"Ray is clearly anguished, Persephone realizes; he believes this stuff with all his soul and all his guts. He believes in the viral metaphor of a bronze-age rabble-rouser from the Levant, as interpreted by his syncretist followers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. He believes in heaven and hell as real, literally existing destinations you can book an airline ticket to. He believes salvation is a deterministic, card-punching exercise in holding faith in the right god; believes that there’s a coming End of Time in which his godhead will return to Earth, reading minds and separating the sheep from the goats. No need to ask why his God might prescribe eternal torture for the unbelievers, no need to engage with the problem of free will—Schiller’s eschatology is either brutally truncated or sublimely simple, depending on viewpoint. One thing it isn’t is nuanced."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Fantasy authorsNovelists from EnglandPeople from LeedsScience fiction authors from EnglandGame designers
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 9, “Speaking in Tongues” (p. 159)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Stross
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Charles Stross
295 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Charles Stross →
Related Quotes
"It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagr…"
"The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investme…"
"Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbi…"
"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent."
"Mo used to be a troubleshooter: whenever the organization had a spot of trouble she shot it until it stopped twitching."
"Story of my life. I wasted nearly a decade before I realized that life is not a game and there are no save points or …"
"A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer."
"The number one crime in any age: offending the money."
"See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire int…"
"Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live witho…"