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"DnF. Unfortunately this felt like fan fiction — the writing was really clunky and there’s no way in to caring for the characters." — Dec 20, 2025 10:07AM
"DnF. Unfortunately this felt like fan fiction — the writing was really clunky and there’s no way in to caring for the characters." — Dec 20, 2025 10:07AM
“The majority of the 'irreligious' still behave religiously, even though they are not aware of the fact. . . . [T]he modern man who feels and claims that he is nonreligious still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals.”
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“If only we had listened to the scientists studying zoonotic diseases who have long warned that such a pandemic was inevitable if we continued to disrespect nature and disrespect animals. But their warnings fell on deaf ears. We didn’t listen and now we are paying a terrible price.”
― The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
― The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
“It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit…for the nonreligious men of the modern age, the cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute; it transmits no message, it holds no cipher.”
― The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
― The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion
“I had an experience in the whale nursery in Baja, Mexico, that moved me deeply. I noticed that one whale was extremely white, which our guide explained occurs with these whales as they get older. Its body and tail had numerous scratches and gouges, which usually come from years of defending babies from orcas that try to eat the young on their annual migration from Alaska to Baja. As the whale came closer, we could see many barnacles on its skin and a deep indentation in the back of the blowhole, which also were signs of an elder whale. Our guide said it was almost certainly a grandmother whale.
“The grandmother whale’s head popped up next to our boat as the swirling, bubbling water spilled away. She raised her chin toward the rail of our boat, and we began to stroke her silvery skin. Aside from the barnacles, her skin was smooth and spongy, as we could feel the soft blubber beneath. As we stroked her she rolled to her side, opening her mouth and showing us her baleen, a sign of relaxation. And then she looked at us with one of her beautiful eyes. What she could see of us as we stared down at her from the boat, smiling and laughing, I had no idea, but it was clear she felt safe and wanted to connect in these bays, where possibly during her lifetime we had almost exterminated her kind. I felt so moved that tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“Our guide was in the background saying, ‘This whale has forgiven us. She has forgiven us for who we were and is seeing who we are today.”
―
“The grandmother whale’s head popped up next to our boat as the swirling, bubbling water spilled away. She raised her chin toward the rail of our boat, and we began to stroke her silvery skin. Aside from the barnacles, her skin was smooth and spongy, as we could feel the soft blubber beneath. As we stroked her she rolled to her side, opening her mouth and showing us her baleen, a sign of relaxation. And then she looked at us with one of her beautiful eyes. What she could see of us as we stared down at her from the boat, smiling and laughing, I had no idea, but it was clear she felt safe and wanted to connect in these bays, where possibly during her lifetime we had almost exterminated her kind. I felt so moved that tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“Our guide was in the background saying, ‘This whale has forgiven us. She has forgiven us for who we were and is seeing who we are today.”
―
“He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.”
― When We Cease to Understand the World
― When We Cease to Understand the World
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