happens when they disagree with their own side.” - Gurwinder
Hurry: The hurrieder I go the behinder I get.
Practice: Deliberate practice requires effort and is not necessarily enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance.
Unqualified: “Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it.” - Patrick McKenzie
Paradoxical: Christianity is paradoxical and confused. On the one hand, it says that humanity is wickedly depraved. On the other hand, it completely trusts the humans that wrote the scripture it so heavily relies on, and the thousands of men who have piled on their imaginings since.
Simple: “Any Universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” - Barrow’s first law
Future: “The future isn’t promised, but it has promise.” - @SameResolution4737 (reddit)
Error: “Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Keynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong. That the most persistent principles of the universe were accident, and error.” - Keynes (Frank Herbert’s Dune)
Real: “People do not believe Jesus’ resurrection to be real because it is historical, but they believe it is historical because it is real to them.” - Pieter Craffert, DTh
Reasons: “When somebody puts God as a reason on top of something, you can’t fight it. It’s hard to fight it. There’s nothing logical that you can say to a person.” - Randy Wright
Identity: It is even more difficult to get a man to understand something when his identity depends on his not understanding it.
Kings: Most kings are forgotten.
2009: Flirting with the chubby girl at the gym is like buying bitcoin in 2009.
Vices: You have none of the vices I admire, and all the virtues I detest.
Decency: Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
Bizarre: “There is a theory that states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.”…”There is another theory which states that this has already happened.“
Knowledge: One of the many things that irk me about religion is that it’s adherents think they have access to a being with infinite knowledge, but are gifted none of it.
Dark: In Dark Ages, people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch black night a blind man is the best guide; He knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind men as guides. ― Heinrich Heine
Ignore: “The more an idea is tied to your identity, the more you will ignore evidence it is false. People seem to have no trouble finding reasons to ignore the merits of ideas they dislike. To continue to grow and learn, you must be willing to update, expand, and edit your identity. In many ways, growth is unlearning.” - James Clear
Fool: “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” - Mark Twain, Probably
Ambition: “I’m more of a one week on one week off kinda guy. I think they do it that way in Denmark. You’ll never see a Danish flag on the moon but God damnit they’re happy” - Deadpool
Optimize: You can’t optimize what you don’t understand (or measure).
OSS: “And that’s also the open source spirit: To let a billion lemons go unsqueezed. To capture vanishingly less than you create.”
Clarke’s Laws:
Prayer: The secret to effective prayer is asking for things that would have happened anyway.
Persistent: Wrong ideas can be very persistent.
Critic: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. — Theodore Roosevelt
Finite: “What good to me is the favor of a being who, able to bestow upon me infinite good, does not even give me a finite one?”
Sages!: Is there anything more surprising than the logic of so many profound doctors, who, instead of acknowledging the little light they have upon natural agencies, seek outside of nature—that is to say, in imaginary regions—an agent less understood than this nature, of which they can at least form some idea? To say that God is the author of the phenomena that we see, is it not attributing them to an occult cause? What is God? What is a spirit? They are causes of which we have no idea. Sages! study nature and her laws; and when you can from them unravel the action of natural causes, do not go in search of supernatural causes, which, very far from enlightening your ideas, will but entangle them more and more and make it impossible for you to understand yourselves.
