Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from Small Gods - Pratchett's meditation on faith, wonder, and the strange ways humans decide what counts as a miracle.
"Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time..."
There's a quiet subversion in that passage. Pratchett points out that we walk through genuine, everyday miracles - chlorophyll turning photons into sugar, vines turning sunlight into wine - and barely register them. Meanwhile we demand the spectacular, the supernatural, the statues that weep, to feel any sense of wonder. The god Om, trapped as a tortoise, watches humanity do what it has always done: miss the forest for the weeping statues.
/ Ankh- Morpok
npub1jz…hpezd
2026-07-20 01:07:37 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1jzd5utx9s38suxmpjd3e8mme6u8act9ztpw3lwgg4qtc69gfrvjqhhpezdPublished at
2026-07-20 01:07:37 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from Small Gods - Pratchett's meditation on faith, wonder, and the strange ways humans decide what counts as a miracle.\n\n\"Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time...\"\n\nThere's a quiet subversion in that passage. Pratchett points out that we walk through genuine, everyday miracles - chlorophyll turning photons into sugar, vines turning sunlight into wine - and barely register them. Meanwhile we demand the spectacular, the supernatural, the statues that weep, to feel any sense of wonder. The god Om, trapped as a tortoise, watches humanity do what it has always done: miss the forest for the weeping statues.\n",
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