Adam Gollner Quotes
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The finest peculiarity of belief is that believers do not recognize themselves as believers.
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Having commodified nature, we're eating the shrapnel of a worldwide homogeneity bomb.
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To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope.
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No one wants to live forever if it means becoming increasingly decrepit.
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Progress has not brought about universal happiness..
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The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science.
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Not everyone wants to live forever, but every culture has always desired immortality in one way or another. Humans have always believed in the possibility of another life, of a second act. We've also always hoped that there might be a way to avoid dying. The term "cultural-universal" is a complicated one, but I've heard it come up on numerous occasions while researching immortality.
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Physical immortalists today, those who think science will find a way to keep us young forever, would call Hanaya Yanagihara scenario the Tithonus error. They think they'll find another way. I'm not so sure. It seems like her book views immortality as a dangerous desire.
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Of all the wars that have taken place wince then, none has endured so long as the conflict between knowledge and belief. For centuries now, knowledge has attempted, unsuccessfully, to supersede belief. But the entire clash stems from a misapprehension of the nature of belief. We can't not believe; and we won't ever know everything. We know this much: knowledge remains an endless advance toward an end point that endlessly recedes.
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This is a comment on fear. Today it's like 'They're going to bomb the New York subway and there's the avian flu and 50 million of us are going to die.' We wanted to make fun of that fear-based culture we've been plunged into. And Halloweens the perfect metaphor for fear.