Well I like Douglas Adams. From Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest
thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from
its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious
mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with.
It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix
formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve
signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has
supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a
Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to
you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear
decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your
Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so
mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some
thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the
NON-existence of God.

The argument goes like this:

`I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith,
and without faith I am nothing.'

`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It
could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so
therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly
disappears in a puff of logic.

`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that
black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's
kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune
when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, "Well,
That about Wraps It Up for God."

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers
to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more
and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.


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-lance smith