Home > Work > Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
1 " In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment. "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
2 " If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well. "
3 " Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around. "
4 " The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education. "
5 " The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist? "
6 " The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another? "
7 " Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around. "
8 " The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses. "
9 " In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility. "
10 " I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on. "
11 " I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit. "
12 " To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort. "
13 " You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting. "
14 " I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion. "
15 " Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us. "
16 " In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being. "
17 " I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood. "
18 " But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called "primitive" societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo. "
19 " I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do. "
20 " As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms. "
