The promise of heaven is one of the most efficient machines ever built for getting people to neglect the only world they will ever have. I gave it up, lay awake terrified of dying, and found what let me sleep.

God is not an answer. It is the name we write on a box we are too tired to open, and when I finally opened mine, the name was the only thing inside.

You can plant the tree. You cannot make it grow. Most of the misery I have seen, my own included, comes from mixing up those two.

There is no architect. Every star, every tree and every thought in your head is what happens when one stuff, energy, keeps trying to fall quiet and keeps failing.

Omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. Religion saved those words for God, but they fit eight blind rules far better. Nobody wrote them, nobody can bend them, and they run everything you will ever see.

You have never seen the world, only a screen behind your eyes. Underneath it is a room that hands back everything you put into it, in its own time, with no one adding mercy.

Once I had a way of checking a claim before I leaned on it, the natural question came next. What was actually there?