It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen.

Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

Personally, I don't believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.

These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.