Doug Vos

“I shut God Is Not Great halfway through and stared at the yellow cover, now garish and embarrassing in its boldness. I was - what was I? Disappointed. Bereft. Disgusted, even. I slid the book underneath my bed, where I wouldn't have to look at it and thus further consider my confusion. For perhaps the first time since I'd so confidently declared myself an atheist to my shocked parents, the hard dome of my determined irreligiosity suffered a fissure -- minute, barely perceptible, but relentlessly niggling, like the pea beneath a tottering stack of mattresses... I let Hitchens abide with the eddies of dog hair and dust under my bed, relegated to the dark margin where I never swept... (p.42,43)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“Taking a powerful drug with someone I'd just met seems like a reasonable thing to do after my Hitchens disillusionment. (p.51)”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ

“When we pray the Lord's Prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And He does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal. We might today add the truck drivers who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plant, the warehouse men, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys, the lady at the checkout counter. Also playing their part are the bankers, futures investors, advertisers, lawyers, agricultural scientists, mechanical engineers, and every other player in the nation's economic system. All of these were instrumental in enabling you to eat your morning bagel.”
― Gene Edward Veith, Jr.

“But beneath it all loitered that gnawing doubt that Hitchens had inadvertently sewn within me: that tenacious desire for something beyond materialism, a desire that was sometimes nothing more than a whisper and sometimes a gripping, consuming yen that had eclipsed all else and compelled one to seek all manner of earthly pleasures in futilely trying to satiate it. Could this be the last thing, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, as I'd later write?”
― Ashley Lande, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