I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller. - Dan Simmons

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

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

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.