i'm putting these here so i don't lose them:
"Men rarely, if ever, manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." -Robert A. Heinlein
that one reminds me of some lines in nabokov's PALE FIRE. but in that poem, the speaker says something like this: the most man can invent is a "domestic ghost."
the next is from the preface to defoe's ROXANA (the full title being ROXANA THE FORTUNATE MISTRESS OR, A HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND VAST VARIETY OF FORTUNES OF MADEMOISELLE DE BELEAU, AFTERWARDS CALLED THE COUNTESS DE WINTELSHEIM IN GERMANY BEING THE PERSON KNOWN BY THE NAME OF THE LADY ROXANA IN THE TIME OF CHARLES II, and i am not even kidding about that).
"[...] but when Vice is painted in its Low-priz'd Colours, 'tis not to make People in love with it, but to expose it; and if the Reader makes a wrong Use of the Figures, the Wickedness is his own."
1724 is trying to tell you something about censorship and concepts such as "lewdness" and "obscenity."