DavidV

"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic." --from "The Second Sin", by Thomas Szasz

"... religions teach the slave virtues. They make inanimate things holy, and falsehoods sacred. They create artificial crimes. To eat meat on Friday, to enjoy yourself on Sunday, to eat on fast-days, to be happy in Lent, to dispute a priest, to ask for evidence, to deny a creed, to express your sincere thought, all these acts are sins, crimes against some god, To give your honest opinion about Jehovah, Mohammed or Christ, is far worse than to maliciously slander your neighbor. To question or...

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters. — H.L. Mencken

Most of us exhibit something called ‘attributional bias’: we believe our successes are due to our own internal faculties, and our failures are due to external factors; whereas for others, we believe their successes are due to luck, and their failures to their own flaws. We can’t all be right. - Ben Goldacre, "Bad Science"

Too much nonsense in my Facebook feed lately. This is what happens when you become too promiscuous with Facebook friend requests. What should I do: A: Obsessively comment on posts informing people how uninformed/wrong/mentally unhinged they are. B: Unfriend stupid people. C: Troll them until they get mad enough to friend me first. D: Block their posts, so I can ignore their lunatic rants while still blessing them with my genius, in the optimistic, yet ultimately futile hope that they will o...

Just saw some guys yelling and frantically carrying a fire hose across the office. Should I be worried?

" followed a golden rule, whenever a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones." - Charles Darwin

"It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate the universe without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty are fully appreciated to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to see life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare and very exciting. It usually end...

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." — Charles Darwin

"In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy. In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds. The sage does not attempt anything very big, And thus achieves greatness." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 63

"Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate." - Sun Tzu

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsica...

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken.

Q: If you had to adopt any religion, which one would you choose? A: Any, as long as I'm the founder, since the rules for all of them are all made up anyway.

In the last James Bond film, the Haitian government passes a minimum wage bill that would put all the workers in the country's textile companies out of business. So the companies hire a mercenary group to overthrow the president and replace him with someone who understands demand and supply. Problem solved, aggressor removed from power, millions of poor workers get to keep their jobs. So why is Bond trying to kill the heroic mercenary who saved the Haitian economy?