More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data—offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order—creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.”
What had once been life’s quiet moments of solitary reflection—a few minutes alone on a bus, or walking to work, or waiting for an appointment—now felt unbearable, and people impulsively reached for their phones, their earbuds, and their games, unable to fight the addictive pull of technology. The miracles of the past were fading away, whitewashed by a ceaseless hunger for all-that-was-new.
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Nothing is invented, for it’s written in nature first. Originality consists of returning to the origin. —ANTONI GAUDÍ
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? —NIETZSCHE
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. —WINSTON CHURCHILL
“Edmond found it deeply distressing,” Winston continued, “that the human mind has the ability to elevate an obvious fiction to the status of a divine fact, and then feel emboldened to kill in its name. He believed that the universal truths of science could unite people—serving as a rallying point for future generations.”
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
“It is very obvious to me,” Beña said as they walked, “that there is only one way Christianity will survive the coming age of science. We must stop rejecting the discoveries of science. We most stop denouncing provable facts. We must become a spiritual partner of science, using our vast experience—millennia of philosophy, personal inquiry, meditation, soul-searching—to help humanity build a moral framework and ensure that the coming technologies will unify, illuminate, and raise us up … rather than destroy us.”
Sunlight on stone.
