Religion | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Apr

until I thought of what I’d say, which connection I should cut

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?”
“Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”

- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Jacob Bacharach observed something on his blog the other day that prompted a reminiscence of my own: my lingering fondness for Catholic novelists. G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, Walker Percy, Tim Powers, Walter M. Miller: I could pick up any of the novels of theirs I own and read them again today, for unexamined pleasure, no matter how many times I’ve read the book I pick^*. They’ve survived for me, while the catechism has dwindled.

Why is that? Part of it involves the gentle wit of their style. Maybe they’re all cribbing Chesterton and Lewis, condemning the excesses of the secular world with sardonicism and a touch of smugness. A more savage satire would be off-putting, given its source, and that sort of bitterness gets tiring in heavy doses. It speaks to the snob in me, the man who’s been affecting world weariness for half his life, and it makes me feel like less of a boor for doing it.

the-man-who-was-thursday Part of it likely involves their flavor of mid-century Catholicism. Late 20th-century readers, familiar with the Church of Rome only through encyclicals and headlines, wouldn’t recognize Catholicism the way it’s portrayed at the Order of Leibowicz or on Malacandra. It admits that, no, faith doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but what in secula seculorum does? Given the last century’s few benighted attempts at letting the intellectuals run the show, I can’t deny the appeal. There’s something Byronic in that doomed romanticism, something existentialist in the willingness to push on even in the absence of reason. The new atheists have yet to achieve such sentiment, anyway.

“One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a playworld which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

The third part, of course, is nostalgia.

_________________
* Which isn’t to say I’m oblivious to their flaws: Chesterton’s tendency to pass paradox off as wisdom, Lewis’s bogus apologia, and so forth.

May

everyone will leave at exactly the same time

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Morning all! Taking advantage of WordPress’s post-scheduling feature to leave you this note. By the time you read this, I will no longer be present on this Earth. Unbeknownst to you, I took a half day on Friday and got myself saved in advance of the Rapture. So now I’m kicking it in Heaven along with the other 144,000, or however many it’s supposed to be.

“But Professor,” you’re saying. “Why would you, an unrepentant atheist, embrace dispensationalist fundamentalist Christianity?” To hedge my bets. If Pascal’s Wager means anything, then a one-in-a-quintillion chance that an 89-year-old engineer with a radio show has the goods on the afterlife is worth any amount of foolishness. Plus, I’ve grown tired of using reason, intuition and the evidence of the senses to rule my behavior. What good have they done me so far? Sure, I’ve got a great job, a loving girlfriend, supportive peers and a sweet car, and my health, and a 401(k), but doubts still plague my heart. Whereas, if Harold Camping’s to be believed, I can accept Christ as my savior and wash those doubts away.

Those if you who saw me pre-ascension this weekend might have noted that I hadn’t stopped my drinking, swearing, or otherwise radical lifestyle. That’s the beauty of dispensationalism: I don’t need to! Merely being baptized, accepting Christ as my savior and admitting that I am an imperfect creature in constant need of his guidance will vouchsafe me a place in Heaven. There’s been a lot of debate in history over whether faith alone or faith and good works will save a sinner. But trust me: just faith.

If you’re reading this, then you weren’t one of the elect. Sorry! I’d tell you to come to the fold, but it’s too late at this point. Everyone who’s going to be saved has been. For now, all you can really hope for is a painless death. I suspect things get extra bad for the ones who engrave the mark of the Beast on their foreheads, but I’m not positive. Like I said, I’m still new to all this!

So long, friends! It’s been fun! I hope at least some of you are in Heaven with me, otherwise it might get boring.

Update: disregard.

Apr

written by an Italian poet in the thirteenth century

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Caught the two-hour premiere of The Borgias, Showtime’s entry into the “Blood, Tits and Scowling” genre that’s all the rage on premium cable. Considering the hard sell that HBO’s putting on Game of Thrones, The Borgias caught me almost completely off guard. Where’s the NYC food truck painted like a sacristy? Whither the “Indulgence” gifts on Facebook? Anyway.

The Borgias: Aside from the usual weaknesses of a pilot episode, an excellent introduction to Vatican politics. Jeremy Irons is suitably restrained, for once, as Rodrigo Borgia, vice chancellor of the College of Cardinals on the eve of being elected Pope Alexander VI. He’s attended by his son, Cesare Borgia (Francois Arnaud), who’s also a priest but ironically seems more ruthless. Cesare seems to hold the role played by Michael Pitt in Boardwalk Empire: the loyal, cold-blooded son, willing to do what the father isn’t. He’s aided in this cause by a conveniently recruited assassin, Micheletto (Sean Harris), and his brother in the papal armies, Juan.