Children: “In the matter of religion, men are but overgrown children. The more absurd a religion is, and the fuller of marvels, the more power it exerts; the devotee thinks himself obliged to place no limits to his credulity; the more inconceivable things are, the more divine they appear to him; the more incredible they are, the more merit he gives himself for believing them.” - Jean Meslier
Fear: “He who from his childhood has had a habit of trembling every time he heard certain words, needs these words, and needs to tremble. In this way he is more disposed to listen to the one who encourages his fears than to the one who would dispel his fears. The superstitious man wants to be afraid; his imagination demands it. It seems that he fears nothing more than having no object to fear.” - Jean Meslier
Incomprehensible: “Long enough have the instructors of the people fixed their eyes on heaven; let them at last bring them back to the earth. Tired of an incomprehensible theology, of ridiculous fables, of impenetrable mysteries, of puerile ceremonies, let the human mind occupy itself with natural things, intelligible objects, sensible truths, and useful knowledge.” - Jean Meslier
Silence: “I call heaven to witness that I also thoroughly despised those who laughed at the simplicity of the blind people, those who furnished piously considerable sums of money to buy prayers. How horrible this monopoly! I do not blame the disdain which those who grow rich by your sweat and your pains, show for their mysteries and their superstitions; but I detest their insatiable cupidity and the signal pleasure such fellows take in railing at the ignorance of those whom they carefully keep in this state of blindness. Let them content themselves with laughing at their own ease, but at least let them not multiply their errors by abusing the blind piety of those who, by their simplicity, procured them such an easy life. You render unto me, my brethren, the justice that is due me. The sympathy which I manifested for your troubles saves me from the least suspicion. How often have I performed gratuitously the functions of my ministry. How often also has my heart been grieved at not being able to assist you as often and as abundantly as I could have wished! Have I not always proved to you that I took more pleasure in giving than in receiving? I carefully avoided exhorting you to bigotry, and I spoke to you as rarely as possible of our unfortunate dogmas. It was necessary that I should acquit myself as a priest of my ministry, but how often have I not suffered within myself when I was forced to preach to you those pious lies which I despised in my heart. What a disdain I had for my ministry, and particularly for that superstitious Mass, and those ridiculous administrations of sacraments, especially if I was compelled to perform them with the solemnity which awakened all your piety and all your good faith. What remorse I had for exciting your credulity! A thousand times upon the point of bursting forth publicly, I was going to open your eyes, but a fear superior to my strength restrained me and forced me to silence until my death.” - Jean Meslier
Compel: “On the pretext of being willing to drive you to heaven, they prevent you from enjoying your life on earth in any way; and finally pretending to keep you away in some other life from imaginary pains of a hell that does not exist…they compel you to suffer in this life, which is the only one that you can claim to. “ - Stephens
Open: “Open your eyes, my dear friends, open your eyes…Your religion is not less vain or superstitious than any other; it is not less fake in it’s principles, nor less rediculous or absurd in it’s dogmas or maxims.” - Jean Meslier
Exist: “We have one collective hope: the Earth. And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless, famine and calamity abound. Sufferers curl themselves into the arms of war, people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s concept of God. Do we admit that our thoughts & behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb, vanished airplane, every fictionalized dictator, biased or partisan, and wayward son are part of the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national and cultural conflicts and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, I see beyond the plight of humans. I see a universe ever-expanding with its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional fabric of space and time. However big our world is, our hearts, our minds, our outsize atlases, the universe is even bigger. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world’s beaches, more stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words & sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived. The day we cease the exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuing of our species. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their low-contracted prejudices and would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment. Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective; a perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above nor below, but within.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
Gift: “This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.” - Michael Chrichton
Free: “I’m free, therefore I am lost.” - Frans Kafka
Death: Where do we go when we die? To the same place the flame goes when it’s snuffed out.
Error: But it is not by old error that new error can be combated.
Instinct: Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
Liberalism: “The genuine Liberal does not say “this is true,” he says “I am inclined to think that under the present circumstances this opinion is probably best”. The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology. The decisions in the council of Nicea are still authoritative, but in science fourth-century opinions no longer carry any weight. In the USSR the dicta of Marx on dialectal materialism are so unquestioned that they help to determine the views of geneticists on how to obtain the best breed of wheat, though elsewhere it is thought that experiment is the best way to study such problems. Science is empirical, tentative, and undogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. The scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.” - Bertrand Russel
Canvas: Heaven is a blank canvas upon which you paint your desires, upon Satan you paint your fear, upon God you paint your hope.
Human: We’re built to be skeptical of new things.
Fate: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Death: Every night we attend a dress rehearsal for death, punctuated with some mild hallucinations.
Never: Hitting rock bottom and bouncing back is actually a good scenario. The worst-case scenario is when “it’s bad, but not that bad,” and before you know it, many years have passed, and you are now old, and you never really tried, never really grew, never really lived.
No one left: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. — Martin Niemöller
Mastery: “Mastery requires lots of practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. Thus, an essential component of mastery is the ability to maintain your enthusiasm. The master continues to find the fundamentals interesting.” - James Clear
Dialog: Religions train you to interpret your inner monolog as a dialog.
Retain: No one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood. - Dante
Wearisome: He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet. - William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Accustomed: Christianity is full of mysteries that you have grown accustomed to and ignore.
Improbable: The process of natural selection is a pump that drives living complexity up the mountain of improbability. - Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth
Seduction: The illusion of design makes so much intuitive sense that it becomes a positive effort to put critical thinking into gear and overcome the seductions of naive intuition. - Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth
World of Beliefs: “If you wish to become a philosopher, the first thing to realise is that most people go through life with a whole world of beliefs that have no sort of rational justification, and that one man’s world of beliefs is apt to be incompatible with another man’s, so that they cannot both be right. People’s opinions are mainly designed to make them feel comfortable; truth, for most people is a secondary consideration.” - Bertrand Russel
Uh…What?: We are non-equilibrium quasi-steady-state systems. - Sean Carroll
UFO: Anything is a UFO if you’re bad enough at identifying things.
