Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity. - Dan Simmons

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal (sic) which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing, said my young friend. A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts, or life at the height of the datasphere...consensual idiocy.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.