Pope Alexander VI starts the pilot by telling his mistress, Vanossa (Joanne Whalley – remember her? she’s still great), that he can’t be seen with her in public. He ends the episode in a cozy affair with Giulia Farnese (sultry-eyed newcomer Lotte Verbeek), much to the family’s chagrin. But Giulia’s not a lovestruck innocent: she quickly begins consolidating her power by befriending the Pope’s daughter, Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger). Lucrezia and Cesare’s relationship is already uncomfortably close for brother and sister; we’ll see if the Pope’s threats to marry her off put a strain on it.

The pilot suffers from the need to cram a great many plots in a mere two hours. Confrontations and reconciliations that probably took months in real history take seconds on screen. More than once, we see something akin to the following:

Pope Alexander VI: … and I’m making my mailman the Archbishop of Barcelona.
Cardinal Orsini: SIMONY! I denounce you!
Pope: Sounds like someone doesn’t want the awesome papal offices I’m selling.
Orsini: What? Me? Nonsense.
Pope: Good.
Orsini: Speaking of, why don’t you come to a party I’m throwing tomorrow?
Pope: I don’t know; you were just threatening me. Are you sure I won’t be poisoned?
Orsini: Oh, come on. “Poison-free in ’93″, that’s my motto.
Pope: Well, I’m between mistresses at the moment, so I’m free.
Orsini: Excellent! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to swing by the pharmacy to pick up some, er, flavorless blood thinners. Back in a trice!

And so on.

This baldness aside, the series benefits from good cinematography and great performances. When we first see Alexander VI greet the citizens of Rome on the Vatican balcony, blessing the crowd with a dignified wave of his hand, the parallel to the recent coronation of Benedict XVI is striking. Every scene in the Church drips with rich robes, the luster of gold, and the dim lights that would evoke backroom politics in a later century. The Cardinals all look old and corrupt, barely capable of putting up a front for each others’ lies. The younger generation, embodied in the Borgia family, appear young and vibrant. Cesare is most frequently filmed in motion, his clerical robes swirling around his heels as he stalks down one corridor or another.

I still have high hopes for Game of Thrones, but it’s got a strong competitor to live up to.

May

said it ain’t where you’re from; it’s where you’re at

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Weddings are wasted on the young. I don’t mean the really young, like J.J’s toddler, who would sprint across the dance floor to give someone a high-five then hide behind his mother’s skirts. But anyone between the ages of seven and seventeen has no business being at a wedding. Unless it’s their own and they’re in a state that tolerates that sort of thing. But the real joy of a wedding comes not from the ceremony or even the rituals following it. It comes from those long hours at the reception, sitting in small circles with a friend at your side and a drink in your hand, saying, Hey, remember when? It’s reflecting on the deep history you have with the married couple, and then realizing with a sigh that all of it is prologue.

Fortunately, I didn’t see any kids between seven and seventeen at Will and Gina’s wedding this past weekend. Gina and Will always meshed in such a way that you had a hard time remembering when they weren’t a couple. The goofy humor, the quiet energy. But, with effort, I was able to remember Will before he met Gina, and those few months before Gina started openly dating Will. That was eight and a half years ago. And yet, seeing them at the front of that church last Saturday, I still recognized the excited look in their eyes. Wow. We made it.

The ceremony, a Catholic mass, spent as much time on Jesus as it did on the happy couple. The DJ’s playlist was probably the same as any other wedding he’ll do this summer. And everyone knows what order the reception rituals come in: introducing the couple, toasts, first dances, cutting the cake, etc. It’s not the ritual that makes the wedding special. You can get the wedding day just right and still end it in bitterness a few years later. Or you can twiddle your thumbs during a grotesque homily^*, fumble with the lighting of special candles, and still come out all right. It’s not about the uniform; it’s about who’s on your team with you.

will-and-gina

_________
* I don’t use the word “grotesque” lightly. The priest told an inspiring fable about a soldier who was sentenced to death by a court-martial. Told that the sentence would be carried out when the curfew bell rang, the soldier’s wife tied herself to the bell clapper so that no one would hear the signal. When her “cut and bloodied” body was found inside the bell, the sentencing officer solemnly intoned, “Curfew will not be rung today.” I hope the photographer caught the dawning look of horror that washed over the congregation; my digital camera has a pretty small lens.

