Oh. So this is a religious thing. Something in Dan feels so relieved to know that it's not that he's missing a major piece of information that affects his world, but that "the solar system" is a tenet of the faith that a bunch of people have that there was a Big Bang. Dan bets Boimler also believes in evolution and dinosaurs and all those sorts of things.
Dan isn't religious anymore. He was raised on a diet of Bible stories and isolation, and his faith was always casual, a result of his life circumstances rather than any genuine piety. Losing his religion was easy; he thinks of Christianity as like a local accent he picked up from proximity to true believers, his parents, and then something that flaked off him when he was without them. It's something that makes him feel wistful, but not sad. Sometimes he prays still, but he isn't expecting anyone to be listening, and that expectation doesn't make him feel any sort of emptiness or abandonment.
But he's seen how important faith was to his parents, and he's seen it many times in his travels with humans and monsters and ghosts, the way belief is so sincerely-held and precious to some people, and far be it for Dan to correct Boimler on matters of spirituality. If Boimler believes in the Big Bang, Dan will respect that.
"Ah, alright, I think- well, where I'm from the world is flat." That doesn't sound like challenging Boimler's beliefs, he doesn't think. He's couching it as his own world. "Otherwise we'd fall off."
no subject
Dan isn't religious anymore. He was raised on a diet of Bible stories and isolation, and his faith was always casual, a result of his life circumstances rather than any genuine piety. Losing his religion was easy; he thinks of Christianity as like a local accent he picked up from proximity to true believers, his parents, and then something that flaked off him when he was without them. It's something that makes him feel wistful, but not sad. Sometimes he prays still, but he isn't expecting anyone to be listening, and that expectation doesn't make him feel any sort of emptiness or abandonment.
But he's seen how important faith was to his parents, and he's seen it many times in his travels with humans and monsters and ghosts, the way belief is so sincerely-held and precious to some people, and far be it for Dan to correct Boimler on matters of spirituality. If Boimler believes in the Big Bang, Dan will respect that.
"Ah, alright, I think- well, where I'm from the world is flat." That doesn't sound like challenging Boimler's beliefs, he doesn't think. He's couching it as his own world. "Otherwise we'd fall off."