Children: To bear children in this world is like carrying wood into a burning house. - Peter Wessel Zapffe
Bedrock: We’ve hit philosophical bedrock with the shovel of a stupid question. - Sam Harris
Debt: No time to sharpen the axe, there is too much wood to cut.
River: No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he is not the same man.
Anthropomorphism: I believe in God only in that he is an anthropomorphism of the forces in the universe that we do not understand.
Truth: Most people don’t really want the truth. They want constant reassurance that what they believe is true.
Coincidence: People believe the impossible, and suspect the improbable.
Time: The past is completely gone. The future doesn’t exist.
Ideas: Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. Even if your ideas are good, you’ll still have to ram them down people’s throats.
Best: “The woods would be silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” - Henry Van Dyke
Same: In life, each man is unique. In death, they are the same.
Expectations: Expectations rise more quickly than reality’s ability to meet them.
Unfair: Fairness is a human idea, and the universe just doesn’t care about it. - Hank Green
Mortal: Mortality gives meaning to our lives, and morality helps us navigate that meaning. - The Good Place?
Human: Earth stinks, yo. It’s hot and it’s crowded, but somehow it’s also cold and lonely? - The Good Place
Empty: Heaven is as empty as hell below.
Hope: We burn the fuel of our lives for a sunrise we will not see.
Light: How strange that light should blind.
Tradition: Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.
My religion: I should like to believe my people’s religion, which was just what I could wish, but alas, it is impossible. I have really no religion, for my God, being a spirit shown merely by reason to exist, his properties utterly unknown, is no help to my life. I have not the parson’s comfortable doctrine that every good action has its reward, and every sin is forgiven. My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter. - Bertrand Russel
Pillars of Christianity: God as an explanation for the universe. Scripture as a message from God. Divine revelation as valid epistemic source. Testimonies as confirmation of worldview. Personal experience as evidence of worldview.
Commanded to love: God gave us the free will to choose to love him or reject him. Meanwhile the first commandment is a command to love him.
Obligation: Biology enables, Culture forbids. - Sapiens, 147
Rigor: Most people don’t apply scientific rigor to their everyday experiences, and so most of them are prone to superstition. - Zod
St Thomas Aquinas: That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. (Yikes)
Belief: Could the new testament have been written exactly the way it was if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead? If you’re fully convinced of something, you behave the same way as if it were true, whether it is true or not. Paul was motivated by belief in the resurrection. Belief in the resurrection is not the same as the resurrection.
Calvinism: Does God want everyone to be saved? Why does Jesus talk in miracles so that people don’t understand and be saved, or harden people’s hearts. If God is sovereign, how do we still have free will in the matter?
Being wrong: The fact that I came to grips with being wrong about something as important to me as my Christian faith has, believe it or not, lead me to a place of less dogmatism. If I can be wrong about that, I could be wrong about anything. I could even be wrong about Christianity being wrong. This is the path of pursuing truth. — Paul Ens (Paulogia)
Other religions: Millions of people have believed in other gods so much so that they built temples, went on pilgrimages and sacrificed much in their names. They were as convinced as you are, maybe even more. That’s the problem with personal experience.
Not oppressed: Science isn’t actively trying to take God out of the equation. God was a hypothesis that has no substantial evidence. Christians are not oppressed, they’re just wrong.
Epistemic Vices: Groupthink, Powerful stories, Religious experience, Personal revelation.
Arbitrary Salvation: One of the pre-conditions of salvation seems to be that you believe that God exists. How could you accept his salvation if you do not believe that he exists? Unbelievers are said to have an evil heart, and are destined for eternal punishment (Ephesians 4:18, Hebrews 3:12, Revelations 21:8). This creates a dichotomy between righteous believers, and evil unbelievers. What about righteous unbelievers, and evil believers? Are we not all born evil (Psalm 51:5, Romans 3:23)? In that case, why make a distinction? If we are all born evil, then believers are righteous simply by believing, and unbelievers are evil simply by being born. How is it that God would, knowingly, make someone who was destined for eternal damnation? Why even bother? Surely even 100 years of committing the most heinous crimes would not merit a soul’s eternal conscious torment? In that case, God did that soul a disservice by making it at all. And that salvation is hinged on belief seems arbitrary to me. The request for belief seems to be a pointless test. Why would such a dire task be entrusted to fallible humans, who could fail at every turn? God, by his own choosing, created a doomed humanity, doomed on the grounds of the infallibility with which he conceived them, punishing them with a torture of his own design, and snatching from the flame only the chosen few who accepted their damnation and begged for mercy. I struggle to see this as good news.
