Badlands Quotes

What I'd like to read is a scientific review, by a scientific psychologist--if any exists--of 'A Scientific Man and the Bible'. By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil...

Intelligence reports and local folklore together perpetuated tales of his bloody adventures across the rim worlds and badlands of Terran space. It was his trademark and often over the last two decades, history proclaimed in large bloody letters that ‘Kilroy woz ‘ere.

Christina Engela