Theology 101: Pascal's Wager

Blaise Pascal (pictured) was a 17th century French philosopher who is best remembered for what came to be called "Pascal's Wager." In the condensed version that is usually presented to nonbelievers (often by people who never heard of Pascal), it goes like this: Even if you don't believe in God, you would do well to worship him, because if he does exist, you will go to heaven, but if he doesn't exist, you will have still lived the most satisfying lifestyle of all, that of a Christian. 

I'm writing about Pascal's Wager because someone offered it in response to my last post, and I wanted to take time for an extended answer. The following are my objections to it, but I'm not consulting any sources, so I make no claim to completeness.

1) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that there is an afterlife in which we will remember who we were in this life and be judged for what we did.

2) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that his wager would result in one becoming a Christian (a Catholic Christian at that) as opposed to joining some other religion. 

3) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that there is only one god.

4) Pascal assumed (for no apparent reason except that he was a Christian) that God demands our worship. What if God really wants something entirely different? What if God's real interest is that we all have twelve children, or else that we have no children? Or what if for some reason known only to divine omniscience, God prefers the company of atheists?

5) Pascal assumed (for no reason that I can think of) that God would reward people for simply going through the motions of worship.

6) Pascal assumed (for no reason that I can think of) that the same religion-oriented lifestyle that he, as a believer, found rewarding would also be rewarding to someone who wasn't a believer. 

7) Pascal's advice is meaningless to atheists because they see no reason to hedge their bets.


Maybe you're wondering why I've thought so much about Pascal's Wager. Well, way back in the antediluvian days of my youth, I took a few courses in theology in order to regain my faith, but the reverse occurred. Although my professor was a conservative Methodist minister and my classmates were ministerial students, I lost what little faith I had left when I started thinking even more critically about what the Bible meant and about the arguments in support of, first Christianity and then theism. I also observed that my classmates never seemed to come up with profound questions, and this too led me to doubt the intellectual respectability of religion. I thought that, yep, these people are dumb enough to be sheep alright, and they're the ones who are going to go out and run churches. Of course, in all fairness, most of them were Mississippi country boys whose families were poorly educated and who had just gone through twelve years of the worst public school system in the nation, and that's assuming that they didn't go to one of the white-only Christian "academies" that appeared in response to integration and were even worse than the public schools. It's also true that my professor didn't encourage probing questions, and as far as I could tell from the answers he gave me, he had never asked them.

However, my educational background had been similar to that of the other students, and not only that, I flunked three grades in public school, making me look even dumber. Why then, was I the only one who doubted, and did I really start doubting all at once at age twelve, or was I already headed in that direction a year earlier when I built a pulpit in my back yard and started preaching to my friends? All I can tell you is that I couldn't believe, and I did try. Now, I respect myself for being a skeptic by nature, and I forgive myself for having so devalued truth that I spent years trying to deny what I considered to be the reality about theism and religion. 

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced." Keats

I was in the kitchen last night when I was suddenly so overcome by the fear of death that I couldn't have felt much worse had I been on the threshold of being violently murdered. I forgot that I ever felt any differently, and I wondered why I hadn't long since killed myself simply to escape my terror of dying. I recalled that before Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun, he had tried to throw himself into an airplane propeller, and I imagined that I was experiencing a taste of that same desperation. 

A few minutes later, I put on a Czechoslovakian film called The Cremator, which turned out to be the darkest, scariest movie I had ever seen, and the fact that it was also brilliantly funny only made the horror worse. Indeed, I had to steel myself to remain in my chair. Then, I remembered that I had eaten some marijuana an hour before the fear started, and I realized that my emotion had been drug-inspired and wasn't really the totality of my life. Marijuana exacts a price for its insights, and if I use it when I'm already upset, as I did last night, the result can be such that I wouldn't hesitate to call it insanity. I survive such times simply by riding them out. I was afterwards exhausted but couldn't sleep so I took an Ambien. It is now the next afternoon, and I've been weak, dizzy, and anxious, all day. I just took a large dose of marijuana because I want to see where it will take me when I am already in such a state. 

You probably read that last sentence in horror and with the question Why?! in your mind. My answer is that I am on a quest in the realm of ultimate reality, and marijuana untethers my consciousness so that I can free associate a hundred times more effectively than usual, and the result of this free association is oftentimes new insights. As you might imagine, given that I'm an atheist, I hesitate to use the word quest because many are sure to assume that such adventured are spiritually inspired and, if successful, will lead to God. My conclusion has been just the opposite. 