Levels of sin: How is God harmed, influenced, or affected by sin? How is it that an infinite God could be slighted, offended, upset, angered, regretful, grieved, or invoked to jealousy? Those things only make sense in the context of a finite being. It would be like an immortal trillionaire with an unlimited-wish-genie being upset at losing a piece of Lego.
God is anthropomorphic: The Bible attributes a lot of human characteristics to God, especially in the Old Testament. For example, the idea that God is a warrior is pretty strange. War is a human thing. Why does he need to embody that characteristic? And why does the whole story conclude in the book of Revelations with a war to end all wars? Why is that the final solution? I would think that God would be a little more sophisticated than that. Anthropomorphism is rooted in human psychology. Therefore, God seems to be a canvas that we have painted ourselves upon.
Intuition: What we take our intuitions to be on these questions are deeply informed by all of the biases of our culture and so on. It’s very difficult for us to sit from behind a veil of ignorance and think what would our priors actually be like. Studying other cultures certainly helps with that. — Brady Goodwin
Convoluted mess: If you think about what it could have taught, and how it could have elevated man kind for thousands of years, and what it actually did, it’s pretty lame…If the omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent God of the universe wanted to communicate to mankind, why did he come up with this convoluted mess of the bible and resurrection? — Brady Goodwin
Prayer or science: Would you rather have prayer or science? Given X emergency scenario, would you rather prayer or go to the hospital? God seems to walk hand in hand with real world solutions. Doctors don’t get thanked, God gets all the credit for things he didn’t intervene in.
Asymmetrical: Two complicated problems: Why is there something rather than nothing? And Why do people believe in God? If God exists, then both of these problems have a cosmic solution. If he does not, however, then we’re left with a skewed, asymmetrical problem: It seems easier to believe in a God than to explain these phenomena. What we get is a universe where God might not exist, but either way is the preferred solution.
No Claim: Things Christianity has no claim over: Light, Love, Family, Community, Fellowship, Generosity, Peace, Sacrifice, Creation, Humanity, Good, Morality.
Secondary Warrants: When secondary warrants shatter, the primary often cracks. — Stephen Woodford (Rationality Rules)
Explanations: …It introduced me another way of looking at the world when before it was: there is no other way to explain our reality. What I said was that the Bible does such a good job of explaining our reality but really I just hadn’t been exposed to any other ways. — Brady Goodwin
Unity in Religion: Religion brings unity if you’re already part of their bubble. It doesn’t help unite people from different religions. It doesn’t handle diversity well.
Experience: What you are experiencing can be real, even if what you are cognitively attaching it to isn’t.
It’s Not Hate: This is humanity reaching out to humanity. — Brady Goodwin
Hope: Hope is a very personal thing. It’s what I want to be true. — Rhett McLaughlin
Asymmetry: Low epistemological standard meets confident unfalsifiable claim.
One-way: God wants a personal relationship with us, so naturally the way to make that happen is to have one-way “conversations” inside your own head. This is totally how normal relationships with real people work and not how small children interact with their imaginary friends…
Dogma: Today’s writers are infused by the spirit of scientific skepticism and the ethos of questioning authority. They should not be satisfied with “That’s the way it’s done” or “Because I said so” and they deserve not to be patronized at any age. They rightly expect reasons for any advice that is foisted upon them. (By replacing dogma with reasons and evidence…) — Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
Truth: Truth is available to all who are willing to work to achieve it, but truth is certainly not commonly possessed by all and is no one’s birthright. It’s hard to know the truth. The world does not reveal itself to us. We understand the world through our theories and constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions. Our way of understanding the world must be constantly scrutinized for hidden biases. — Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style
Desire: Men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are determined. — Baruch Spinoza
Effort: As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.
If true: If Christianity is true, what is the thing that is true? With thousands and thousands of variations, there is something for anyone but nothing for everyone.
Complicated: “What we do is so very complicated. William of Ockham was a 13th century monk. He can’t help us now. He would have us burned at the stake.“ - Westworld
Not the same: Science is based on skepticism, and religion is based on dogma. They are not the same.