Aug

so I came down to crash and burn your beggars banquet

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

The Family: A secret conspiracy of religious fundamentalists, who use their unequaled access to American politicians to meet in secret with overseas dictators, sounds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. If true, or if masquerading as truth, then one would expect to find it in a photocopied zine left in a punk rock cafe or an Allston laundromat. Not in a well-researched book, excerpts of which have appeared in Harper’s and Rolling Stone. Not by a man who’s met this conspiracy in the flesh.

But such a book is Jeff Sharlet’s The Family. And such a conspiracy is … well, the Fellowship is such a loose grouping of interconnected “prayer cells” that it’s tough to give them a single name. Founded in 1935 by Norwegian missionary Abraham Vereide, it started as a means to create a solid anti-union, anti-communist front – in the name of Jesus – on America’s west coast. It has grown since then: a faith that does not target congregations but “key men” in places of high power. Since Vereide’s directive that his brothers “submerge the institutional image” of the Family in 1966, they have had no formal status. It’s hard to call a faith that builds no megachurches, sponsors no protests, and does nothing public except run the National Prayer Breakfast a “fundamentalist conspiracy.”

And yet many of the Watergate co-conspirators, including Chuck Colson and James McCord, were members of the Fellowship. Gerald Ford prayed in a secret prayer cell with them. William Rehnquist led the Family’s bible study for federal judges. Figures attacked by controversy, such as James Watt and Clarence Thomas, have absconded to the Family’s private retreat – the Cedars – to avoid the public eye. Reagan and Bush Sr praised the Family for its secrecy and diplomatic efforts. Paul Temple, former Exxon executive, helps support the Family through generous donations. The Fellowship was instrumental in arranging the Camp David accords in 1978 and the Congo/Rwanda talks in 2002. Senators Hillary Clinton, Sam Brownback and John Ensign, as well as Congressman Chip Pickering and Gov. Mark Sanford have all relied on the Family for moral guidance, if not diplomatic cachet. And this is a short list.

What makes the Family so successful, if not so sinister, is that they’re not obvious in their fundamentalism. They don’t have much use for the Bible beyond the New Testament, and even that they don’t memorize. They don’t build a lot of churches. They don’t write op-eds opposing gay marriage. What they have done, rather, is quietly command the ear of every President since Eisenhower, the most powerful men in both houses of Congress, the occasional Supreme Court Justice, and many American diplomats abroad.

Their explicit goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian nation, and thereby the world into a Christian planet. Or not Christian, rather, but Christ-loving. As Sharlet makes clear, the Fellowship does not believe in the idea of Christianity so much as they worship Christ the man: God made flesh, the ultimate source of power in human form. And in spreading God’s power around the world, they have funneled money and U.S. aid to some of the 20th Century’s worst dictators, including Mohammed Siad Barre, Suharto and Gustavo Alvarez Martinez.

Sharlet doesn’t spend the entire book on the Family (though he could). He spends a lot of time digging into America’s religious history: its Pilgrim founding, its revivals and hysterias, its itinerant preachers and urban megachurches. Secular observers, Sharlet claims, look at events like the Great Awakening or the Scopes Monkey Trial as outliers – bursts of fundamentalism that flare up and die down in time. Sharlet asserts, to the contrary, that the periods of secular culture are the outliers. America is and always has been a fundamentalist nation. Americans want to feel their religion, not be guided by it. And by tapping into that need for a strong, emotional faith, and delivering it to key men in Washington, the Family has succeeded where generations of grass roots efforts have failed. Their hand is on the wheel.

Aug

april, come she will

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:57 am

I forgot my camera battery when going to Mia and Bob’s wedding in Dublin, NH this Saturday. So now I have to weblog about it to remember it at all. It’s not my fault.

Rachel V. and Steve were kind enough to give me a ride up. We listened to Steve’s XM radio and Rachel’s extra-danceable iPod playlist.

