Quote that lightened my day

We stand awed at the heights our people have achieved
by PZ Myers, Pharyngula

I can respect the beauty of religious literature and the struggle put into it while at the same time realizing that falling back on the will of an imaginary being is an admission of failure. I don't consider the believers to be simple-minded—I think life can be hard, and that the great minds of history have endeavored to articulate some sense of meaning to pain and beauty, because that's what human minds do. But I also think that passing the buck and inventing an ineffable universal will as an ultimate cause is a seductive trap, [...] where we try to project our mental state onto the universe as a whole. St Paul's anguish was real, but the supernatural entity to which he directed it was not. When an atheist rejects the entity, it does not mean the anguish is denied.