I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the pr… - Dan Simmons

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal (sic) which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Pascal's Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.
Perhaps because it posits only two choices, said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation, she said.
Those last two aren't the same thing, I said.
No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of 'the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.'
A spiritual agoraphobic, I said.
Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her.
Religion seems to have always offered that false duality, she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.

Each of them was intimately aware of the procedure for electing a pope—not only of the antiquated mechanisms, of course, but of the politicking, pressuring, deal-making, bluffing, and outright blackmail that had often accompanied the process over the centuries.