#nat

To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill. ↗

— Harlan Ellison

#human-nature #death

Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world. ↗

— Otsuichi

#contradictions #contradictory #death #epiphany #gratitude

Subject to the law(s) of nature, hate is born to die ↗

— T.F. Hodge

#emotions #energy #force #hate #nature

Man is biodegradable; his mistakes are not. And sometimes I feel man cannot delay his degradation prior to his death. ↗

— Jaf Liethers

#environment #human #jaf-liethers #man #mankind

No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied- including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it's hard to see how monogamy comes "naturally" to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers- even presidential legacies- for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature. ↗

— Christopher Ryan

#monogamy #sexuality #death

A little politeness might smooth the way ahead. Knowing it was his turn to be dispatched, the best he could hope for was as swift a death as the one Massetti had so thanklessly received. ↗

— Victoria Lamb

#death #goodluck #the-queen-s-secret #thriller #death

It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design. ↗

— Robert J. Sawyer

#chance #coincidenc-e #fine-tuning #id #intelligent-design

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#chance #coincidence #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle. ↗

— Michael Denton

#biology #chance #chemical-evolution #coincidence #id

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#chance #darwinism #evolution #id #intelligent-design