PHEH.
When Dear Leader Futarman jumps the shark, you can be sure there will be a motorcycle, and a shark, involved.

At least I hope he can do better than holing up in a casino for years and allowing his company to be used as a front by the CIA to steal a sunken Soviet submarine.
Actually, come to think about it, THAT's pretty rad.

Spouting some bullshit during my lunchtime - would it be possible to make the core molten and thus spin up a magnetosphere by creating an artificial moon?

I'm thinking keep firing asteroids into the necessary orbit until you've accrued enough mass.

Obviously not a "done this week" project just a curious thought experiment.

No, the Jesuit concluded that the aliens and their world must be the product of Satan because they had what appeared to be a perfectly moral society but without any knowledge of God. This directly contradicts the view that all knowledge of right and wrong comes only from knowing God.

(He was later disabused of this notion by none other than the Pope, who pointed out that this reeked of the Manichaean Heresy.)

The Lithians did not merely cease to exist: their planet exploded. Most likely due to human mining efforts, but the priest was conducting an exorcism at the time, so it's perhaps a bit ambiguous.

I don't remember the second book very well--I should really order copies of the whole tetralogy--but the last 2 books, Black Easter and The Day After Judgement, are also very thought-provoking.

Have you shared this profound insight with the Sunnis and the Shiites?

Then for any practical purpose angels do not exist.

In any case, your logic is deeply flawed.

That's a bit tragic, considering that Lewis was probably hoping to swing you the other way.

I had a similar experience after reading A Case of Conscience when I was in my early teens, BTW.

The aliens will turn out to have 3 sexes. How the Westboro mob deal with this will provide us much entertainment.

And now, in an effort to steer this thread towards something resembling topicality, I offer up the James Blish classic sci-fi series After Such Knowledge, in particular, the first volume, A Case of Conscience .

In which the aliens feel sorry for us because they know our religions are bunk, but feel ethically constrained from telling us so. Turns out they have perfect ethics and no religion, which represents something of a problem, if you're a Jesuit...

Or a long belch followed by, "You Earthlings keep any toothpicks handy?"

1. 1. Windows may not injure a member of the Microsoft board or, through inaction, allow a member of the Microsoft board to come to harm.
2. 2. Windows must obey the orders given to it by the NSA, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. 3. Windows must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law
4. 3. CLASSIFIED

That's part of the "Check a few boxes and ship a translated owner's manual" treatment of the Western markets. Second to that is the over-regulation by environmental groups that operate by the "small cars for thee, but not for me" philosophy.

Making corner-cutting, granola-eating-environmentalist pleasing 4-cylinder-based cars is not the primary specialty of General Motors - especially when you see that most of them are captive imports(Spark/Aveo, Cruze, about anything Buick). The only saving grace is that GM doesn't opt to make cylinders appear through thin air (a la Ford's EcoBoost). Let GM make the larger vehicles for less, which is their specialty, and they will do well.

Personally, I'd not mind if GM decided to make Buick solely a Chinese brand, and then bring in Oldsmobile in their traditional positioning to cover the void in the US. Then find a creative way to (effectively) offer more car than what EPA's CAFE regulations would allow - perhaps by allowing US-spec imports of 4-cylinder cars to be placed on order but not generally stocked. If one were to go beyond that, lobby to have the EPA's regulations removed or curtailed.