I am struck with awe when I comprehend how huge the Universe is, and when I think that we, all of us, and all the people and all things we will ever touch and hold and care about, are a thin scum on the surface of a big ball of rock. I'm amazed that we, nothing more than an organized bunch of chemicals, can wander around, eating popsicles, writing dirty poetry on walls with magic marker, building baseball stadiums and cathedrals and rocket ships, wondering whether it's time to refinance our home mortgages, and making more of ourselves. The human race has grown up from unthinking animals, and will probably die out, unmourned, all in a blink of the geological eye, and be replaced by . . . what? Something as different from as as we are from the dinosaurs, surely.
But none of that gives me a desire to invent some kind of supernatural explanation for it all. To do so would be to deny the single most frustrating, painful, hopeful, thought-provoking, inspiring, beautiful thing about the Universe: the fact that it follows natural laws. It unfailingly, consistently, indifferently follows a set of rules, and—perhaps this is the most amazing thing of all—we have one and a half kilograms of fatty tissue that can actually figure those laws out.
So why do we turn our backs on this fact and declare that the mysterious is mystical? Why do we call the unexplained supernatural, and relish the idea that there is something beyond all natural laws and thus beyond our intellectual capacity? Even when, again and again and again, we find natural explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be the whim of the gods, the work of demons, or visitations from another world, people still inexplicably foster a belief that there's some special, powerful thing that lies always just beyond our intellectual limits but which, for some reason, is intimately connected to us. Why?

LANCE
Your inner child screams for cartoons and sugary cereals, but your adult tastes love the buzz of quality mind altering substances. Sooner or later, you're going to have to grow up, at least a bit.

Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.