“Technos and clerics have much in common. Both take a world that can’t be fully understood and try to explain its fundamental properties. Clerics postulate beliefs that can never be proven; they demand you accept these postulates as your Faith, which will guide your actions and thoughts. It’s a top down way of thinking; start with the big picture and derive rules for living. Fundamental knowledge is static. Even the derived rules rarely change.Technos work from the bottom up. They build a baseline of observations and formulate theories to explain these phenomena. Nothing is sacred; with new observations, theories are discarded or modified to fit the facts.Technos and clerics; how could they not be in conflict?Dan Ronco’s Diary, 2016”

“Science requires both observation and comprehension. Without observation there are no facts to be comprehended; without comprehension science is mere documentation. The basis for comprehension is theory, and the language of theoretical science is mathematics. Theory is constructed on a foundation of hypothesis; the fewer the hypotheses needed to explain existing observations and predict new phenomena, the more ‘elegant’ the theory”

“You believe in entropy, which postulates that all phenomena tend to sink to lower levels of organization and energy, and in evolution, which postulates that the history of life has been just the opposite. People like you credit both theories. It’s de rigueur. Is that reason rational? I say, f*ck off.”

“Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”

“As I've often observed and remarked: the most gifted screenwriters can concoct believable monsters, deviants, heroes, regular-joes, atheists, agnostics, all sorts of characters. But the believable depiction of a full-orbed Christian character is simply beyond them. Evidently they have never known (much less understood nor liked) even one credible, practicing, Biblically-faithful Christian. It's the one color missing from their palate — as starved for ideas as they are.”

“This is one of those things that you can never explain to anyone; that's what I want to explain - one of those free-association moments with connections that dissolve when you start to try to put them into words.”

“We're [Luxenbenites] not talking about the emotional drivel your romanticists have fantasized. We're talking about nature's actual laws. The hard and fast rules every species has to observe. The ones you've so scrupulously ignored.”