Does Santa Exist?

by Eric Kaplan

Science doesn’t tell us what we should think about science.

The point of the joke is that “sane” and “truthful” need to be defined in such a way that we can tell who is crazy and lying without smuggling in our own other beliefs.

This book is about things we are not sure we believe, half believe, believe sometimes but not always, maybe hope we believe but don’t as much as we want to, maybe wish to stop believing but are not sure who we would be if we did.

If we look at Christmas carefully, it almost seems as if the whole point of the holiday is to warn us away from practical rationality.

When we intellectualize a problem, we lose a lot of potentially helpful information coming in from our nonintellectual faculties: our body, our imagination, and our emotions.

A related issue is that of self-defeating and self-fulfilling prophecies. People pay a lot of money to motivational coaches to tell them, “You can do it!” Why? Because it’s true that if you think you can do it, you’ll have a better chance at doing it.

As long as we stick to copying something that has worked before, we are not being creative: We are plagiarizing our former selves.

We had our life figured out when we were kids and then bam! puberty came along and totally upended what was important to us. We had our lives figured out as a couple and bam! we had a kid and everything went kablooey.

Therapy, education, and paradigm shifts don’t promise just to give us what we want, they promise to change what we want and reorient our priorities.

I am going to adopt a mentally challenged child. That’s threefold: [one], it’s harder for them to get adopted, I have, [two], oodles of love to give, and three, I just really enjoy the company of the mentally challenged. There is one caveat I realized, in my plan, and that is, they don’t leave the nest at eighteen. You die, God willing, of old age at eighty, and you are worried about who’s going to take care of your sixty-year-old retarded child. That’s where I came up with this brilliant solution: I am going to adopt a retarded child who is terminally ill. I know. Now you’re thinking, who looks to adopt a retarded child who’s terminally ill? An amazing person.

Once we realize that comedy may in fact be an appropriate response, it stops being inappropriate and we can’t laugh.

But broadening his point beyond what he actually believed, you can say we do believe in the myth of progress, we believe in the myth that man is able to understand and control nature, we believe in the stock market and a steady job.

Myths are integrated with rituals, which in turn make us experience time and our bodies in a distinctive way, marking the rhythms of the season with holidays, and imposing communal, soothing rhythms on the body through dance and rocking. Myth-centered societies engage the senses often with a communal meal that knits our bodies together through the shared practices of talking, singing, and eating. Rituals take us out of time to what the Romanian comparative religionist and fantasy writer Mircea Eliade calls illo tempore.

Weber’s word for the historical process that takes us from polytheism to secularism is “Ent-Zauberung,” which means removing the magic,

Proust is reminding us that by living our lives, we are running a risk—that we can be so absorbed in triviality that we die without ever having known our own life.

So what if we craft a situation in which your pleasure is super important? What if the universe is in danger from a monster who is about to eat it, and all that’s needed to defeat him is for you to have an orgasm?

presents need to be wrapped for them to be unwrapped, or they wouldn’t be presents,

I think what I am essentially is a very high-IQ retard.