Religion Is A Virus Quotes

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Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
This Snow Crash thing--is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What's the difference?
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
This is the reason why atheists protest the “God” gene and religious will hate and protest religion as a virus. They were blindfolded at an early age, and their psychological issues were the blindfold. The facts are often used as weapons rather than information to convey truth.
Leviak B. Kelly (Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction)
Whenever a new Christian comes into the church, I wince a bit, because I’m afraid that they will get the “religion disease,” that the “church virus” will kill off the joy and freedom Jesus purchased on the cross to give them.
Steve Brown (A Scandalous Freedom)
She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she’d been in the middle of a different story, one that had nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of men she’d never met. Just as she’d been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone’s careful plans to shit. Just as she’d once been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn’t you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot’s dick?
Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers)
The beauty of science is that people actually change their minds based on new evidence.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Throughout the United States, divorce rates are highest where evangelical religious practices are strongest, in the Bible Belt.10
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
. Christianity is marketed as a religion of love and tolerance, but inwardly it is a destructive virus that causes division, promotes willful ignorance and retards intellectual growth.
Al Stefanelli
The best prophylactic for god viruses, especially fundamentalist variants, is science education. The more science is taught or discussed, the fewer tools a god virus has to infect populations.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years.
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as ‘bugs’ or ‘viruses’ in, or ‘mis-activations’ of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.
Azar Gat (War in Human Civilization)
Try as we will to take the “cure” of ineffectuality; to meditate on the Taoist fathers’ doctrine of submission, of withdrawal, of a sovereign absence; to follow, like them, the course of consciousness once it ceases to be at grips with the world and weds the form of things as water does, their favorite element—we shall never succeed. They scorn both our curiosity and our thirst for suffering; in which they differ from the mystics, and especially from the medieval ones, so apt to recommend the virtues of the hair shirt, the scourge, insomnia, inanition, and lament. “A life of intensity is contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one. But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves. Is religion declining? We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equaling that of the monasteries in their heyday. If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair. The mind, as well as the body, pays for “a life of intensity.” Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being. And what for the great Chinaman was a symbol of failure, a proof of imperfection, constitutes for us the sole mode of possessing, of making contact with ourselves.
Emil M. Cioran (The Temptation to Exist)
If you listen repeatedly to religious speech, after enough repetitions you will actually begin to notice God and His works where there was just chaotic life going on before. What was formerly chance becomes a miracle. What was pain is now karma. What was human nature is now sin. And regardless of whether these religious memes are presented as Truth or as allegorical mythology, you’re conditioned just the same.
Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme)
Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,” said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
Simply disabling specific critical thinking skills is all that is necessary for the god virus.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
Napoleon said, “The main use of religion is to keep the common people from murdering the rich.
Garrison Keillor (The Lake Wobegon Virus)
Religion does three things quite effectively: divides people, controls people, deludes people.” -Carlespie Mary Alice
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand. – Mark Twain (1835-1910) The
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
For just as Jacob and Esau came from their mother Rebecca and their father Isaac, so also both zombies and werewolves came from rabies and blind blessings of theology.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
Religion is a virus, and we are glad to have it.
John Art
The Ancestors were from Africa and entered into Australia 50,000 years ago. They would have eaten food from indigenous life from their area almost immediately. They harvest most of the day, and eat this food. The AM looks like a food source they already eat in Africa. It is highly likely they did eat it. This is still not enough to say it had connection to religion, but it is enough to say they ate it, in all probability. Forensic DNA shows again that they did eat it, as the retrovirus that was on Amanita Muscaria can only be transferred via consumption by humans and it is known that AM is a vector for this virus. Since they forage daily and consume what they forage it puts the consumption just around the time of 50,000 years ago.
Leviak B. Kelly (Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction)
Corona virus is not a cult, perception or religion to discuss if it is real or not. People who don’t believe that Corona Virus is real. Are inconveniencing and endangering the lives of others. They become the carriers of the virus and spreading it everywhere. For your own sake. Stay at HOME.
De philosopher DJ Kyos
We have failed to see truth right in front of us because we have been buried into an obfuscated mindset by theologies and cultural mores made by theologies that themselves have been created by diseases.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
Perhaps the monsters of myth and legend are merely tormented diseased souls that were maltreated because of unseen forces we did not understand and labelled ignorantly and incorrectly out of fear and self-righteousness.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
Hive Queen: So many of your people are becoming Christians. Believing in the god these humans brought with them. Human: You don’t believe in God? Hive Queen: The question never came up. We have always remembered how we began. Human: You evolved. We were created. Hive Queen: By a virus. Human: By a virus that God created in order to create us. Hive Queen: So you, too, are a believer. Human: I understand belief. Hive Queen: No—you desire belief. Human: I desire it enough to act as if I believed. Maybe that’s what faith is. Hive Queen: Or deliberate insanity.
Orson Scott Card (Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3))
We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! "This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." "No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone." "Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." "'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?" "'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now." "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat." "There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.
Carlos Castaneda (The Active Side of Infinity)
...you have to understand who you are talking to and whether or not they are using the word in any proper context of its definition. Whether this is its primary literal meaning or any of the metaphorical constructs that we humans are fond of using.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I’ll fucking kill you,’ said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
In many ways, the vampire was spared the gross suffering of the werewolf but that is only because they suffered in many other ways at the hands of the supernatural doctrines of religion. They, however, were connected to the hyperbolic voice crying in the wilderness.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
Horrific many eyed, many winged angels, undead zombies and vampires are part of our cultures. Witches, warlocks, and demons as well. [...] In many cases what has given birth to some of them may never be known, but perhaps it is because we are not looking in the right places.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
The vampire was the third theological concoction made for the culture to drink from the mixologists of religion and the main ingredient of rabies. The vampire throughout the world arose concurrently with the werewolf and its origin again stemmed from the tortures of being “zombies” tied down in the wilderness.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
Many myths and religions have some kind of threat of retribution from their god or gods, and their doctrines warn of the dangers of doing various forbidden things. Why? Because memes involving danger are the ones we pay attention to! As oral traditions developed, our brains were set up to amplify the dangers and give them greater significance than the rest.
Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme)
Nothing seems more pitiable than otherwise intelligent people gathering every Sunday to struggle ever so hard to understand something that is unintelligible.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. – H. L. Mencken
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs.—What’s the difference?
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
The chains men bear they forged themselves. Strike off their chains and they will weep for their lost security.” This
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Cain was sent the raven to bury his brother's body and hide his transgression from God, the supposed truth still came out in various holy books.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
She's a virus. Her entire family is. They've infected the country with a special brand of intolerance that masquerades as religion.
Meghan MacLean Weir (The Book of Essie)
Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion... What's the difference
Neal Stephenson
The religions changed, the nuances of the demon, theologically, changed but the creature itself did not. So many diseases and illnesses were ascribed to demonic possession.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
People with high dependency needs have difficulty standing up to this level of social sanction. The more dependent, the less able they are to use their native intelligence. They depend instead on the word of religious authority.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
The supernatural is a supposed ethereal realm of existence in most theological paradigms, but again it is predicated on the natural by definition. If you, therefore, cannot prove the natural as a fact then by definition you cannot ever prove the supernatural either.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by d’Holbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this “scientism” have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other “new atheists” – Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist – religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and “poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness. But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.
Karen Armstrong
¡FELICES FIESTAS!!! Durante mucho tiempo y a pesar de mi esfuerzo intelectual no podía encontrar mejor deseo para las Fiestas que “SALUD, AMOR y DINERO” (en conjunto y en ese orden). Daba vueltas y vueltas y terminaba siempre cayendo en ese trío perfecto. Tener Dinero sin amor, ni salud, no se lo deseo a nadie, es casi un castigo divino. Tener Amor, sin salud, ni dinero, es complicado. Y tener Salud, sin amor, ni dinero, es la nada misma (la salud solo se valora cuando no se tiene). Tener los tres, era ¡la gloria! Sin embargo, en los últimos años, le puse más foco a la FELICIDAD. Si uno logra ser feliz, no importa mucho con qué y cómo se consigue. Al final de cuentas, también se puede ser un infeliz teniendo salud, dinero y amor. Y si uno se siente infeliz, casi nada tiene sentido. Este año, me gustaría aprovechar MI DESEO contra un feroz virus que está esta haciendo estragos en nuestra Sociedad: LA INTOLERANCIA HACIA EL QUE PIENSA DIFERENTE. La vida en blanco o negro no es real, es solo un ardid ficticio de los inseguros. No creo que sea un buen negocio impostar seguridad a cambio de que pierdas el sublime disfrute de la diversidad de tu entorno. ¿Sientes que destrozaste al “enemigo” en la discusión y que impusiste por knok out “tu” incuestionable verdad? Lamento informarte que si con ello dañaste la relación que tenias... ¡perdiste! Poquísimas discusiones justifican dañar una relación. Recuerda siempre: muchas veces se pierde más ganando y viceversa. La intolerancia es una agresión que destruye. El problema de “ser el dueño de la verdad” es que esa “verdad” solo existe dentro de tu mente. Deja las verdades absolutas para las religiones y anímate a navegar conmigo en los desafiantes mares de los colores. POR TODO ESTO, QUERIDOS AMIGOS, NOS DESEO UN MUNDO MÁS TOLERANTE, EN DONDE LA DIFERENCIA NO SEA GENERADORA DE ENEMIGOS, SINO DE FUENTES INAGOTABLES DE OPORTUNIDADES. SI ENTRE TODOS LO LOGRAMOS, SIN DUDAS HABRÁ MAS FELICIDAD, MÁS SALUD, MÁS AMOR Y MÁS RIQUEZA. ¡FELICES FIESTAS! POR UN 2018 REPLETO DE REALIZACIONES PERSONALES. GONZALO
Gonzalo Guma
when we talk about the occult, we need to understand what we are meaning to communicate and try to grasp what the individual might hear. You see, the occult to many religious persons can mean anything from benign supernatural or magical things to malignant forces that corrupt or seek to destroy us.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
Respiro profundo otra vez y ya van tantas... La cama es un mal lugar para estos pensamientos. Me siendo agobiado. Ya no aguanto más. El #mundo "desquició" sin darnos tiempo. Enjaulados en nuestras propias casas rogando que el #monstruo no entre a aniquilarnos. Nunca nos sentí tan frágiles e indefensos. El #virus no conoce de fronteras, ni de etnias, ni mucho menos, de religiones... iBasta de noticias, por favor! El Gobierno de turno nos indica hasta en qué momentos podemos respirar. ¿Hoy me tocaba ir al baño? Ya ni sé que día es hoy... Suspiro profundo. #Extraño a demasiada gente. Extraño demasiadas cosas. Extraño tener otro tipo de problemas. Mis pensamientos que se van enredando y diluyendo. La cama que se hace demasiado ancha y fría. Todo esto parece una película de Ciencia Ficción, una de terror, una conspiración mundial... Ya ni me doy cuenta si respiro. Sí, sí: ¡es una conspiración mundial! Es parte de un Plan #macabro de los "dueños del mundo". Inventaron una #Pandemia para que entremos en #pánico y nos encerremos como pichoncitos mojados. Las economías caen estrepitosamente. Los países que se debilitan hasta límites impensados. #Crisis, #muerte y #pobreza por doquier. Las necesidades obligan a las personas enjauladas a ser más adictas que nunca a la realidad virtual. Eso es lo que querían, eso es lo que buscaban... ¿Aún existe la realidad real? Es un Plan que viene desde muy lejos. Y esta, es la antesala del Plan Maestro. Ahora nos instalarán chips para controlarnos del todo e iremos perdiendo, una a una, las #libertades individuales que tanta sangre nos costó conseguir. "Es por nuestra seguridad", nos dirán con tono paternal. Nos quieren débiles, asustados, divididos, denunciándonos, enojados, indefinidos y adictos. La tecnología nos hace más manipulables que un ratón... Cuando suene el timbre, todos iremos tras el queso, reclamando -al unísono- por un poderoso #Gobierno Único, de un Nuevo #Orden Mundial, que cuidará el remanente de la especie... Por fin, mis pensamientos, exhaustos, terminan flanqueando y me quedo dormido... Por suerte, ahora, puedo tener otras pesadillas, algo distintas a nuestra angustiante realidad...
Gonzalo Guma
Now the End of the World is an abstraction because it has never happened. It has no existence in the real world. It will cease to be an abstraction only when it happens--if it happens. (I do not claim to know "God's mind" on the subject- -nor to possess any scientific knowledge about a still non- existent future). I see only a mental image & its emotional ramifications; as such I identify it as a kind of ghostly virus, a spook-sickness in myself which ought to be expunged rather than hypochondriacally coddled & indulged. I have come to despise the "End of the World" as an ideological icon held over my head by religion, state, & cultural milieu alike, as a reason for doing nothing.
Hakim Bey
Boston. Fucking horrible. I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity." But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths. But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness. But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago. So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will.
Patton Oswalt
I feel as though dispossessed from the semblances of some crystalline reality to which I’d grown accustomed, and to some degree, had engaged in as a participant, but to which I had, nevertheless, grown inexplicably irrelevant. But the elements of this phenomenon are now quickly dissolving from memory and being replaced by reverse-engineered Random Access actualizations of junk code/DNA consciousness, the retro-coded catalysts of rogue cellular activity. The steel meshing titters musically and in its song, I hear a forgotten tale of the Interstitial gaps that form pinpoint vortexes at which fibers (quanta, as it were) of Reason come to a standstill, like light on the edge of a Singularity. The gaps, along their ridges, seasonally infected by the incidental wildfires in the collective unconscious substrata. Heat flanks passageways down the Interstices. Wildfires cluster—spread down the base trunk Axon in a definitive roar: hitting branches, flaring out to Dendrites to give rise to this release of the very chemical seeds through which sentience is begotten. Float about the ether, gliding a gentle current, before skimming down, to a skip over the surface of a sea of deep black with glimmering waves. And then, come to a stop, still inanimate and naked before any trespass into the Field, with all its layers that serve to veil. Plunge downward into the trenches. Swim backwards, upstream, and down through these spiraling jets of bubbles. Plummet past the threshold to trace the living history of shadows back to their source virus. And acquire this sense that the viruses as a sample, all of the outlying populations withstanding: they have their own sense of self-importance, too. Their own religion. And they mine their hosts barren with the utilitarian wherewithal that can only be expected of beings with self-preservationist motives.
Ashim Shanker (Sinew of the Social Species)
But you know, the longer you listen to this abortion debate, the more you hear this phrase “sanctity of life”. You’ve heard that. Sanctity of life. You believe in it? Personally, I think it’s a bunch of shit. Well, I mean, life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians all taking turns killing each other ‘cause God told them it was a good idea. The sword of God, the blood of the land, vengeance is mine. Millions of dead motherfuckers. Millions of dead motherfuckers all because they gave the wrong answer to the God question. “You believe in God?” “No.” Boom. Dead. “You believe in God?” “Yes.” “You believe in my God? “No.” Boom. Dead. “My God has a bigger dick than your God!” Thousands of years. Thousands of years, and all the best wars, too. The bloodiest, most brutal wars fought, all based on religious hatred. Which is fine with me. Hey, any time a bunch of holy people want to kill each other I’m a happy guy. But don’t be giving me all this shit about the sanctity of life. I mean, even if there were such a thing, I don’t think it’s something you can blame on God. No, you know where the sanctity of life came from? We made it up. You know why? ‘Cause we’re alive. Self-interest. Living people have a strong interest in promoting the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don’t see Abbott and Costello running around, talking about this shit, do you? We’re not hearing a whole lot from Mussolini on the subject. What’s the latest from JFK? Not a goddamn thing. ‘Cause JFK, Mussolini and Abbott and Costello are fucking dead. They’re fucking dead. And dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life. Only living people care about it so the whole thing grows out of a completely biased point of view. It’s a self serving, man-made bullshit story. It’s one of these things we tell ourselves so we’ll feel noble. Life is sacred. Makes you feel noble. Well let me ask you this: if everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die, where does the sacred part come in? I’m having trouble with that. ‘Cuz, I mean, even with all this stuff we preach about the sanctity of life, we don’t practice it. We don’t practice it. Look at what we’d kill: Mosquitoes and flies. ‘Cause they’re pests. Lions and tigers. ‘Cause it’s fun! Chickens and pigs. ‘Cause we’re hungry. Pheasants and quails. ‘Cause it’s fun. And we’re hungry. And people. We kill people… ‘Cause they’re pests. And it’s fun! And you might have noticed something else. The sanctity of life doesn’t seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says “Save the tumors.”. Or “I brake for advanced melanoma.”. No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up! Made it up!
George Carlin (More Napalm and Silly Putty)
We create ourselves to be almost blind walking dead, where we are led by both negative aspects of religion and cultural conformity to gloss over people. We gloss over the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. We gloss over the Japanese internment camps that most likely would have been far worse had the war continued longer. We often marginalize those besides the ethnic and Jewish descent that died in the Nazi holocaust of World war II.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
The pressure to bind is always present. Once the virus gets one hook into the culture, it has the means to place many more. In this case a hook might be reestablishing prayer in schools, which could lead to reading Bible verses in classrooms, which quickly leads to using schools for religious instruction, and so on. A culture that is bound with religion soon becomes an oppressive and toxic place for those who are not infected with the god virus.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Think of humanity as a giant software program. Our bodies are the hardware and our ideas are the software. Sometimes our software gets a virus : Religious misinterpretations. People who are infected with flawed religious ideas can infect others, especially their children. The religions spread and mutate, until there are thousands of different religious ideas, most of them harmless, some healthy and helpful, but others quite deadly. When the deadly ones reach critical mass, they threaten the whole.
Scott Adams (The Religion War)
Government didn’t say you must stop worshiping God. You must stop praying or preaching the word of God. You must stop believing in God or exercising your faith. You must stop your religion, but what is asking for is everyone should stop human contact. and should social distance themselves, because the virus spread easily in a group of people. By limiting contact, it means not going to church, Easter, clubs, Tavern, events, malls, gym ,school, work. I need you to do your part in order for me to survive.
De philosopher DJ Kyos
Is humanity ready to look upon the roots of religion as it has looked into its political and scientific roots? Are people ready to strip away the fallacies like they have with humours for bacteria, virus, et cetera? Can spirituality be given a chance to lie bare and naked, proudly strutting its stuff publicly? These are the questions that will render the verdict of whether one hears the call of the child (truth) and proclaim its message to the religious royalty, or whether humanity will cling to its “infallible” yet invisible messengers as if they currently cling to us as clothing.
Leviak B. Kelly (Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction)
How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
In 1966, the Roman Catholic Church formally ended the largest censorship drive in the history of the world, formally known as the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (the Index of Forbidden Books). Formally launched in 1559 under Pope Paul IV, this four-century project was remarkably successful, even against non-Catholics. The Church was so powerful in Europe and America that many authors would avoid controversial topics, or modify their works according to the Church's dictates, in order to avoid condemnation by the Church. Authors who ignored the Church's dictates and were banned had trouble finding publishers. Even if they were published, their books were often hard or impossible to find because bookstores were under pressure not to stock them.
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
Growing numbers of us are acknowledging with grief that many forms of supremacy—Christian, white, male, heterosexual, and human—are deeply embedded not just in Christian history but also in Christian theology. We are coming to see that in hallowed words like almighty, sovereignty, kingdom, dominion, supreme, elect, chosen, clean, remnant, sacrifice, lord, and even God, dangerous viruses often lie hidden, malware that must be identified and purged from our software if we want our future to be different from our past. We are realizing that our ancestors didn’t merely misinterpret a few Scriptures in their day; rather, they consistently practiced a dangerous form of interpretation that deserves to be discredited, rejected, and replaced by a morally wiser form of interpretation today. (We
Brian D. McLaren (The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian)
We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you a whole lot more susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things from taking over the world is the Babel factor - the walls of mutual incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of viruses. Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
The ancient war between science and religion is over,” the camerlengo said. “You have won. But you have not won fairly. You have not won by providing answers. You have won by so radically reorienting our society that the truths we once saw as signposts now seem inapplicable. Religion cannot keep up. Scientific growth is exponential. It feeds on itself like a virus. Every new breakthrough opens doors for new breakthroughs. Mankind took thousands of years to progress from the wheel to the car. Yet only decades from the car into space. Now we measure scientific progress in weeks. We are spinning out of control. The rift between us grows deeper and deeper, and as religion is left behind, people find themselves in a spiritual void. We cry out for meaning. And believe me, we do cry out. We see UFOs, engage in channeling, spirit contact, out-of-body experiences, mindquests—all these eccentric ideas have a scientific veneer, but they are unashamedly irrational. They are the desperate cry of the modern soul, lonely and tormented, crippled by its own enlightenment and its inability to accept meaning in anything removed from technology.” Mortati
Dan Brown (Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1))
I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where the gift of getting my husband back was as accidental as my almost losing him, where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers’ hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint—I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth, and I am turning around to tell Jay once again, “Yes, here.” I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of m y might.
Elizabeth Berg (Range of Motion)
All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral -- a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next. That's the way it used to be, and unfortunately, that's the way it's headed right now. But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C., driven out of their homeland by the invasion of Sargon II, but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus -- that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since." "Do you believe in God or not?" Hiro says. First things first. "Definitely." "Do you believe in Jesus?" "Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus." "How can you be a Christian without believing in that?" "I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Lagos, typically for a nonbusinessman, had a fatal flaw: he thought too small. He figured that with a little venture capital, this neurolinguistic hacking could be developed as a new technology that would enable Rife to maintain possession of information that had passed into the brains of his programmers. Which, moral considerations aside, wasn't a bad idea. "Rife likes to think big. He immediately saw that this idea could be much more powerful. He took Lagos's idea and told Lagos himself to buzz off. Then he started dumping a lot of money into Pentecostal churches. He took a small church in Bayview, Texas, and built it up into a university. He took a smalltime preacher, the Reverend Wayne Bedford, and made him more important than the Pope. He constructed a string of self-supporting religious franchises all over the world, and used his university, and its Metaverse campus, to crank out tens of thousands of missionaries, who fanned out all over the Third World and began converting people by the hundreds of thousands, just like St. Louis Bertrand. L. Bob Rife's glossolalia cult is the most successful religion since the creation of Islam. They do a lot of talking about Jesus, but like many selfdescribed Christian churches, it has nothing to do with Christianity except that they use his name. It's a postrational religion. "He also wanted to spread the biological virus as a promoter or enhancer of the cult, but he couldn't really get away with doing that through the use of cult prostitution because it is flagrantly anti-Christian. But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people -- and there was more than just vaccine in those needles. "Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs. So for us, he devised a means for extracting the virus from human blood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA." "Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?" "Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders. "The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us. "At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few -- perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization. "So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked." "Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says. "Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh – Voltaire (1694-1778)
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
Religion is a virus that we cannot get rid of. A virus of the brain that comes from no other source than itself. We who are uninfected must find the cure.
Jordan Beem
While we may never be fully safe from fundamentalism, the best prevention is solid education in the sciences.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Guns, Germs and Steel Infectious diseases introduced [into America] with Europeans ... spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population. – Jared Diamond
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
The Pilgrims' experience was the rule rather than the exception. Everywhere Europeans went, their diseases caused staggering death rates: fifty percent, eighty percent, even ninety-nine percent of indigenous people would die.
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
Pray to GOD, the Ascended Masters, the Archangels, and the Elohim Masters, for the awakening of the people of the Earth. Pray to these Masters for the saving of the rain forests, to stop gang violence, to save the whales. Pray for the economic systems of the Earth to become more responsive to cooperation and the dictates of the Soul and Mighty I Am Presence. Pray to GOD and these Masters for a renaissance of the arts and music in a spiritual manner. Pray that scientists around the world be infused with New Age technologies, understandings and insights, so diseases such as AIDS, the Ebola virus, and cancer can be cured. Pray to GOD and these Masters for a complete transformation of the religions of the Earth, so the contamination of negative ego concepts is cleared from their doctrine, as well as judgmentalness, self-righteousness, and intolerance. Pray to GOD and the Masters for the complete transformation of every aspect of our civilization, to reflect the ideals and values of the Divine Plan of GOD and the Planetary Hierarchy!
Joshua D. Stone (The Golden Book of Melchizedek: How to Become an Integrated Christ/Buddha in This Lifetime Volume 2)
But we're here today to offer a different version of Yahweh's makeover, a different way of looking at this history. This is the story about how humans shaped God's image rather than the other way around. We're going to learn how the transformation of Abraham's god-of-armies to our God Almighty is the result of an evolutionary process, the powerful and inexorable forces known as "survival of the fittest." But it was cultural evolution, not biological evolution, that was at work, changing and improving Yahweh's image over the millennia. And it wasn't just Yahweh who was shaped by cultural evolution; these same forces created and refined all of our religious beliefs.
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
But it seems that it is modern medicine in particular that reflects best the religious heritage of our culture: its ideology, myths, dogmas, symbols, beliefs, gestures, practices, hopes and fears. Although it presents itself as rational, i.e. scientific, objective and neutral, its organisation and functioning are typical of religion. Thus, while defining itself as a secular enterprise, medicine is deeply waterlogged with the spirit of the old religion. Even more, for many, medicine becomes a new, secularised religion (Berger 1991; Clerc 2004; Dworkin 2000 [2008]; Szasz 1977; Szczeklik 2012; Tatoń 2003) and takes up its social functions. It is present in people’s life from the womb to the tomb, provides a response to the same fears and angsts of humanity as the Church, and the pursuit of ‘eternal’ health, youth and beauty has substituted the religious zeal for salvation. Medicine’s war on diseases and death is similar to a religious war against sin, as viruses and bacteria have replaced devils and demons, and the structure and functioning of the World Health Organization (WHO) is similar to that of the Church. Physicians have replaced priests and old, religious morality is being substituted by a new moral code: healthism; even though the object of faith and its expression are different, their religious nature persists.
