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Through long and bitter experience, Rajasinghe had learned never to trust first impressions, but also never to ignore them.
Nature was his real antagonist—the friendly enemy who never cheated, always played fair, but never failed to take advantage of the tiniest oversight or omission.
“Since women are better at producing babies, presumably Nature has given men some talent to compensate. But for the moment I can’t think of it.”
“The Space Age is almost two hundred years old. For more than half that time, our civilization has been utterly dependent upon the host of satellites that now orbit the earth. “Global communications, weather forecasting and control, land and ocean resources, banks, postal and information services—if anything happened to their spaceborne systems, we would sink back into a dark age. During the resultant chaos, disease and starvation would destroy much of the human race.
“While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded…. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
“Of course man made God in his own image; but what was the alternative? Just as a real understanding of geology was impossible until we were able to study other worlds besides earth, so a valid theology must await contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. There can be no such subject as comparative religion as long as we study only the religions of man.”
“If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress. William of Ockham pointed out as recently as your fourteenth century that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. I cannot therefore understand why this debate continues.”
It had put an end to the billions of words of pious gibberish with which apparently intelligent men had addled their minds for centuries.
in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist—he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot.
That unshakable stupidity against which, as Goethe lamented, the gods themselves contend in vain.
The motto of the Lardners and the Bickerstaffs seemed to be: “Nothing shall be done for the first time.”
‘Belief in God is apparently a psychological arti-fact of mammalian reproduction.’
“But what if this is true? It is totally irrelevant to the question of God’s actual existence, as I shall now proceed to demonstrate….”
“01 15 24 This is Friendship Seven. I’ll try to describe what I’m in here. I am in a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent…. They’re coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by… “01 16 10 They’re very slow; they’re not going away from me more than maybe three or four miles an hour…. “01 19 38 Sunrise has just come up behind in the periscope… as I looked back out of the window, I had literally thousands of small, luminous particles swirling round the capsule….” Commander John Glenn Mercury
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