It struck me that his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy shortcuts of someo… - Dan Simmons

Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk and navel lint-gathering common to most religions.

There are no ghosts, my love. Death is final. The soul is that ineffable combination of memory and personality which we carry through life...when life departs, the soul also dies. Except for what we leave in the memory of those who loved us.

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.