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" "I think I know the real reason."
"Which is?"
"Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.
Iain Menzies Banks (February 16, 1954 – June 9, 2013), officially Iain Banks, was a Scottish writer. As Iain M. Banks he wrote science fiction; as Iain Banks he wrote literary fiction.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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The point is: what happens in heaven?"
"Unknowable wonderfulness?"
"Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change."
"Have you always thought that?"
If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don't have life after death; you just have death."
"There are those who believe that after death the soul is recreated into another being."
"That is conservative and a little stupid, certainly, but not actually idiotic."
"And there are those who believe that, upon death, the soul is allowed to create its own universe."
"Monomaniacal and laughable as well as provably wrong."
"There there are those who believe that the soul—"
"Well, there are all sorts of different beliefs. However, the ones that interest me are those concerning the idea of heaven. That's the idiocy it annoys me that others cannot see.
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.
Holse had no idea how these things worked; he had never really bothered with religion, though he had always paid lip-service to the church for the sake of an easy life. He had long suspected that the WorldGod was just another convenient semi-fiction supporting the whole structure that sustained the rich and powerful in their privilege.