Quote of the day

**Magical Realist** · May 10, 2017 06:23 PM

“Men are like linoleum floors. Lay 'em right and you can walk all over
them for years.”
― Mae West

**Magical Realist** · May 11, 2017 05:05 PM

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."

Jane Austen

**Magical Realist** · May 12, 2017 07:27 PM

“Adventures are all very well in their place, but there's a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

**Magical Realist** · May 13, 2017 04:42 PM

“The moment will arrive when you are comfortable with who you are, and what you are– bald or old or fat or poor, successful or struggling- when you don't feel the need to apologize for anything or to deny anything. To be comfortable in your own skin is the beginning of strength.”
― Charles B. Handy

**Magical Realist** · May 14, 2017 04:53 PM

“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Every

**Magical Realist** · May 15, 2017 04:49 PM

“It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe. The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview-however heroic the efforts of redactors- is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture. We will see that the greatest problem confronting civilization is not merely religious extremism: rather, it is the larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made to faith itself.”
― Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

**Magical Realist** · May 16, 2017 06:40 PM

“Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.”
― David Byrne

**Magical Realist** · May 17, 2017 10:16 PM

“You do realize as you grow older that almost nobody knows what they are talking about.”
― John Cleese

**Secular Sanity** · May 18, 2017 01:10 AM

The Collapse of Moral Truths…

The meaning of our cheerfulness.—The greatest recent event that "God is dead," that the belief in the ___ Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes—the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, "older." But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too distant, and too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built ___ upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending—who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?

Even we born guessers of riddles who are, as it were, waiting on the mountains, posted between today and tomorrow, stretched in the contradiction between today and tomorrow, we firstlings and premature births of the coming century, to whom the shadows that must soon envelop Europe really should have appeared by now—why is it that even we look forward to the approaching gloom without any real sense of involvement and above all without any worry and fear for ourselves? Are we perhaps still too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this event—and these initial consequences, the consequences for ourselves, are quite the opposite of what one might perhaps expect: They are not at all sad and gloomy but rather like a new and scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn.

Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that "the old god is dead," as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea."— Nietzsche (The Gay Science, 343)

**Magical Realist** · (This post was last modified: May 19, 2017 08:35 PM by Magical Realist.)

“It appears to be a metallic object...tremendous in size… directly ahead and slightly above… I am trying to close for a better look.”

Captain Thomas Mantell, USAF. These were his last words as he closed in on a UFO in 1948. Minutes later his plane was to crash and he was to lose his life.