Why is this, do you think?

People usually undertake spiritual quests with a pretty good idea of what they're going to experience, and this determines what they do experience. I came at my quest from the opposite direction, that is I started with faith and lost it. That's the thing about spiritual quests, once you give up your preconceptions regarding the nature of ultimate reality, you don't know where you're going to exit the rabbit hole. I know where I exited, and it is here that I will make my stand unless something unexpected happens. What I mean by this is that I try to be open to what many of you call spiritual realities, but the only reason I see to think they exist is that so many people believe in them. 

Why doesn't the firm belief of millions of people over thousands of years lead you too to believe? 

I suspect that people believe for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with external reality. The first is that they are raised to believe as they do, and the second is that they are probably, to some extent, evolutionarily programmed to believe in a spiritual realm.

But, if your conclusion is that the spiritual realm is imaginary, why are you still on a quest? 

The fact that spirits don't exist doesn't make reality less profound or the search for the best ways to live and think less meaningful. In fact, I think the opposite could be true, and here is why. For those who believe in a wise, powerful, and benevolent spiritual realm, the goal is to live in consistency with the desires of that realm just as a child lives in consistency with the desires of its parents. This usually results in a high degree of conformity among those who put their trust in a particular book or teacher. By contrast, I am alone in the darkness with no one to guide me. I say that I am alone because it truly is my road to travel, and the fact that others have traveled it hasn't proven to be of much benefit to me. I can only have confidence in that which I experience because it is only experience that seems real, although I can never be sure that it is real. I just know that it's the only light that I have to go by. As I live it, atheism is stark and bleak, but it is hardly shallow. However dismal the lessons, the quest itself is its own reward.

There’s no accounting for where tolerance might appear

I didn’t know she read my blog until she happened to mention it today. That’s the problem with giving your blog address to people and then assuming that they don’t read it based upon the fact that they never tell you they read it. You keep on getting more and more direct in the expression of your opinions, and two years later you learn that someone has been reading stuff—by you—that might have sent them up through the roof of their house, down through the roof of your house, and directly onto your skull. In this case, the speaker was a Glen Beck conservative and, since I know she’s also a Christian, I assume that she’s an old school literalist as well. Yet, she said she enjoys my writing. My first thought was that she was just having herself a little fun before pulling out her .45 and blowing me away. Then came gratitude and, after I had thought more about what she had said, a lump in my throat. All else being equal, I value a reader like her over a reader who agrees with me. This is why I sometimes share my blog with people who have given me no inkling that they will enjoy it. I’ve gotten a lot of practice in handling rejection that way.

In the reverse direction, two of you have asked how I put with Rhymes (aka Bob), a devoted reader from Georgia, USA, who is also a devoted Methodist. I could have answered the question by saying, “Put up with him?! I’m crazy about him. There are damn few people whose religion you can criticize unsparingly and them still want to hang out with you, and I’m certainly not going to make it more difficult for him than necessary by taking anything he says personally. So what if he gets exasperated? I get exasperated too sometimes. Given his point of view, I marvel that he doesn’t get more exasperated. If anything, I think he’s ahead of me in this, and it makes me want to show him that I can build just as good a bridge across a chasm as he can. No fundamentalist Christian Republican is going to outdo me for tolerance, no sirree. Tolerance comes from wisdom, and wisdom can jump any religious or political boundary. This is why I’m forever trying to increase my allotment of it. It’s also why I sometimes find it where I least expect it, and sometimes don’t find it where I most expect it.

Rhymes is actually so tenacious in reading my blog that I sometimes wonder if he thinks that God gave me to him as a special project. In this fantasy, he has saved more souls than anyone else in the whole state of Georgia, including John and Charles Wesley. He has, as it were, gone through decades of preparation for me at Trinity University for Laudatory Improvement and Personal Salvation (TULIPS for short) where he has a 4.0 grade average, and I’m his post-post-post doctoral project. So, here he is, grimacing and sweating while pulling my soul from one direction, and here Satan is, grimacing and sweating while pulling from the opposite direction, and here I am doing my best to help Satan kick Rhymes in the teeth so he will let go of my arm. Meanwhile, all the angels are looking down, and they’re cheering Rhymes on; and all the demons are looking up, and they’re cheering me on; and all of you are thinking, “I don’t know how much more of these two I can stand.” 

The artist took such outrageous liberties that the illustration isn’t a good likeness of me, but I couldn’t get him to redo it.

Fools make a mockery of sin, so be sure and invite a few to your next party

I just joined a new atheist group because my old one was too much talk and too little partying. In the new group, people like to get drunk and play Strangulation (that’s what we're doing in the picture). If you win, you get to strangle real puppies and kittens while everyone else laughs so much that they cry and roll around on the floor. Because atheists don’t have God telling us what to do, we’re not uptight all the time, so we can do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. That’s what I love most about being an atheist—that and getting to spend Sunday mornings sleeping off hangovers. 

Here’s what inspired me to write this post. The other day, Peggy wanted to take off from work to go to a picnic. She’s been to this same picnic every year for something like 20 years, but she forgot to put in for time off, and she couldn’t get any of the other nurses to swap with her, so she was all bummed about it. The other nurses and I said, “Well, duh, just call in sick, doofus.” Of course, Little Miss Goody-Goody wouldn’t do that. “My middle name is Integrity,” she purred with a self-congratulatory smile. Just so you’ll know, she really said this, but she probably just said it to me because she wouldn’t have wanted to risk making the other nurses mad by saying it to them, whereas she wouldn’t give a rip if she made me mad. As it turned out, she didn’t make me mad, but she did make me laugh my ass off. Ever since then, she’s had to listen to me call her Ms Integrity in a snide voice a hundred times a day while pointing and snickering, and that’s starting to make her mad—not that I give a rip.

To tell you the truth, I’ve never seen it as a case of her being Ms Goody Two-Shoes and me being Mr. Slug Shit from Hell, although she looks at it that way. When she gets on my case, I say, “Peg, coming home drunk at 4:00 a.m. with a drunk woman on either arm and a trunkful of stolen drugs and money isn’t immoral, it’s alternatively moral—for an atheist, anyway. Hell, what do we care? If you’re just dead when you die, go for the gusto. Rape, kill, and mutilate if that’s what it takes to get your rocks off. Know what I mean?” 

No, Peggy doesn’t know what I mean, yet she doesn’t believe in the supernatural anymore than I do. What’s up with that? Why couldn’t I have married a drunken party-girl/puppy strangler like all my infidel buddies? Why did I have to get stuck with Ms “Integrity is my middle name”? That right there is proof that there’s no justice in the universe and therefore no god in the universe either.

If this weren’t a clean blog, I would say a dirty word about now, but then people might start praying for me again, and I would just hate that. It’s bad enough having Bible verses thrown at me, but at least I can throw them back (they might not get resurrected after three days, but they do start smelling like fish), but I can’t throw a prayer back. Besides, prayers make my head spin in circles while I spew garbage cans full of green vomit onto the walls, and when that happens, I always wake up the next day with a sore neck and a lot of housework. Bible verses don’t do that. They do make me break out in pentagram shaped hives that itch like the devil, but Benadryl clears those hives right up. If not for Benadryl, I would have to get an exorcism, and it would scare me to do that because the preacher might decide to burn me at the stake instead.

Anyway, I just wanted to go ahead and admit that you Christians are right about us atheists not caring what we do to other people as long as it feels good to us. Like right now, I would trade the lives of 27.5 million people for a bowl of ice cream. To you, that might make me seem like a bad person, but I don’t see it that way because I would really enjoy that ice cream. Now, if I were willing to simply give away the lives of all those people without getting any ice cream, that would be bad because it would mean that they died for nothing. So you see, my morality is every bit as good as your morality but in a slightly different way.

Of cats and gods

I thought having a dog was neat. I thought having a woman was cool. Then I got a cat. He ignores me. He treats me like scum. Half the time, he walks away when I try to pet him, only to stop after three feet and lick his ass. Dogs are now nothing to me, and women are even less. I just wish I had forty more cats to treat me like garbage. They would take me back to my childhood when I learned that God loved me despite my utter failure to deserve it and his total unwillingness to show it. No matter how much I needed some proof that he was real, no matter how much I pleaded for faith or reviled him for not granting it, he stayed behind a cloud. 

THAT’S what having a cat is like. I know he loves me because he comes looking for me when he’s hungry, and this can only mean that he acknowledges my existence and has hope that I will give him food, and the fact that he acknowledges my existence and has hope that I will give him food proves his great love for me, if I have faith. Yet, he ignores me the rest of time, and this can only mean that he’s better than I in every conceivable way. This makes him like God! If I had a heart attack and fell to the floor clutching my chest in agony, my cat would remain three feet away licking his ass, and the god of the Bible would remain behind a cloud listening to eternal strains of the Hallelujah Chorus, yet, if I had faith, I would just know that I was loved. 

