The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature Quotes

“Studies have proposed that children
implicitly support belief in an afterlife, as it is impossible for the human
brain to comprehend non-existence. There is tantalizing research on humans being “implicit” or “intuitive”
theists—that is, primates programmed to interpret design in disorder,
patterns in nothingness, order in ambiguity. We are set to attribute intention
to natural objects. Humans are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural
phenomena as being there for us. The world revolves around Homo sapiens,
and any perceived design is surely the consequence of supernatural forces
choosing to single out humanity.”
― Christopher Slatsky, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

“I believe so. What I can gather is that they believed consciousness is an aberration, something unnatural. Souls are unique to humanity, and mark us as different. Souls, a mind, whatever—it all makes us too deformed to fit into the natural world. Minds remove us from fitting in. To Dr. Solberg, well, that was a sin. She had to correct that flaw. So, she reached out to the only other thing she thought might have a mind as big as ours. Mother Nature herself.”
― Christopher Slatsky, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

“A people were best described by their monsters, in the complexities of their hauntings and strangeness. The weird gave substance to a culture as much, if not more so, than any faith or language.”
― Christopher Slatsky, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

“At their root level, religions exist to justify the existence of a soul, or as the secularist contends, a mind. The innate need to distance oneself from the natural world by concocting beliefs that inculcate you with an intangible, immortal aspect is the strongest link religion shares with film. You strenuously resist your bodies, rebel against the prospect that your decomposing forms are all there is, blanch at the prospect that there’s nothing cocooned inside your filthy shell to transcend disgusting flesh. Religions and art and dreams are all plaintive cries to transform once your body sickens and dilapidates into compost.”
― Christopher Slatsky, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

“Humans are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural phenomena as being there for us. The world revolves around Homo sapiens, and any perceived design is surely the consequence of supernatural forces choosing to single out humanity. Horror taps into this atavistic theism in that it may fill the reader with a form of awe that allows one to contemplate whether there’s something beyond this physical world, an order, an ineffable truth that sets us to gape at the majesty of chaos. The conceit of an ineffable cosmos caring about us is a seductive thought, and even permeates secular humanist ideologies in exemplifying the virtues of our accomplishments through art, science and such, as if we’ve achieved some pinnacle on the Great Chain of Being.”
― Christopher Slatsky, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature

“And insofar as the sacred corresponds most broadly to an experience of the numinous—that is, to an encounter with something “wholly other,” beyond the usual bounds of human culture, the nonhuman world of nature is evidently allied to the numinous. Confirming nature’s “wildness” has at least a potential religious value then, insofar as it helps us, in Thoreau’s words, “to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”7 God, Nature, and horror are inexorable aspects of our being.”
― Christopher Slatsky, The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature