To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms. - John Leonard

Everybody remembers his or her first magic show. Mine was in a garage in the dark. I passed out bowls of peeled grapes and described them as the devil's eyeballs. After that, by the light of a lantern on a wall of cinderblocks, there were card tricks and some pigeons we pretended to decapitate. The attraction of magic, to the amateur magician, derived from the fact that it wasn't magic at all; it was science in the service of illusion. Having sent in the magazine coupon and received our kit, we knew how everything worked toward achieving the ecstatic grasp.

In God's body shop, each of us was customized. But science came along to substitute statistical inference for free will. We are now a tribe of likelihoods.

Monotheism was a terrible idea, leading directly to Lenin.