Agnostics From The United States

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."

"If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space."

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

"When there isn't enough food, the body has to make a decision on how to invest the limited foodstuff available to it. Survival comes first, growth comes second. And in this kind of nutritional triage, the body seems obliged to rank learning, last. It sort of it's better to be stupid and alive, than smart and dead."

"The whole idea of what happens when you read a book, I find absolutely stunning. Here's some product of a tree, little black squiggles on it, you open it up, and inside your head is the voice of someone speaking, who may have been dead 3000 years, and there he is talking directly to you, what a magical thing that is."

"We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sun light that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise sent us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is, where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always there, if time will one day flow backwards or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. What is the smallest piece of matter, why we remember the past and not the future, and why there is the universe?"

"The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee."

"Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception."

"There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus... the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. ...in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable."

"Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon... was handed to him by the god Marduk... this is a bamboozle... a pious hoax. ...if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody should do," he would have been much less successful..."

"There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. ...such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. ...Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords."

"Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? ...So let's call it "theophorin"...What could the selective advantage of theophorin be? ...to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey."

"Now, it is sometimes said that people who take a skeptical approach to UFOs or ancient astronauts or indeed some varieties of revealed religion are engaging in prejudice. I maintain that this is not prejudice. It is postjudice. That is, not a judgement made before examining the evidence but a judgement made after examining the evidence."

"The hope that if they had intervened many times in human history, surely in the present time, a time of great crisis recognized in the 1960s and '70s and manifestly clear today in the age of fifty-five thousand nuclear weapons, that the extraterrestrials would come and prevent us from doing the worst to ourselves. And in that sense I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves."

"If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?"

"The origin of life happened in significantly less than 500 million years. ...Six days was once a popular hypothesis. ...A process that happens quickly is a process that is in some sense likely... this evidence suggests that the origin of life was in some sense easy, in some sense sitting in the laws of physics and chemistry."

"The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life."

"There is a very stunning range of studies... of interstellar organic matter... the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. ...complex organic materials are everywhere."

"The organic molecules found in the gas phase in the atmosphere of Titan by Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft include hydrogen cyanide, cyanoacetylene, butadiene. cyanogen, propylene, propane, acetylene, ethane, ethylene, Methane, likewise. And the principle constituent of the atmosphere, there as here, is molecular nitrogen. It is, I think, very interesting that we have a world in the outer solar system that is loaded with the stuff of life."

"This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story."

"Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them."

"We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system."

"Let's go back to the solar nebula... with the temperature declining the farther we get from the Sun. ...at different distances from the Sun, different materials will condense out, because they have different vapor pressures or different melting points. ...water condenses out roughly at the vicinity of the Earth, whereas silicates condense out closer to the Sun... you have to go out to somewhere near the present distance of Saturn before methane condenses."

"This image of four spectra is taken from one of Huggins's publications. ...You can see that the Comet Winnecke resembles olive oil more than it does Comet Brorsen."

"When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. ...It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ...with trivial exceptions, all organisms on Earth use... an enzyme, to control the rate and direction of the chemistry of life. ...a nucleic acid to encode the hereditary information ...the identical code book for translating nucleic acid language into protein language. ...At the molecular level, we are all virtually identical."

"Suppose your father... walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week."

"Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God."

"Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. ...Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r'2... as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do."

"At birth all of us imagine that we are the universe, and we don't distinguish the boundaries between ourselves and those around us. ...in some social situations, there is the sense that we are central, important. ...there was a natural projection of those attitudes upon the universe."

"Projected upon the natural world... is the idea of privilege. ...Ever since the invention of civilization, there have been privileged classes... some groups that oppress others and that work to maintain these hierarchies of power. The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position."

"The history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance..."

"If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is a quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason that it seems counterintuitive is that is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate."

"The idea that as I walk in this direction my watch goes slightly slower and I am contracted in the direction of motion and my mass has increased slightly does not correspond to everyday experience. ...the reason that it does not correspond to common sense is that we are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. We may one day be in that habit, and then the Lorentz transformations will be natural, intuitive."

"The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species."

"I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Old Ones; "They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.""

"I suppose what makes Lovecraft both good and bad is the fact that he was an obsessed writer. And this is also the reason that so few of the works in the Lovecraft tradition have touched the same level of imaginative power. August Derleth or Robert Bloch can capture the Arkham atmosphere and style excellently, but it doesn't express their true centre of gravity as writers. [...] This explains why Lovecraft has remained unique, in spite of the number of writers who have been fascinated by his mythical world and by his style. He created the Cthulhu Mythos out of inner necessity."

"I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers. The view I expressed in that book [i.e., The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1961)] was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly a creative genius in his own way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously: that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse and had about an element of ressentiment, a kind of desire to take revenge on a world that rejected him. In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away into a world of gloomy fantasy."

