6
" Look around your house. There is probably enough material there to allow you to make a human being. If you, the new professor Frankenstein, put all the bits together in exactly the right way, and then you shot some electricity into the body, would you be able to stand back, raise your hands to the heavens and cry, 'It’s alive!'. You would need to be a fucking lunatic to believe that such a thing is possible. But, deep down, every materialist believes it. After all, they think they will create conscious robots from scrapyard metal. Emergence – how stupid things become smarter together. Not! Emergence – how Not-X comes from X just by randomly shuffling X around long enough. "
― , One Right Answer, Infinite Wrong Answers: Why Humanity Is Addicted to Being Wrong
8
" Superheroes are the story of America. They are the means America uses to tell its story, and it sees itself as the ultimate superhero. America is the most mythical country in the world because, ironically, it has the least myths of its own. America isn’t an inventive country, it’s a re-inventive country. It’s always stealing from everywhere else and repurposing it. Why is Hollywood in the USA and not in Europe? It’s because America is a laboratory for reinventing and representing old stories, for continually mythologizing itself, in order to establish for itself a set of myths such as other, much more historical nations, have naturally. But America is now running out of stories, and is plundering its own stories that it has already told so often. How many times do we need to see Spiderman’s Origin Story, or Superman’s, or Batman’s? The same old material is being endlessly recycled. America has run out of stories, and that’s why it’s going into a steep decline. It can’t inflate itself any more. The wells of its imagination have run dry. "
― , Superheroes and Presidents: How Absurd Stories Have Poisoned the American Mind