Leading A Human Life Is A Full-time

If Life Is Not Real, Life Is Not Earnest, And The Grave Is Its Goal, Perhaps It's Ridiculous T Otake Ourselves So Seriously.

The Point Is... To Live One's Life In The Full Complexity Of What One Is, Which Is Something Much Darker, More Contradictory, More Of A Maelstrom Of Impulses And Passions, Of Cruelty, Ecstacy, And Madness, Than Is Apparent To The Civilized Being Who Glides On The Surface And Fits Smoothly Into The World.

The More Details We Learn About The Chemical Basis Of Life And The Intricacy Of The Genetic Code, The More Unbelievable The Standard Historical Account Becomes

Humans Are Addicted To The Hope For A Final Reckoning, But Intellectual Humility Requires That We Resist The Temptation To Assume That Tools Of The Kind We Now Have Are In Principle Sufficient To Understand The Universe As A Whole.

Once We Have Taken The Backward Step To An Abstract View Of Our Whole System Of Beliefs, Evidence, And Justification, And Seen That It Works Only, Despite Its Pretensions, By Taking The World Largely For Granted, We Are Not In A Position To Contrast All These Appearances With An Alternative Reality. We Cannot Shed Our Ordinary Responses, And If We Could It Would Leave Us With No Means Of Conceiving A Reality Of Any Kind.