"“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.”"