How we cite our quotes: The main text of the story is cited (Chapter.Paragraph). The date headers are not counted as paragraphs. The verses in the chapters with a single passage from the narrator's religious texts are cited (Chapter.Verse.Line#). In chapters with multiple passages, the verses are cited (Chapter.Verse#.Line#). The four section pages with the years and passages are cited (Year.Verse).
Quote #4
In the book of Job, God says he made everything and he knows everything so no one has any right to question what he does with any of it. Okay. That works. That Old Testament God doesn't violate the way things are now. But that God sounds a lot like Zeus—a super-powerful man, playing with his toys the way my youngest brothers play with toy soldiers. Bang, bang! Seven toys fall dead. If they're yours, you make the rules. Who cares what the toys think. Wipe out a toy's family, then give it a brand new family. Toy children, like Job's children, are interchangeable. (2.49)
Yeah, the Old Testament is pretty violent in parts, and that God, Yahweh, doesn't like a lot of questioning. Note how when Lauren becomes a sort of spiritual guru herself, she, in contrast, welcomes dissent (18.82). Compared to the Old Testament, Lauren's is a very different model for how education and community building should work.
Quote #5
Maybe I'll be more like Alicia Leal, the astronaut. Like her, I believe in something that I think my dying, denying, backward-looking people need. I don't have all of it yet. I don't even know how to pass on what I do have. I've got to learn to do that. It scares me how many things I've got to learn. How will I learn them? (3.46)
Lauren is really concerned with successfully conveying her knowledge to others, and she feels frightened by the difficulty of learning how to do that. It's maybe surprising that factors outside of herself—the final invasion and collapse of Robledo, above all—are mainly responsible for a lot of the evolution Lauren eventually undergoes.
In other words, Lauren doesn't simply stay in her bedroom her whole life pondering and writing in her journals to come up with some written-down solution. Her world changes dramatically: it's out of her control, and she's forced to grow up and adapt primarily as a result of that. Sometimes you just have to get flung into a changing situation in order to grow.
Quote #6
I've never felt that I was making any of this up—not the name, Earthseed, not any of it. I mean, I've never felt that it was anything other than real: discovery rather than invention, exploration rather than creation. I wish I could believe it was all supernatural and that I'm getting messages from God. But then, I don't believe in that kind of God. All I do is observe and take notes, trying to put things down in ways that are as powerful, as simple, and as direct as I feel them. (7.6)
This is an attitude commonly expressed by fiction writers, including Stephen King in his memoir On Writing. Lauren's vibe is that she's discovering the truth, exploring its territory, and not just making it up, not just inventing a fictional religion. Of course, it's paradoxical that this attitude reaches us today through the medium of a fictional novel.