Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.

you can make mean anything.

No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos. What it's going to be, I don't know. Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And maybe knowing isn't the point. Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

If you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane.