"history is little more than the Newgate calendar of nations"
Herbert Spencer, quoted by Will Durant The Story of Philosophy
“Goodness me! Humans don't go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!”
Kryten the robot butler in the Red Dwarf episode "Last Day" (as a side note, Kryten firmly believes in a "silicon heaven" for everything from robots to calculators to toasters)
“Once, long ago, a little crazy hypothesis was thrown across a dark sky and left there. And people could never forget it. Religions were built by its light, poets’ minds shone in its brightness, political systems used its warmth to draw men closer together, and science examined it cautiously and ‘proved’ it to be the essence of sanity, the seed of human growth. It may be only a bedtime story that men told themselves in their loneliness; it may be a lie: this sanctity of the human being, this importance of man the individual, this right of the child to grow, but when it is proved so, there will no longer be an earth to witness the lie’s triumph and no men here to mourn the loss of their dream.”
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
“One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing.”
C.S. Lewis God in the Dock
In my latest National Post column, I point to a Page One story in Monday's paper about children with three genetic parents to underline my warning, in the print edition that same day, that scenarios we thought we might wrestle with ethically in the future are here now. Yet we seem unready to wrestle, even unable to.
"Religion makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity makes us sad about the things that do not matter."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, February 16, 1924, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #8, July/August 2000
"The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News October 21, 1905, quoted in Dale Ahlquist and Peter Floriani, Chesterton University Student Handbook
In my latest National Post column I say, from hearing a series of outstanding talks at Moses Znaimer's ideacity conference, that the future is here now.