Many of the biggest and most far-reaching investments we make in our lives are investments that have little or nothing to do with money.

There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.

Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.

In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.

But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live

To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn't even belong on the list, since it doesn't link salvation to divine worship, but to me this is just a quibble. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation, and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or rising above it.

The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.