“Was nu-metal a reaction to the … flamboyance of hair bands?” Rachel asked at one point.
“I thought nu-metal was a reaction to grunge,” I chimed in from the back seat.
“And grunge to hair bands,” Steve finished.
“Only one way to settle this,” I concluded, digging out my cell phone to call Fred Durst. Still hasn’t got back to me.
“Who are you texting?” Rachel asked Kevin Q. We stood in the shade around the rustic firepit in Mia’s mother’s backyard.
“I’m not texting anyone,” he said, not looking up.
“Then what are–”
“I’m live-tweeting the wedding.”
Later, someone waved a copy of the program at Kevin, with its admonition to silence cell phones during the ceremony. To drive the point home, Serpico texted “turn off your phone” just before the ceremony started. Kevin got it and fumed.
The ceremony, though outdoors, was shaded by the towering trees and aerated by ambient wind. Mia’s uncle, a pastor, conducted the ceremony, giving plenty of advice and insight to the young couple. We sat patiently until told to stand again. I suppose it says something of the secularity of the audience that nobody knew what to do when prompted to “share a sign of peace.” It fell to the lapsed Catholics (like me) to turn and start shaking hands.
No communion wafers, though. Hell, that’s another, what, fifteen minutes? Twenty?
Chatting with my favorite EMT, Lynne W., I learned that tall, skinny people are more prone to suffer collapsed lungs. “I wonder if that has any connection to the stabbing pains I feel once every ten months or so when I draw a deep breath,” I speculated.

“Could be.”

“Eh, my cross to bear.”

“Oh, life’s so hard for you tall and slender people.”

“Exactly; I – hey!”
I got to chat at length with the significant others of my friends: Rachel’s Steve; Michelle McN’s Ben; Kevin’s Shawn. They have an identity outside of their predicate attachment to an existing friend, I discovered. For instance, Ben took up snowboarding after skiing screwed up his knees. He, Haley and I chatted about it in the smoker’s circle near the parked cars. I wasn’t smoking; I just wanted to hang with the cool kids. Like Ben.

Also, Steve quit smoking, drinking and caffeine a year ago, all on the same day. Neither Vickie nor I could believe it. “I don’t even drink or use caffeine that much, and I don’t smoke,” I told him. “But if a doctor told me those two were killing me, I’d ask, ‘How long do I have?’ ”
Rode back with a full car – the Serpico/Keoughs and the Smithneys, me snug in the backseat with Claire and Kim^*. We reminisced about childhood indulgences: our favorite books that we devoured a stack at a time, our favorite cartoons, our favorite food. Everyone conceded that everyone at the wedding was cool and that we all need to hang out with them more. Which I plan on.

______________________________
^* All ri-ight.

Jun

rule britannia is out of bounds

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

WALL-E: Another touching and awesome Pixar spectacle. Pixar has mastered animation to the extent that a one-foot robot with only two words in its vocabulary can emote more effectively than most of the stars expected to carry a summer picture today. They’ve mastered comic timing on a level that puts 99% of comedies released today (Mike Myers films, the [Genre] Movie series) to shame. And I’m not the best barometer for tearjerkers, sensitive twit that I am, but very few human actors can move me like Pixar’s wooden toys, fuzzy monsters, colorful fish or rusting robots.

(No, I haven’t seen Up yet; planning on it)

Red Mars: I started this book when I was 14, maybe, got about 100 pages into it, and couldn’t sustain interest. Don’t know why I stuck to my initial judgment for so long – putting too high a premium on my adolescent judgments – but man, was I wrong. Red Mars works on all levels. As a compelling story of social orders in development, Red Mars tells the story of the first permanent colony on Mars – dedicated scientists at constant odds, each with their own vision of utopia that they seek to impose upon a lifeless planet. I also found myself able to follow the hard science aspects to a greater extent than in other sci-fi novels – I got the importance of aerobraking, and moholes, and the Phobos oscillation on the space elevator. So few engineers-turned-authors can make that work for an English major like me.

But above all else, Red Mars tells my favorite story: of how the war between institutions grinds humans in its wake. Red Mars lacks any overt villains. Though the United Nations and the megacorporations that run it draw no real sympathy, they do have a compelling case: they made a significant investment in Mars by getting the colony there, and they want to see that investment recouped. The environmentalists and the terraformers both make solid arguments for their points of view. Even the saboteurs draw the reader in, with their hokey Rousseauvian mysticism.

What else was I wrong about at age 14, I wonder?

Your Religion is False: Asked and answered, I suppose.

Atheists will never gain much traction in the public forum with the cranky attitude that people like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers adopt in talking about faith. The ancient churches of the world have dealt with better (and better armed) vitriol for centuries. But gone are the years when joking about a holy man would get you exiled from your village, or burned at the stake, or eaten by bears. Laughter is a hard weapon to deflect.

