(December 3, 2013 at 3:06 am)DOS Wrote: "And what tortures have you in the other world besides the quadrillion kilometres?" asked Ivan, with a strange eagerness.
"What tortures? Ah, don't ask. In old days we had all sorts, but now they have taken chiefly to moral punishments- 'the stings of conscience' and all that nonsense.
I liked that part. Perhaps more revealing than had been intended.
"There was a time when we'd have gone all Hellraiser on a sinner's ass, you know. Chains, whips, molten liquid, dildos covered in long rusty spikes. And lots more," he said wistfully. "We could make a dozen steps feel like a quadrillion miles, I'll tell you that!" With this, he burst into a prolonged laughter, occasionally slapping his thigh or pausing to wipe his eyes. He finally stopped, and glared at Ivan. "Now it's namby-pamby shit like 'walk for a trillion miles and we'll open the Pearly Gates.' It's disgusting, really. Don't they understand that once they cross that threshold, they'll forget that they ever walked at all?"
He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. "Some people really don't understand the concept of eternity, you know what I'm saying?" Ivan nodded, hoping that the creature would not notice that he was backing away.
Maybe we can make it a homework assignment. Write your own addendum to the OP's snippet from Dostoyevsky!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