Anonymous
Like the traditional confessions, the new religion preaches that people when born into the world are corrupted and need the protection of a salutary institution—the church of medicine. According to the theology of medicine, newborn humans are weak and exposed to the impact of new devils: viruses, bacteria and microbes. For this reason, just after delivery, which takes place in the new religion’s new churches, individuals are subjected to new purification rituals (Gajewska 2012; Domańska 2005; Nowakowska 2010). As medical demonology stresses that the world is ruled by omnipresent demonic viruses, bacteria and genes that spell doom for people, the role of modern priests is to lead humanity toward salvation and eternal health. Thus, vaccinations substitute for baptism and introduce the newborns into the community of the medical church and protect them from the primal evil of infection. And as medicine accompanies individuals till the end of their lives, it constructs a feeling of absolute dependence (Otto 2004 [1999]) similar to that preached by religion
Anonymous
This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What's the difference?
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
An epidemic exemplifies system dynamics. The more you can think systemically, the more you can follow the path of coins, art, religion, or disease. Understanding how coins travel along trade routes parallels analyzing the spread of a virus.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
arguing or pointing out the inconsistencies only creates defensiveness, and when someone is defensive, dialogue is no longer possible. Defensive people do not learn or change because they cannot listen. Creating defensiveness does not help the cause of rational discussion and change. Being self-aware means learning to observe not just ourselves, but the way others react to us. People mirror our impact.
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Scientific ideas also infect minds but with one caveat: those ideas have to create a link to objective reality in order to survive. Ideas
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Living true to ourselves is the greatest gift we can give our children and the world. Developments
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Once a religion binds with a new culture, it has a tendency to latch on like a parasite and direct cultural development in ways that ensure security of the religion and propagation. Religion embeds in the culture as a rabies virus embeds in the brain of a dog or raccoon. Successful binding creates the illusion that culture and religion are one, and followers come to believe that the culture could not survive without the religion. Further,
Darrel W. Ray (The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture)
Corona Virus has once again reminded us that the world at the level of viruses and bacteria may operate on survival instincts alone where survival of the fittest is the only moral code. Human body structure might have evolved to be in the present form, but the Ultimate Creator has given us the human soul and spirit which has consciousness like animals, but also has conscience. To focus attention on consciousness alone is to live with survival instincts and ignore higher morals. To act on goodness suggested by conscience requires looking beyond animal instincts and embrace goodness as a habit and wilful choice. Accountability in life hereafter urges that and promises cause and effect in moral matters.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
The medical cure for Corona Virus can be sought keeping in view the viral behaviour in bio-chemistry. But, the cure for purifying human soul lies in looking beyond viral, bacterial, cellular and animal behaviour and paying attention to goodness in behaviour urged by the conscience in human soul.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
In the Godless worldview, the battle of survival ends with destruction eventually for Corona Virus, bacteria, other unicellular organisms and multi-cellular organisms like animals and humans the same way. Humans having consciousness and conscience may define their personal meaning of life by themselves as to how best to spend few million breaths under the sun in maximizing self-pleasure. But, the life ends without due justice for many people who are killed, robbed and discriminated against and it ends without due punishment for many people who cause these crimes. Some are lucky and some are unlucky in the mortal combat of survival of the fittest.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
A human child requires nourishment and care to sustain itself. This experience of being dependent for our survival needs gives us a chance to not forget our fallibility and weaknesses despite our strengths and superior ability in youth. Sometimes, a virus creates havoc in our routine life. It makes us understand that despite having consciousness, superior intellect and accumulated knowledge passed over from generations to generations, we are still fallible and vulnerable. We are not God nor can we be. Pandemics and natural calamities invite us to ponder that if life is going to end from one reason or the other, then what is the purpose and meaning of life. If we have been created by the Ultimate Creator, then what is the purpose defined for our lives. The purpose of life defined by religion is not constraining when we look at life in far future. We have this ability to reflect on the far future. Good morals and virtuous lives using our free will can enable us to achieve what we want to achieve in this world without success, i.e. everlasting life, peace of mind, no regrets of past, no vulnerabilities and no constraints of nature. It is up to us whether we look into the far future for which we have the ability or succumb to our survival instincts and perish as another life-form.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
We are experiencing one of the most significant pandemics in recent history. Corona Virus can transmit from one person to another person. To avoid exponential growth in the spread of Corona Virus cases, social distancing is suggested. Father of Monetarist School of Economics, Milton Friedman said that one thing which a person can always be sure of is that everyone would put his or her self-interest before others. Apparently, it is realized by governments that this is perhaps not the right thing to expect and put faith in at the moment. Private choices in pursuit of self-interest and invisible hand were deemed to be less reliable in current situation. Lockdown was considered necessary by governments in everyone’s individual and collective interest. Things do not work out randomly. They have to be worked out.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
