#bs

I talked to him on Christmas, and again on March 5th. Neither one of us hung up the phone that whole time. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#awkward #christmas #conversation #dead-air #march-

God is the supreme uncreated light of which Wisdom is born, but there was never a time when God's Wisdom did not exist. ↗

— Merritt Y. Hughes

#religion #wisdom #religion

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#britain #colonialism #europe #holy-land #irony

I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery. (Steve Jobs) ↗

— Walter Isaacson

#steve-jobs #religion

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm. ↗

— Nick Cohen

#arabs #bigotry #britain #islam #islamism

If you've got a religious belief that withers in the face of observations of the natural world, you ought to rethink your beliefs - rethinking the world isn't an option. ↗

— P.Z. Myers

#observation #reason #religion #science #nature

Or maybe that’s what it’s all about: this religion’s substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool.” “McLuhanesque?” “Hey, look, even I read a book now and then,” Ayumi protested. “McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right.” “In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?” “Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#medium #message #murakami #religion #substance

He was a man I came to respect. Not because he wore Ziploc bags for socks (he had sweaty feet), but because he also kept his sandwiches warming there while he walked. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#respect #respect

American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#calories #corn #farmers #fats #fresh

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers. ↗

— Thomas Pynchon

#paranoia #proverbs #questions #wit #wrong