[GunRunner]

Our loves are as great as our hopes, and the thorough-going atheist has no hopes of anything other than a 100 mph crash into a solid brick wall.

I beg to differ.

Tchaikovsky, the Hubble telescope, and the microchip provide things of such grandeur that it's hard for me to believe that people once got excited over a burning bush or parlor tricks with wine and water.

If heat death occurs before we've found a way to colonize outside of the universe, then I hope we will have left a good mark on history. I don't need a pedagogical fairy tale to give me hope.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"Tchaikovsky, the Hubble telescope, and the microchip" are marvels, and I share your sense of wonder; but don't be so flip in your Biblical comparisons. They are of a different order than you imagine. Nobody who has given it 10 minutes' thought has supposed it was all about alcoholic beverages on tap and combustible shrubbery.

If some Sunday-School teacher had invented "pedagogical fairy tales" to chide and guide her kiddies, she would not have invented anything so quirky and strange as a draconian king who would let none buy nor sell on all the earth unless they had his number inscribed on their and and forehead, nor a nameless "I AM" who cares to set the Pharaonic slave-class free.

She would be more likely, I think, spin tales of dragons who are innocent but different, and need only to be understood; and an evolving Little Eukaryote that Could.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"and" = "hand"

Damn typsos...