After the lockdown, when markets become less active, the subject of mainstream economics faces another tough ground. There are millions of poor people who do not have work. When lockdown happens, a great many people find resource markets stalled where they used to get income. More than ever, such crises necessitate the flow of resources from the haves to the have-nots. But, frozen goods and resource markets cannot help much, especially the poor and vulnerable people. That is where, pro-social behaviour and beyond-market distribution of resources is necessary. However, mainstream economics treats altruism as ‘impure’. It looks at altruism in the paradigm of pursuing self-interest.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
The heyday of conspiracy theories had been the reaction to the French Revolution. Like a virus, they would come to life every time that society was led into a state of anxiety and fears. But in the Modern Era they turned into a true secular religion. The surge of these theories in the Modern Era reflected the need to explain the collapse of a seemingly unshakeable ancien régime. This collapse was so unexpected, the break with medieval civilization so inevitable, and the upheaval so profound and so fraught with far-reaching economic, social, and political consequences that it needed an explanation. But the level of a patriarchal society's political culture changed too little, and the earlier one remained the explanatory matrix. Hence Divine Providence did not disappear, but a new fetish came to replace God: humans will and reason. In this respect, conspiracy is a sort of replacement of Revelation for an ill-defined, immature patriarchal consciousness disintegrating under the pressure of the Enlightenment, already having lost the integrity of faith but not yet having gained a basis in reason. Conspiracy gives the masses who have been cast out of the traditional matrices of thought explanations of the world missing outside of religion. Hence it contains elements of both religion (a parallel reality fitted to a ready-made picture of the world, teleologism) and rationalism (total logicalization, the search for cause-and-effect links and the hidden reasons for a phenomena lying within the interests of agents, and fitting the world into a logically interconnected system). This drama that burst onto Europe after the French Revolution finally arrived in Russia, with a century's delay.
Evgeny Dobrenko (Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics)
En Monrovia, la gente llevaba a sus familiares enfermos para que los curaran en la iglesia. Hasta cuarenta pastores murieron tras contraer el virus por haber atendido a sus congregantes aquejados.
Michael T. Osterholm (Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs)
They {alien parasites} begin by invading the minds of individuals in government, military, medicine, finance, media, education, academia, secret societies and religion. They give these individuals what is essentially a computer virus. From these foxholes, they launch their spiritual warfare against the general population and against specific individuals.
Laurence Galian (Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!)
We must realize the truth around our past and within it and how not being willing to question the status quo has led to horrific deeds to victims in the past.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
When we walk a mile in another's moccasins, we can sympathize in a way that one cannot with just a pure clinical perspective.
L.B. Ó Ceallaigh (Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives)
For the real virus that spreads, are of the mindsets of the unwilling who refuse to cut the cords that play us.
Devon Hewett (GOD IN THE GARDEN: a collection of poetry written beyond the surface)
Too often, when we hear the words “global crisis” we tend to focus on the word “crisis” rather than on “global.” But the corona virus pandemic that has affected all humans, irrespective of race or religion, means that in a globalized world, we need a method that can credibly address and interrelate the human dysfunctions that have led to various types of planetary crises.
John Raymaker
So the deuteronomists codified the religion. Made it into an organized, self-propagating entity,” Hiro says. “I don’t want to say virus. But according to what you just quoted me, the Torah is like a virus. It uses the human brain as a host. The host—the human—makes copies of it. And more humans come to synagogue and read it.” “I cannot process an analogy. But what you say is correct insofar as this: After the deuteronomists had reformed Judaism, instead of making sacrifices, the Jews went to synagogue and read the Book. If not for the deuteronomists, the world’s monotheists would still be sacrificing animals and propagating their beliefs through the oral tradition.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
Consciousness is there in animal life. Beyond animal instincts, humans also have inherent recognition of good and evil in their conscience. Belief in deterministic justice and rewards in afterlife fulfils our aspiration to have true and fair reward for every small act of goodness and evil in afterlife. Every moment of a nurse and that of a cured or dead patient is not meaningless if one believes and prepare for afterlife by achieving excellence in morals. Imam Ghazali wrote that wealth is useful till we die, relatives till we are put in grave and only good deeds will be the currency on judgement day. If we have good deeds to take in next life, then we can have everlasting happiness that is not infected and affected by any Corona Virus.
Salman Ahmed Shaikh (Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World)
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic. – Bertrand Russell Here’s
Craig A. James (The Religion Virus: Why We Believe in God: An Evolutionist Explains Religion's Incredible Hold on Humanity)
Religion is an infectious and contagious virus. It can infect everyone if they don’t have immunity provided by pure knowledge and pure wisdom.
Debasish Mridha
Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)