Stranger in a Strange Land

comprehension of English was less than perfect; he continued to make mistakes through his ignorance, being "only an egg." But had he grokked this correctly? He had been waiting to meet the human "Old Ones," for he had many questions to ask. Was this an opportunity? Or did he require more learnings from his water brothers before he was ready?
                Jubal was saved by the bell. Dorcas arrived with sandwiches and coffee, the household's usual fair-weather picnic lunch. Jubal ate silently, which suited Smith as his rearing had taught him that eating was a time for contemplation-he had found rather upsetting the chatter that usually took place at the table.
                Jubal stretched out his meal while he pondered what to tell Mike- and cursed himself for the folly of having permitted Mike to watch stereo in the first place. Oh, he supposed the boy had to come up against human religions at some point-couldn't be helped if he was going to spend the rest of his life on this dizzy planet. But, damn it, it would have been better to wait until Mike was more used to the overall cockeyed pattern of human behavior . . . and, in any case, certainly not Fosterites as his first experience!
                As a devout agnostic, Jubal consciously evalued all religions, from the animism of the Kalahari Bushmen to the most sober and intellectualized of the major western faiths, as being equal. But emotionally he disliked some more than others . . . and the Church of the New Revelation set his teeth on edge. The Fosterites' fiat-footed claim to utter gnosis through a direct pipeline to Heaven, their arrogant intolerance implemented in open persecution of all other religions wherever they were strong enough to get away with it, the sweaty football-rally & sales-convention flavor of their services-all these ancillary aspects depressed him. If people must go to church, why the devil couldn't they be dignified about it, like Catholics, Christian Scientists, or Quakers?
                If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshipped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship."
                But with bleak honesty Jubal admitted to himself that the Universe (correction: that piece of the Universe he himself had seen) might very well be in toto an example of reduction to absurdity. In which case the Fosterites might be possessed of the Truth, the exact Truth, and nothing but the Truth. The Universe was a damned silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that some abstract somethings "just happened" to be some atoms that "just happened" to get together in configurations which "just happened" to look like consistent laws and then some of these configurations "just happened" to possess self-awareness and that two such "just happened" to be the Man from Mars and the other a bald-headed old coot with Jubal himself inside.
                No, Jubal would not buy the "just happened" theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe-in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.
                What then? "Least hypothesis" held no place of preference; Occam's razor could not slice the prime problem, the Nature of the Mind of God (might as well call it that to yourself, you old scoundrel; it's a short, simple, Anglo-Saxon monosyllable, not banned by having four letters- and as good a tag for what you don't understand as any).
                Was there any basis for preferring any one sufficient hypothesis over another? When you simply did not understand a thing: No! And Jubal readily admitted to himself that a long lifetime had left him completely. and totally not understanding the basic problems of the Universe.
                So the Fosterites might be right. Jubal could not even show that they were probably