The best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show. . . . The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.

— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. . . .

— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

[I]n 1915 Utah became the first state in the Union to criminalize marijuana. The impetus for the ban came from the LDS Church, which was concerned about increasing marijuana use among its members. Latter-day Saints, it turns out, were way ahead of the curve when it came to smoking dope, thanks to the polygamists who’d developed a taste for cannabis in Mexico, where some six thousand of them had fled by the early years of the twentieth century to escape federal prosecution. In the summer of 1912, the Mexican Revolution flared through northern Mexico, and the escalating violence compelled most of the expatriate polygamists to return to Utah, where they introduced marijuana into the broader Mormon culture, alarming the LDS general authorities.

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

After having been an administrator for some time, I can say that “evil” is just “random” from a different perspective.

— Paul Matthews

There is really no basic difference between the results of automatism and the products of chance; total determinacy comes to be identical with total indeterminacy.

— G. Ligeti

To multiply the telling would be too little
For the multitude of fact that filled my journey.

— The Inferno of Dante
Translated by Robert Pinsky

Souls who are good

Never pass this way; therefore, if you hear
Charon complaining at your presence, consider
What that means.

Too many have fallen, too many feel they have failed. The pressures upon us, the promises we cannot keep with ourselves — these things are making monsters of too many of us.

— Dave Eggers, What is the What

Here is the subtle but magnificent scene in the evening sky tonight from Scatterbranch, TX. The labels were added after the fact to help you navigate. Get outside and look! Tomorrow night the moon will be right next to Jupiter. Notice that the three planets all form a straight line – that is the plane of our solar system. Earth’s Moon formed after the rest of this stuff and its orbit is slightly different. Which is why it is not “lined up” with the rest.

— Grady Price Blount

McCartney points up at the corner staircase, which leads to the windowed control room where George Martin and the engineers worked. “That was where the grownups lived,” he says. “Those stairs were so iconic, it’s engraved in your memory like a dream.”

— Brian Hiatt
Rolling Stone
March 1, 2012

More and more Wall Street types are undergoing testosterone treatments “in the hope of being turned into alpha males,” said Charles Wallace in the Financial Times. Exhausted from “working Stakhanovite hours” and fearful of losing their jobs, many bankers and traders hope male-hormone supplements will “sharpen their faculties and makes them more competitive.” Dr. Lionel Bissoon, who once treated women for cellulite on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, now specializes in testosterone therapy. “Ninety percent of my patients have some involvement in the finance industry,” he says. While some blame testosterone for the “machismo and aggressive risk-taking” that caused the financial crisis, Bissoon’s patients swear by the stuff. It promotes “the positive side of aggression,” says John, 40, a venture capital executive.

— The Week, February 24, 2012

The problem is that we have these new capabilities (i.e., drones), and Obama and Bush have established the precedent of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to warfare that keeps most of what we are doing in the dark. My fear is that future presidents are going to find those capabilities and that precedent very hard to resist. When hammers (drones?) are cheap, it’s tempting to buy a lot of them and you’ll tend to see a world full of nails. Drug lords in Mexico causing trouble? Let’s just take ‘em out. Tired of Hugo Chavez and his shenanigans? We’ve got an app for that.

— Stephen M. Walt
via sleepzandthinkz

We may think we vote in line with out economic interests and social values, but our politics may be driven largely by our biological makeup. University of Nebraska researchers measured how aroused the nervous systems of highly conservative and liberal voters became while they viewed positive images, such as pictures of babies or cute animals, and negative scenes featuring car wrecks or fearsome insects. The conservatives showed greater interest in negative images, while liberals responded more strongly to positive ones. When researchers showed both groups collages that intermingled positive and negative images while tracking their eye movements, they found that conservatives focused on the more alarming material. Even on a physiological level, conservatives appear to spend more energy “monitoring things that make them feel uncomfortable,” psychologist Mike Dodd tells LiveScience.com. That may make them more receptive to campaigns that stress their fears, while liberals are more drawn to hopeful plans for the future. “It’s amazing the extent to which they perceive the world differently,” said political scientist John Hibbing, who helped design the study.

— The Week, February 24, 2012

“We must not inquire too curiously into motives,” he interposed, in his measured way. “Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch

[Any book or work of art] which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people [should be destroyed].

— Joseph Goebbels

In an open square across from the University of Berlin, 20,000 books were burned in a huge bonfire. Joseph Goebbels spoke at the event to 40,000 cheering spectators. Some of the authors whose books were destroyed include Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Jack London, Hellen Keller, H. G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Emile Zola, and Marcel Proust.

An important, and sometimes overlooked, fact about the book burnings is that they were not instigated by the Nazi government, nor were they instigated by non-intellectual thugs. The book burnings were instigated by university students. The Nazi Student Organization conceived and executed the burnings all over Germany that night. Book bonfires burned brightly in every German university city. The professors had taught their students well.

— Stephen Hicks, Nietzsche and the Nazis