Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing, said my yo… - Dan Simmons

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.

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 price of its saving the life of someone’s child.

I began to understand. “A Faustian bargain...,” I said.
“The Faustian bargain,” said the girl. “All the church had to do to gain the universe was sell its soul.”