To nominate yourself as the hero of your own story is to step outside society, not with the intention of turning your back on it but with the intenti… - Eric Maisel

Any modern person, believer or atheist, can feel this way (i. e., that the universe is meaningless). The believer, to take some comfort and to find some solace, allows his brain to perpetrate a trick that it is quite willing to play: to conjure a god and a more pleasant universe. So he turns to religion, even if to find that solace he must ignore his religion’s monstrous contradictions, swallow his doubts, smile at ludicrous claims and accept that he has transformed a metaphor into a pseudo-reality. Before the advent of modern science and the last four hundred years of increased knowledge, believers may have believed in some seamless way, uninterrupted by doubts. Now every sensible, educated, modern believer knows in a corner of consciousness that she is buying her solace on the cheap—she knows that the pope is not infallible, that god did not give the Jews a piece of land, that there is nothing like nirvana, and so on. So she bites her tongue and tries to get as much out of her religion as she can, covering her eyes to all the rest—and not really dealing with the central issue of cosmic indifference.

Life is a project to live, not a mystery to unravel.

On religion, many are destined to reason wrongly; others not to reason at all; and others to persecute those who do reason.