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“But you can't kill me, Lord Tyrant. I represent that one thing you've never been able to kill, no matter how hard you try. I am hope.”
― Mistborn: The Final Empire
― Mistborn: The Final Empire
“Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.”
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“However, there is a way to know for certain that Noah’s Flood and the Creation story never happened: by looking at our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Mitochondria are the “cellular power plants” found in all of our cells and they have their own DNA which is separate from that found in the nucleus of the cell. In humans, and most other species that mitochondria are found in, the father’s mtDNA normally does not contribute to the child’s mtDNA; the child normally inherits its mtDNA exclusively from its mother. This means that if no one’s genes have mutated, then we all have the same mtDNA as our brothers and sisters and the same mtDNA as the children of our mother’s sisters, etc. This pattern of inheritance makes it possible to rule out “population bottlenecks” in our species’ history. A bottleneck is basically a time when the population of a species dwindled to low numbers. For humans, this means that every person born after a bottleneck can only have the mtDNA or a mutation of the mtDNA of the women who survived the bottleneck. This doesn’t mean that mtDNA can tell us when a bottleneck happened, but it can tell us when one didn’t happen because we know that mtDNA has a rate of approximately one mutation every 3,500 years (Gibbons 1998; Soares et al 2009). So if the human race were actually less than 6,000 years old and/or “everything on earth that breathed died” (Genesis 7:22) less than 6,000 years ago, which would be the case if the story of Adam and the story of Noah’s flood were true respectively, then every person should have the exact same mtDNA except for one or two mutations. This, however, is not the case as human mtDNA is much more diverse (Endicott et al 2009), so we can know for a fact that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Noah are fictional. There”
― The Invention of Christianity
― The Invention of Christianity
“The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort.”
― The Light Fantastic
― The Light Fantastic
“Olive Wellwood told no stories about Goldthorpe, or the Gullfoss mine. She had packed away the slag-heaps and winding-gear, the little house in Morton Row, with its dark uninhabited parlour, its animated kitchen and pocket-sized garden, the ever-present stink of the ash pits across the yards, and the grime that floated onto the strips of lace curtain. She had packed it away in what she saw in her mind as a roped parcel, in oiled silk, with red wax seals on the knots, which a woman like and unlike herself carried perpetually over a windswept moor, sometimes on her head, sometimes held before her on two arms, like the cushion on which the regalia lie at coronations. This vision was not a story. The woman never arrived, and the parcel was never opened. The weather was grey and the air was turbulent. When Olive Wellwood found her mind heading in that direction, she was able to move imaginary points on an imaginary rail and shunt her mind away from “there” and back to Todefright, with its penumbra of wild woods and flying elementals.”
― The Children's Book
― The Children's Book
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