Fiona > Recent Status Updates

"The same tendency to glory in the quaintness of ethnic religious habits, and to justify cruelties in their name, crops up again and again. It is the source of squirming internal conflict in the minds of nice liberal people who, on the one hand, cannot bear suffering and cruelty, but on the other hand have been trained by postmodernists and relativists to respect other cultures no less than their own."

"If hell were plausible, it would only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter. Given that it is so unlikely to be true, it has to be advertised as very very scary indeed, to balance its implausibility and retain some deterrence value."

"The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism—as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’ So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.’"

"Religious moralists can be heard debating questions like, ‘When does the developing embryo become a person—a human being?’ Secular moralists are more likely to ask, ‘Never mind whether it is human (what does that even mean for a little cluster of cells?); at what age does any developing embryo, of any species, become capable of suffering?’"

"I’m inclined to suspect (with some evidence, although it may be simplistic to draw conclusions from it) that there are very few atheists in prisons. I am not necessarily claiming that atheism increases morality, although humanism—the ethical system that often goes with atheism—probably does." Disproportionately few or actually few, though, if so many people are religious?

For a guy who keeps comparing things to "cranes" and "skyhooks" he never actually clearly defines the important qualities of either. Obviously a reader can get the gist but you think he'd make doubly sure that the reader is on the same page.

I think one of the issues of this book is that it requires some prior knowledge/assumption on the reader's part. It's fine if the reader isn't stupid/can Google, but does make reading a little awkward and disjointed when Dawkins plows along like the reader must follow even though he admits this book isn't just about preaching to the choir. (example: Popperian)

"More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding."

"Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the [creationists] can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative."

"Nevertheless, it is a common error, which we shall meet again, to leap from the premise that the question of God’s existence is in principle unanswerable to the conclusion that his existence and his non-existence are equiprobable."

"The ‘hurt’ and ‘suffering’ consisted, remember, not in any person enduring violence or real pain of any kind: nothing more than a few daubs of printing ink in a newspaper that nobody outside Denmark would ever have heard of but for a deliberate campaign of incitement to mayhem." Surprisingly weak argument because sensationalism actually happens fairly often these days with social media.

"Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense." Who knew that was how they meant it? I wish the same.

"More potently, our minds are a hungry audience, craving only the peaks and valleys of experience. The bland erodes, leaving behind the distinctive bits to be remembered again and again. Painful or passionate, surreal or sublime, we cherish those little rocks of peak experience, polishing them with the ever-smoothing touch of recycled proxy living."

"Worry has weight, and is an infinitely renewable resource. One might say worries are the only things you can make heavier simply by thinking about them."

I suppose this is a book for all ages but when every line is practically a pat on the back about how these characters/this book is subverting tropes, I'm hoping this just a meta tongue-in-cheek because every bit of this writing style is annoying.

"In short, Tress was a normal teenage girl. She knew this because the other girls often mentioned how they weren’t like 'everyone else,' and after a while Tress figured that the group 'everyone else' must include only her." Ironically the opening description of her fits the stuff people make fun of romance/YA writers for.

"I know the sunlit trail well now—intimately, or at least, intimately enough that the blue markers no longer seem exciting (what is intimacy if not the ebb of excitement?)."

"Clearly, we are not on the same drug. This is the problem with human relationships: you come to a person with one feeling and they’re having another."

"I get why people like this outdoorsy, self-inflicted adventure stuff. There’s something to be said for manufacturing a crisis (a crisis can be simpler than just living). Definitely more thrilling. Each time I see a trailmarker, I feel a flood of adrenaline."

"Euphoric dreams leave a question hanging in the air—the question of: Is that all we get?"

"Doom is maybe just a trapped sob, I tell myself. Remember that."

"If I’m honest, I came to escape a feeling—an attempt that’s already going poorly, because unfortunately I’ve brought myself with me, and I see, as the last pink light creeps out to infinity, that I am still the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me."

"evading the keepers’ call to heal" At first I thought there was just some old-timey English spelling going on, but this is at least the third wrong homonym I've seen used.

"My body gives me no quarter and I long, not for the first time, to step outside it, to shed my skin and float, formless and unfeeling through the world. It would be to die, I realize abruptly, without this body I would be dead. What an unnerving, new thought."

The second comparison/simile to missing a step on a staircase within the past 30 pages. At least it was worded differently. I'm not enthused about the writing in this book.

"Disappointment tells us what we truly wanted. And to want is to be alive."

"In life, reunions are the closest thing we get to miracles."

"I reached for my coffee, my interest peaked." Maybe not the best editing in this book.

"If you want something to be interesting, the important thing is to start by living your life fully every day. Then things will start looking interesting all by themselves."