"I am profoundly saddened by the news of H. P. Lovecraft's death after a month of painful illness. The loss seems an intolerable one, and I am sure that it will be felt deeply and permanently by the whole weird fiction public. Most of all will it be felt by the myriad friends who knew Lovecraft through face-to-face meeting or correspondence: for in his case the highest literary genius was allied to the most brilliant and most endearing personal qualities."

"The view that human relations exist only as engulfment is a serious limitation on a narrative artist. Toward the end of his life Lovecraft seems to have been unhappily aware of this; unfortunately he also underrated his own work and died before it began to be popular. His originality and his undoubted talent (the eerily parodic autobiography of "The Outsider," details like the "gelatinous" voice in "Randolph Carter" or "a warmth that may have been sardonic" of Innsmouth) is best at its quietest, worst in its bravely direct but often inadequate attacks on a theme that requires (at the very least) poetic genius. The very rarity of literary treatments of Lovecraft's main theme give his work added interest, however, and his work will probably always appeal to readers who find his theme compelling. If he had not died young, he might have moved beyond the kind of horror story that says This is what it feels like to the kind that adds And this is what is really happening. The latter moves into tragedy and implied social criticism (as does, for example, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House). Lovecraft concludes "the spectral in literature ... is ... a narrow though essential branch of human expression" (p. 106), a comment that might well describe his work: narrow, not appealing to wide tastes and even considerably flawed, yet authentic, and by those who find it congenial, securely loved."

"The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft. Preposterous, overblown, absurd in every way — yet with an originality that looks more powerful and convincing each time I dip into it."

"I'd first read Lovecraft when I was a young adolescent, which is perhaps the best time to read Lovecraft. Now, I admire him for his style, his monomaniacal precision, the 'weirdness' of his imagination, and the underlying, intransigent tragic vision that informs all of his work. He's an American original, whose influences on subsequent writers in the field (Stephen King, for instance) is all-pervasive."

"Lovecraft's writing is a kind of purple poetry, notoriously parody-able. Of course such language can be done badly, and is not a necessary corollary of Weird Fiction (see, for example, the more robust register of Hodgson in many of his short stories, or Blackwood's melancholy ruminations). However, at its best Lovecraft's (and others') writing achieves affect because of, not despite, its prose, a crime against a certain au courant middlebrow minimalism , that will in passing extol barer prose as "spare", as if logo-parsimoniousness were a self-evident virtue ; or, even more absurdly, as "precise", as if the word " table " is somehow more like a table than a prolix descriptive alternative."

"Lovecraft's narrative is not only modern, it also emerged from an imagination that was deferential to no dogma that may be dated, one that assimilated what had come before and envisioned what might come to be in the evolution of human consciousness, deliberating with a fearsome honesty until it settled on a position it could hold in good faith and was ready to jettison as dictated by evidence or cerebration. Lovecraft drew upon and extended the most advanced thought of his time as well as all previous scientific and philosophical developments that tended to disenchant the human species with itself. In that sense, he really went the limit of disillusionment in assuming the meaningless, disordered, foundationless universe that became the starting point for later figures in science and philosophy....Although Lovecraft did have his earthbound illusions, at the end of the day he existed in no man's land of nihilism and disillusionment. As a fiction writer, he will ever be a contemporary of each new generation of mortals..."

"Lovecraft dangles like a rabbit from the jaws of his unconscious. Seldom in his life and never in his writing did he try to fight back, to summon up a shred of coherent reasoning, a scrap of authentic prose, as a bulwark against the terrors and compulsions that tyrannized his mind. But Lovecraft's feebleness gave his writing its one strength: his tales can be frightening."

"Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me."

"H.P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thousand are dialogue. [...] Lovecraft was, by all accounts, both snobbish and painfully shy [...] the kind of writer who maintains a voluminous correspondence but gets along poorly with others in person — if he were alive today, he'd likely exist most vibrantly in various Internet chatrooms. Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others — particularly listening, picking up accepts, rhythms, dialect and slang of various groups. Loners like Lovecraft often write it badly, or with the care of someone who is composing in a language other than his or her native tongue."

"I like imagining that Lovecraft is spinning in his grave as he's forced to view the world through the eyes of his statuettes placed in the homes and offices of the likes of Nnedimma Okorafor, Kinuko Y. Craft, S. P. Somtow, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and me."

"H. P. Lovecraft-that very, very racist writer"

"(talking about nerddom) H. P. Lovecraft exemplifies this fascination like no other, and the fandom for him is well-justified. It just goes to show how many people he influenced, from Jorge Luis Borges to Stephen King. However, Lovecraft cannot be read at all without criticism. Criticism of him, criticism of the racist WASP culture of New England, criticism of bourgeois literature and its tendency to exclude new voices. Lovecraft was a perpetrator and a victim."