Winston Jen

“The cultural event being threatened in this case was Christmas, that most Anglo-Saxon of festivals whereby the birth of a Jewish baby in a Middle Eastern stable two thousand years ago is commemorated.”
― James O'Brien, How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

“She cast about for her next adversary. She didn't seem to have one. The fight was over, and the few surviving hobgoblins were running away.

"Form up!" she shouted. "I want a column with the traders in the middle. Fast!"

Once the procession was under way, Aunrae, striding along at Greyanna's side, asked, "May I know where we're going? An ally's castle?"

"No," Greyanna replied. "I suspect we couldn't get in. We're going to hide our charges in Bauthwaf."

The column crept past corpses and burning stone, and as they made their way to the cavern wall, other commoners came running out of their homes to join the procession. Greyanna's first impulse was to turn away those without ties to House Mizzrym, but she thought better of it. Many of the newcomers carried swords, and she could press the dolts into martial service if needed.

Occasionally someone collapsed, coughing feebly, poisoned by the stinging smoke. The rest stepped over her and pressed on.

Someone gave a thin, high cry, as if at an unexpected pain. Greyanna spun around. The goblins weren't attacking. Her client the canoe maker had simply seized his opportunity to knife another male in the back.

"A competitor," the craftsman explained.”
― Richard Lee Byers, Dissolution

“Religion demands complete conviction, but science advises against that. It demands understanding instead of belief, so it must be based on verifiable evidence; it must explain related observations with a measurable degree of accuracy; it must withstand continuous critical analysis in peer review; and it must be falsifiable too. If it doesn’t fulfill all these conditions at once, then it isn’t science. If it meets none of them, it could be religion.”
― Aron Ra, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

“If there really was one true god, it should be a singular composite of every religion’s gods, an uber-galactic super-genius, and the ultimate entity of the entire cosmos. If a being of that magnitude ever wrote a book, then there would only be one such document; one book of God. It would be dominant everywhere in the world with no predecessors or parallels or alternatives in any language, because mere human authors couldn’t possibly compete with it. And you wouldn’t need faith to believe it, because it would be consistent with all evidence and demonstrably true, revealing profound morality and wisdom far beyond contemporary human capacity. It would invariably inspire a unity of common belief for every reader. If God wrote it, we could expect no less. But what we see instead is the very opposite of that.”
― Aron Ra, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism