Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

We live in a digital world where all is available at the touch of a screen. Money has been simplified, changed subtly over time from tangible bills to numbers in cyberspace. Cash is no longer in a cloth bag; it's numbers on a screen. Numbers that can be manipulated and modified. If you run out of numbers, you can just buy some more, right?

Just as TurboTax simplified much of the tax process, so has the colossally scary legal process been reduced to a kinder, gentler series of mouse clicks and 'Continue' buttons by LegalZoom, the online leader that has become so prominent in its market that it's practically a generic.

A plant-based diet has actually simplified my life in so many ways. For breakfast, I try to get my first serving of fruits and nuts for fuel. I'm completely addicted to coconut water for the electrolytes and hydration.

I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.

A simplified Christmas isn't about circumstances as much as it is about focus.

The hypothesis of God, for instance, gives an incomparably absolute opportunity to understand everything and know absolutely nothing. Give man an extremely simplified system of the world and explain every phenomenon away on the basis of that system. An approach like that doesn't require any knowledge. Just a few memorized formulas plus so-called intuition and so-called common sense.

What, more realistically, is this "mutation," the "new man"? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue's dream; the "free-thinker" and skeptic, closed only to the truth but "open" to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the "seeker" after some "new revelation," ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping "fact" because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is "possible"; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his "rights," yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest "stimulus"; the "rebel," hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only God; the "mass man," this new barbarian, thoroughly "reduced" and "simplified" and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.

Mysticism poor mysticism! When it is underestimated and oversimplified it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion.

Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

A plant-based diet has actually simplified my life in so many ways. For breakfast I try to get my first serving of fruits and nuts for fuel. I'm completely addicted to coconut water for the electrolytes and hydration.