Sacrificed learning: When you start with the premise that one person’s guess is just as good as another person’s evidence, you have sacrificed the ability to learn.
The God Excuse: The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument. — George Carlin
Aliens: One of the problem with aliens is that they have unbounded explanatory capacity. Almost any phenomenon can be explained by them. And the other problem is that they have unbounded avoidance capacity. They can always avoid future observations fairly easily…Something that can explain anything, can avoid anything (so it’s almost unfalsifiable) and could always just be our lack of knowledge. — David Kipping
Belief: Why do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? — Richard Dawkins
Awe: I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. — Douglas Adams
Bad religion: One of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
Shame: Without shame like this, how can you sell forgiveness?
Not present: It is obvious that people are often led by their hopes and wishes to perceive what is not in fact present.
Personality Change: The God of the Old Testament is utterly unlike the God believed in by most practicing Christians. He is an all-too-human deity with the human failings, weaknesses, and passions of men — but on a grand scale. His justice is, by modern standards, outrageous, and his prejudices are deep-seated and inflexible. He is biased, querulous, vindictive, and jealous of his prerogatives. — Charles Templeton
Aware: Our human software has only recently begun to be updated with the cognitive awareness of some of the ruts that have been etched into our hardware.
Wishful: Christianity is a continuous exercise in proclaiming what you desire to be true as true. That desire, that mere conviction, becomes real enough in the mind of the beholder to be asserted as a “higher reality”. And it resists all counterfactuals.
God and Country: “God and country are an unbeatable team. They break all records for oppression and bloodshed” - Luis Bunuel
Moral Compass: The moral compass in me, an atheist, is the same as the one in you, a Christian. It is the very same compass you use to pick and choose which bible verses to base your morality on. I just skip that step. And if you go on to say how you don’t get your morality from the bible, but from God, well to that I say the bible seems to inform you a great deal about God.
Grand sin: We are so egocentric that we think our every deed has cosmic significance, even our sin. Atheism is, indeed, an ego death.
Connected: People love to imagine things that they don’t understand are somehow connected to each other. - Matt D’owd (PBS Spacetime)
Religious Conviction: Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. - Blaise Pascal
Sweet: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet. - Emily Dickinson
Trojan: If the gift horse we’re being offered is a Trojan one, we’ll be glad we looked it in the mouth. - Theramintrees
You - Keaton Henson (Lyrics)
🎵 If you must leave, Leave as though fire burns under your feet
🎵 If you must speak, Speak every word as though it were unique
🎵 If you must die, sweetheart Die knowing your life was my life’s best part
🎵 If you must fight, Fight with yourself and your thoughts in the night
🎵 If you must work, Work to leave some part of you on this earth
Dialogue: A dialogue with only one participant is a monologue.
Heretic: If all in society were agreed on the truth and beauty and value of one proposition, all except one person, it would be most important that that heretic should still be heard, because we would still benefit from his perhaps outrageous or appalling view.
Stopped: I stopped fighting for something that was supposed to be fighting for me.
More of the same: I realized that the last six thousand years weren’t something special. They were just more of the same. - Harrison Cother (on JW indoctrination that earth’s fallen state over the last 6000 years is Satan’s plan)
On the Bible: It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. - Mark Twain
Bamboozle: One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. - Carl Sagan
Same Energy: A Christian saying atheism is bad because your life lacks the purpose provided by his religion has the same energy as a cosmetics company saying that your face is ugly because it lacks their beauty cream.
He Loves You: Jesus loves you so much that he won’t force you to go to heaven, but he will force you to go to hell.
Personal Testimony: It’s amazing how a culture that reveres personal testimony is so quick to discredit their own people’s stories as soon as they don’t line up with their narrative.
Certainty: Science is never settled, and certainty is the death of thought.
Leaps: A leap of faith is a leap of logic, a jump to an unwarranted conclusion, made on the wings of bias and credulity.
Action: Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.
Says God: What would I need to say to convince you that God is speaking through me? Probably something that aligns with what you already want or believe to be true. Something that affirms you, reassures you, inspires you. And it would help if I was someone you looked up to. Or if you trusted me. Even better if I was an authority figure. It doesn’t take much, especially considering that the trust and authority aspects are often achieved by proxy (someone I trust trusts them).
Calibration: a belief system survives and reproduces not if it’s calibrated to be true, but if it’s calibrated to be easily transmitted and easily believed. If it isn’t, we never hear of it.
Eyewitness: Ask enough people and everything happened.
