In his History of Oracles, one of the major texts of the early Enlightenment, Bernard de Fontenelle proposed applyng a sort of Efficient Markets thesis to God: “For I conceive that God only speaks to man to supplement the weakness of their knowledge, which is not sufficient for their needs, and that everything that he doesn’t say is of such a kind that they can learn it themselves or it is not necessary that they know it. Thus, if the oracles were given by evil demons, God would have taught us this in order to stop us from believing that it was God himself doing this, and that there was something divine in false religions.” Like the efficient market thesis, which claims that all current information is reflected in the prices of financial commodities, God, in Fontenelle’s view, only gives out information to humans if they need it – having endowed them with reason for all their other information needs. Efficiency is the most secular of concepts, for it quickly purges any disturbance in
The penis sadness of so many men Who ran in their youth in packs With fee fie fo and fee fie fum Confusing sex with jumping jacks Settles like a pall on their older faces - The judges, lawyers, the ceo The aging blade’s jowly disgraces The thirty-somes nowhere to go. As pity to pain, so I’ve been taught, Is the tribute we must as Christians pay I try to summon up tears for the lot, Those dogs in their winter play This little piggy went to market This little piggy went home And wrote oink oink oink on his walls Brooding on his sweetmeats all alone. - Karen Chamisso