Joel Grus puts humor to good use in Your Religion is False, by taking a John Hodgmann-esque look at all of the major world’s religions. He alternates between straight-faced looks at the absurdity of religious doctrine and exaggerations for comic effect:

Conservative Protestants strictly follow three universal principles, all of which revolve around the idea of “I’m sick of the Pope telling me what to do”:

“If the Bible says it, I believe it. If the Bible doesn’t say it, I don’t believe it. If the Pope says it, for sure I don’t believe it, unless the Bible says it too, in which case I have to ask my pastor what I think.”
“It doesn’t matter how good or evil you are – if you accept Jesus as your savior, you’re going to heaven, and if you don’t you’re going to hell.”
“I’m sick of the Pope telling me what to do.”

The first causes all sorts of problems, as it forces Conservative Protestants to believe that the world is only 6000 years old, to disbelieve in all sorts of useful science, to insist that one man both built a boat capable of carrying and subsequently discovered two members of every species on Earth (including, apparently, all five million-plus species of beetles), and to assert that pi equals 3. The second causes all sorts of problems, as it has allowed a number of Nixon-era criminals to establish lucrative post-incarceration prison ministries. The third is actually an exceptionally sensible position.

And he devotes attention to just about every religion I’ve heard of, from the obscure (transcendental meditation, Jainism, giant stone head worship) to the institutional (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc). I think this is the book’s greatest strength and the key to its outreach. Every believer thinks that religions other than his own are silly, or false, or harmful, and wouldn’t mind a chance to poke fun at them. Maybe by seeing them juxtaposed with his own beliefs – equally silly in Grus’s eyes – he’ll have cause to rethink them.

Highly recommended. Buy a copy today.

(Disclosure: I advised Joel on certain portions of the book and provided some feedback on an early draft. However, I think you all know me well enough to know that, if I didn’t think this was a genuinely worthwhile book, I’d put off Joel’s persistent requests for a glowing review with a polite passive-aggression until he lost interest or took the hint. I’m that sort of asshole. But I haven’t; it’s legitimately funny)

Jun

breathe in, breathe out

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

As an atheist, rationalist and all-around humorless asshole, I don’t go in for a lot of Eastern mysticism. I don’t think much of reiki. I don’t believe in the healing power of crystals, or cranio-sacral touch, or reflexology. I think ear candling’s a dangerous fraud. I don’t trust acupuncturists or chiropractors.

So you wouldn’t think I’d be big on ki.

Watching Vlad promote to black belt at jiu-jitsu this past Saturday, I took a moment to revisit my thoughts on ki. Vlad’s built like a linebacker – big but fit, in full control of his mass. But he moves with a fluidity that speaks to incredible control over his own body. When Vlad throws you, you don’t feel the tension of exertion behind it. You feel a smooth, continuous projection, like a roller coaster cresting a hill. That’s the kind of energy it takes to toss someone to the ground using only your hands, or to break through a stack of boards with a single chop while kneeling in front of them.

The human body is a pretty efficient machine for directing force into one fine point. Think about it: your body has enough fine control to turn a deadbolt, enough raw power to lift a box of books, enough coordination to ride a bicycle and enough balance to descend a staircase. That’s a remarkable variety of tasks. But too often, if we’re using our body without training, we dissipate that force. We lift heavy boxes by bending at the back instead of the knees, or we try to turn a deadbolt while holding four bags of groceries. Instead of directing our muscles to their most precise use, we let them run wild.

It gets even worse in a fight, when adrenaline ramps up our reflexes. Our arms flail in crazy windmills. We hold our breath, filling our body with tension, and lean forward on our toes as if to spring. We swarm and crush, but we don’t fight effectively. How much better to dispel that tension – forcing your body to relax, directing energy from where it’s wasted (keeping the entire body rigid) to where it’s needed (the hand, the leg, the arm, etc).

Think of the incredible coordination required for Dwight Howard to dunk a ball from nearly the free throw line. Every muscle must be working in unison to that goal alone – legs, torso, arms, hands. He couldn’t pull that off if he just had a powerful jump, or merely had good ball control. It takes athleticism, coordination and practice.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO3c8EaxsxQ]

That’s ki. Strip it of the mysticism, and ki is shorthand for the control and awareness of one’s own body that comes with years of practice at a given task. It’s what lets me push away an opponent half again my weight when I couldn’t bench that much, even on steroids. It’s what lets the world’s greatest athletes perform in the clutch. And it’s what carried my friend and fellow instructor Vlad through his black belt test this past Saturday.

Call it what you’ve like, but I’ve seen it. It’s real.

May

it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:28 am

I haven’t been religious for more than a decade now. From the day I decided to walk away from religion I’ve never missed it. It fills no essential role in my life, either ethically or logically. I almost forget what it was like to be religious.

