Justin > Recent Status Updates

"One Amish man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, BlackBerrys and iPhones (yes, he knew about them) was that 'you got messages rather than conversations.' That's about as accurate a summary of our times as any."

"Consider the provocation, the enormous anxiety weighing on our species for thousands of years, that could only produce such an extraordinary breakthrough as the decision to reject one reality and substitute another."

"There can be no reason for lying except to escape death, and if there were no death people would not bother to lie."

"Anxiety increases with education. As we grow more sophisticated, which is to say more 'unnatural,' ever more ingenious rationalizations are needed to explain death away."

"Hope of setting things right with the gods has driven us to lunacies of self-denial, cruelties, prosecutions, elaborate ceremonies with incense and smoke, dancing around totem poles, the thumbscrewing of heretics; from Mexico to India, the casting of shrieking innocents into pits, and all kinds of psychotic, shameful, and ludicrous practices such as would make whatever gods might be watching hide their eyes."