More important than your obligation to follow your conscience—or at least prior to it—is your obligation to form your conscience correctly.  –Antonin Scalia

A man died on the road outside my subdivision.  And I have a really good ghost story.  And yet... We are not products of our experiences.  We are products of our decisions.

“The desire for explanation always outruns the recognition of explanatory power.  The illusion of understanding is more important for most men than understanding itself.  And what counts as an understanding today will be revealed tomorrow as an illusion, often so gross that people will wonder how anyone came to believe it.  Conduct that was once attributed to the devil will be attributed by successive generations to a deficient or excessive phrenological bump, to an unresolved Oedipus complex, to bad conditioning, to faulty brain chemistry, to unfortunate genes, or to a part of the brain that fails to light up on fMRI scans when appropriately provoked.  The illusion of understanding is like the grin of the Cheshire Cat:  it is what remains when all else has disappeared.”  -Theodore Dalrymple