But I have noticed one thing missing: the sense of community.

Church, or temple, or the mosque: these are all great places to meet a broad cross-section of neighbors. Consider that the people you see at your place of worship, you might never run into otherwise. They don’t work at your office; they don’t belong to your community pool; they don’t date your friends. But once a weekend, you show up at the same place. You bake stale brownies for the same picnics, assemble the same houses on church retreats to the Appalachians and chaperone the same pool parties. You’re forced to meet people whose paths would never cross yours normally.

Networking like that improves the quality of your life. The broader and stronger your network, the better the type of jobs, perks and friends you’ll find. Oh, you’re in the market for a car? My cousin’s a dealer out in Springfield – he’s been trying to offload some inventory. Or: sixth grade, you said? My daughter just entered sixth grade at that private school up in Clinton; she loves it. And my wife sits on the school board. Let me give you our number.

Religious services work like that, in a way few other groups do, because of the disparate interests they draw in. Other groups – professional organizations, amateur sports teams, bar-hopping circles of friends – can approach that level of networking success, but they can never duplicate it. You need the random-but-not-quite sampling that a faith draws in – people who believe enough in common to talk to each other, but not so much that they have nothing to say.

I’ve been part of like-minded atheist experiments – the Boston Objectivist Network being the most successful – but it’s never quite the same. And I think this is why religious people will enjoy a statistical, and thus political, advantage over the non-religious for decades to come. They have instant networks. They have a voter base – or, more importantly, a movement base – that can easily be tapped into. Atheists do not.

I’m not saying you should join a church you don’t believe in for the free brownies and car washes. But I’m always looking for ways to expand my network.

Dec

hit the shore 'cause I'm faded; honeys in the street saying money, yo we made it

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 12:15 pm

Pascal’s Wager is an argument for belief in the Christian God – not proof of its existence, but merely a contention to believe in it – that runs as follows:

[E]ven though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should “wager” as though God exists, because so living has potentially everything to gain, and certainly nothing to lose.

Game theorists might explain the wager using a chart like this:

God exists God does not exist

Wager for God Gain all Status quo

Wager against God Misery Status quo

Already we see one problem – if belief in the Christian God costs us nothing, it also means nothing. You can argue over what a belief in the Christian God requires: consumption of the Eucharist? regular attendance at Sunday Mass? faith alone? faith plus good works? In fact, millions have been arguing this for the last twenty centuries, and millions have died in the arguing. But it strikes me as common sense that belief must entail some behavior that non-believers aren’t doing. There has to be some obvious difference between belief and non-belief. Otherwise, the term “belief” is meaningless.

Okay, the apologist says: belief costs something. But that’s a relatively minor pittance compared to the infinite reward of Heaven. A small price is worth paying if there’s a chance of an infinite payoff.

This bugged me for a while until last night, as I got off the shuttle from work. As usual, I was thinking about gaming.

Consider: I have a die with six sides. You examine it to your satisfaction to prove that it’s not weighted or tricked. If you like, we can substitute a die of your own, provided I get to examine it as well.

I say, “Pay me $5 and I’ll let you roll this die. I’ll pay you whatever number comes up.”

You say, “That’s a sucker bet.”

I say, “But! If you roll a 6, I’ll let you re-roll and add the new number to the total. If you roll a 6 again, I’ll let you roll again. I’ll let you keep doing this as many times as a 6 comes up.”

You say, “Really? I dunno …”

I say, “Come on! A small price is worth paying if there’s a chance of an infinite payoff!”

So you fork over $5 and roll. Ten rolls later, I’m up at least $8, if not more.¹

Pascal’s Wager has a lot of problems, but the biggest is: he never gives you the odds of each outcome. And you never trust a game where they don’t post the odds. Let’s say the Commonwealth of Massachusetts holds a special lottery where the prize is infinite money for life – the ultimate charge card. Should I pay $1 for a ticket? $10? $50,000? Depends on the odds of winning.

The “infinite payoff” of Heaven sounds nice and all, but I don’t know if the odds of the Christian God existing are one in a thousand, one in a trillion or one in ten. And that’s a lot of hours to give up on Sunday if I guessed wrong.

These are the things I think about on the bus.

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¹ The average roll on a fair die with six sides is 3.5. The average roll on an exploding die with six sides – meaning, one that lets you re-roll and add on every time you get a six – is 4.2.

	*God exists*	*God does not exist*
*Wager for God*	Gain all	Status quo
*Wager against God*	Misery	Status quo