“Look deep into my eyes… You are getting very, very sleepy… You are getting so sleepy that you can longer think, so you are free, free to believe, believe, believe…in anything you were told was true by the people you grew up among…” 

“...the peace of God, which passeth all understanding...” the Bible

“Religion is the opium of the people.” Marx

In this post, I maligned my cat by presenting him as a stereotype. For that I humbly begged his forgiveness, and he graciously granted it. 

This post was inspired by a reader who quoted the following Bible verse to remind me of the low opinion in which God holds that part of his creation which was made in his own image: “The heart is deceitful...and desperately wicked.” 

How America is getting "back on track"

Before 9/11, an American a politician could get by with being only nominally religious. Now, it helps if he’s “born again”; claims that God inspired him to run for office; thinks God created America to dominate world affairs; considers the Bible a reliable guide to scientific truth; believes our laws are based upon the Ten Commandments; thinks America started down the tubes 50 years ago when the Supreme Court ruled against school prayer; believes that God gives health and wealth to those who please him—making poverty the fault of the poor; opposes abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, the teaching of evolution, and universal healthcare;  and wants America to fully support Israel against its neighbors in order to hasten the Battle of Armageddon and hence the “Second Coming of Christ.” 

However, America is not just rattled by its newly discovered vulnerability. It’s also disturbed by: its impending financial collapse; the increasing number of its people who have no religion; its loss of status in the world to horrid little yellow men who don’t love Jesus; its inability to win wars against semi-literate and poorly armed “ragheads” (aka “sand niggers”) who don’t love Jesus;  and the fact that its rich are getting richer, its poor are getting poorer, and its middle class is disappearing. America gives billions to buy the friendship of oppressive regimes the world over while its roads are falling apart, its local governments are laying off teachers, firemen, and policemen, and its people are dying because they can’t afford medical care. The belief is that a “return to God” will bring about a return to the optimistic materialism of the Eisenhower administration (mid '50s) when “In God We Trust” was first stamped on all American money, the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance, and Christ’s words about loving your neighbor and doing good to your enemy were ignored, especially in regard to Commies, queers, atheists, and niggers.

In times of fear, religious fervor often grows and religious people start looking for someone to blame for what they interpret as the loss of God’s favor. Well, guess who they have in their sights? Atheists, liberals, socialists, feminists, scientists, environmentalists, non-Christians, homosexuals, unionists, and animal rights’ supporters. Civil libertarians can win victory after victory in court to keep America from becoming a theocracy, but the number of mayors, aldermen, school administrators, teachers, governors, and other officials who are willing to promote Christianity without the least regard for the law, or freedom of speech, or their oaths of office is such that we can’t begin to sue them all. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights that have for so long protected freedom in America are honored less and less everyday and the Bible more and more due to this desperation to get America “back on track.” You can now be charged with terrorism simply by committing what used to be a misdemeanor property crime. Your house or business can be searched without a court order. A GPS transmitter can be installed on your car without your knowledge. You can be locked away for life without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom. The FBI can even obtain a list of the books you got from your local library. Pre-9/11, such things were unimaginable.

Evangelical Christians (Evangelicalism is the dominant face of American religion) are enthusiastic supporters of such violations of the Constitution as well as “enhanced interrogation.” This Evangelical contempt for liberty isn’t surprising when you consider that they subscribe to an authoritarian religion which brooks no questions, offers no appeals, and predicts everlasting agony for everyone but themselves. The future is looking ever bleaker for those of us who don’t go along with this unholy alliance of religion and politics, but there is very little we can do about it. I don’t see how the current trend is even a good thing for Christians, because once they silence the rest of us, history would suggest that they will turn on one another. As the saying goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but once that enemy has been annihilated, the “friend” had better sleep with one eye open.

What has been most breath-taking  about America’s post 9/11 descent into madness is how quickly and easily the very government that was supposed to protect our rights went about abolishing them, and how few people objected. Most Americans appear ready to buy safety at any cost, not realizing that oppression from within is surely a greater threat than terrorism from without. In the fight against Islamic fundamentalists, our government has the capability of being our ally, but who will help us when the terrorists’ Christian equivalent is running our government? It is my sad conclusion that the only things that are genuinely important to the American people are junk food, comfy recliners, trash on the telly, and that most hard-assed American patriot of all, the Lord Jesus. Give them these, and they will follow like sheep.