Upscale Young Men Seem To Go For

The Seeker Who Embraces Positive Theology Finds ... That You Can Have All That Stuff In The Mall, As Well As The Beautiful House And Car, If Only You Believe That You Can. But ... If You Don't Have All That You Want, If You Feel Sick, Discouraged, Or Defeated, You Have Only Yourself To Blame. Positive Theology Ratifies And Completes A World Without Beauty, Transcendence, Or Mercy.

Thus Will The Fondest Dream Of Phallic Science Be Realized: A Pristine New Planet Populated Entirely By Little Boy Clones Of Great Scientific Entrepreneurs Free To Smash Atoms, Accelerate Particles, Or, If They Are So Moved, Build Pyramids -- Without Any Social Relevance Or Human Responsibility At All.

Exercise Is The Yuppie Version Of Bulimia.

Human Intellectual Progress, Such As It Has Been, Results From Our Long Struggle To See Things 'as They Are,' Or In The Most Universally Comprehensible Way, And Not As Projections Of Our Own Emotions. Thunder Is Not A Tantrum In The Sky, Disease Is Not A Divine Punishment, And Not Every Death Or Accident Results From Witchcraft. What We Call The Enlightenment And Hold On To Only Tenuously, By Our Fingernails, Is The Slow-dawning Understanding That The World Is Unfolding According To Its Own Inner Algorithms Of Cause And Effect, Probability And Chance, Without Any Regard For Human Feelings.

The One Regret I Have About My Own Abortions Is That They Cost Money That Might Otherwise Have Been Spent On Something More Pleasurable, Like Taking The Kids To Movies And Theme Parks.