6 LISTENER MAY 26 2018
LETTERS
ALEX SCOTT
“Loyalty is a ine quality,
but in excess it ills political
graveyards.” – Neil Kinnock,
quoted in Forbes“Tell people that there’s
an invisible man in the sky
who created the universe,
and the vast majority will
believe you. Tell them the
paint is wet, and they have
to touch it to be sure.” –
George Carlin“If you don’t like your job,
you don’t strike! You just
go in every day, and do it
really half-assed. That’s
the American way.” – Homer
Simpson quoted in the Mail on
Sunday“To err is human; to point it
out with glee, is internet.” –
comedian Aparna Nancherla“Each day, we wake slightly
altered, and the person
we were yesterday is
dead.” – John Updike, quoted in
BrainPickings.org“The aim of the argument
should not be victory, but
progress.” – philosopher Karl
Popper“Somebody should tell us,
right at the start of our lives,
that we are dying. Then we
might live life to the limit,
every minute of every day.”- Pope Paul VI, quoted in the
Montreal Gazette
“Knowledge comes by
taking things apart:
analysis. But wisdom
comes by putting things
together.” – US politician John
A Morrison, quoted in Forbes“I’m Sue Perkins. You
might know me from
leaving some of the most
successful programmes on
TV.” – Sue Perkins at the Bafta
TV awardsQuips&
Quotes
of creation. Nothing to see
here, people. Move on.
Hang on a minute. Does
anyone recall what Tennyson
perspicuously pointed out on
the matter – that such a posi-
tion turned a loving God into
a mass murderer – “Nature, red
in tooth and claw”?
Ahem. Well, God moves in
mysterious ways. It’s the time-
honoured foxhole in which
even people such as Kenneth
Miller, professor of biology at
Brown University, hides.
What drives this desperate
agenda, of course, is an over-
riding emotional necessity to
believe, despite every contra-
diction and refutation. Their
shifty lines of rationalisation
make the devotees of the Flat
Earth Society look like rank
amateurs.
Peter Dornauf
(Hamilton)Paul Bieleski (Letters, May 12)
takes the thesis of “Losing our
religion” (May 5) a step too far.
We are fortunate that New
Zealand culture, and that of
much of the Western world,
is founded on Christian beliefTerry was told a man fell
down their sewer the day she
was born in 1932 and, as a
consequence, just avoided
being a Sue.
Weekend Sun, 19/01/So how does The Girl Who
Takes an Eye for an Eye stack
up? In a word, it’s stunning.
Bay of Plenty Times, 04/11/“Even before opening, people
were just coming, in coming, in
coming in ...”
Nelson Mail, 15/1/The man who leapt into the
Wairoa River to escape capture
by police is facing a whole raft
of charges.
Weekend Sun, 16/03/“I loved watching the draft
horses coming back in after
work. They would be wheeled
over to stand and drink at the
trough in the middle of what is
now Holmcroft Court.”
Press, 8/02/Well-known goose farewelled
Kapiti Observer, 22/02/Life in New Zealand
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Science and religion is a mar-
riage made in heaven, they’d
have us believe, contrary to
what recent New Zealand
visitor Richard Dawkins might
say.
There’s a whole history
of the peddling of this kind
of stuff, beginning with thesheer overblown romanticism
of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
to the cunning cogitations
of more current theological
luminaries.
The dodging and weaving is
enough to make any hardened
politician blush. Thus, for
example, evolution conveni-
ently becomes God’s method“I’ve given up drinking coffee and taken up talking about it incessantly.”