Origin (Robert Langdon, #5)

by Dan Brown

Atheists now have their own baseball caps?

“Exactly. I also told you that I had found the purpose of my life—to employ the truth of science to eradicate the myth of religion.”

believe future generations will look at our current traditions,” Kirsch declared, “and conclude that we lived during an unenlightened time. As evidence, they will point to our beliefs that we were divinely created in a magical garden, or that our omnipotent Creator demands that women cover their heads, or that we risk burning our own bodies to honor our gods.”

Nothing is invented, for it’s written in nature first. Originality consists of returning to the origin. —ANTONI GAUDÍ

Fascinating, Langdon mused. A clear scientific theory of how life might have self-generated…without the hand of God. “I am a religious person,” England said, “and yet my faith, like my science, has always been a work in progress. I consider this theory agnostic on questions of spirituality. I am simply trying to describe the way things ‘are’ in the universe; I will leave the spiritual implications to the clerics and philosophers.”

Seconds later, a viewer’s response text crawled across the bottom of the screen: RELIGION CANNOT CLAIM MORALITY AS ITS OWN…I AM A GOOD PERSON BECAUSE I AM A GOOD PERSON! GOD HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!

IN THE BEGINNING, MAN CREATED GOD.

“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.”