Kraken

by China Miéville

“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?” The little room felt like a trap. Baron and Vardy watched him. “Come on now,” Vardy said. “You can have faith in anything,” Vardy said. “Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”

Wendell Berry - There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Thomas Merton in Seeds of Contemplation - Everything That is, Is Holy

“It’s always bells and smells,” Vardy said, from his obscurity. “Always high-church. They might … abjure the world”—he rolled the pomp of the phrase around—“but for sects like this it’s all rites and icons. That’s the point. Not many cults have had their reformation.”

Phantom rickshaw drivers, their hours and pay mysterious and pitiful.

Uber, but for rickshaws driven by ghosts

Creationism’s a way of thinking I am not worthless at a time when people were being told and shown they were.

Plastic in the shape of a little cow. It eyed him sideways, so it could display its flank made of glass. Inside were its four stomachs, which had lit up, one by one, he remembered, and there, they still did, repeatedly, one at a time. Paunch, king’s-hood, fardel and maw, digestion glimmering in each in turn toward its lactic telos, stalwart of some Commonwealth economy. From the New Zealand room, Billy thought.

given how much beef I've eaten, I should know what the names for the stomachs are. But this is the first time