Five favorite quotes

So my friend Marauder tagged me to post about my five favorite quotes. I don't know why I'm responding, as it's just going to encourage him and others to keep doing things like this, but well, here I am. Here are five quotes I'm rather fond of, in no particular order:

"From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God." -Jonah 2:1

I might as well start with my favorite verse from the Bible, seeing as I'm a Bible blogger. I'm rather fond of this verse because there's something simultaneously absurd and profound about the idea of praying from inside a fish (or whale?). It seems like an entirely unlikely place to be praying, but on the other hand, most people would do exactly that upon finding themselves in such a position, and in Jonah's case, if he had bothered to talk to God earlier in his story, he probably wouldn't have been there.

"Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds." -Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

I like this quote, because whether or not Stephenson is a Christian (I have no idea) I think he's hit on a profound truth. I think just about every religion, including Christianity, is like a shiny gold coin with a mountain of crap piled on top of it. Even in a good church, how much of the time one spends in there is spent studying the basic, fundamental truths of Christianity that really matter? Not that you could do that 100% of the time, because all the extra stuff is important, too, if it happens to be tangential to the fundamental truths rather than central.

"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." -Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

This quote by Crick is one I find humorous. As you may have gathered from some of my previous posts, I'm not completely set against the concepts of evolutionary theory, and actually am often found to be an advocate among fellow Christians for the concept of evolution in a general sense. However, I've always thought that the amazing complexity of the DNA molecule points very strongly to the idea of an intelligent designer. I think it's funny that Crick here seems to be agreeing with that assessment, but insists that any serious scientist must keep his mind closed to such an idea.

"A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing everyday without repeating himself." -Charles M. Schulz

A lot of people seem to feel that the comic strip Peanuts got sort of old and tired towards the end, or that it was never quite as good as the earlier strips. This may be true, but keep in mind that Schulz was drawing the thing for fifty years! One of my favorite blogs is The Comics Curmudgeon, in which the writer rants daily on what's really really bad on the newspaper comics page. I love newspaper comics, and consider it a wonderful art form all of its own, but it's true that there is a lot of bad stuff out there. At the same time, consider how difficult it must be to come up with 365 new jokes every year, and to draw a picture for each one. Even though I laugh along with Josh's other readers at his blog, I appreciate the challenge that these artists are facing, and bow down to even the mediocre ones as being far more talented than I probably ever will be.

" 'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
" 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
" 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
" 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' " -Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

I feel like this a lot. (Alice, or the cat? Take your pick.)