Wrestling with Religion

I have been dead forever--or for 13.8 billion years if you count time from the Big Bang. I am alive now, of course, but I was dead less than a century ago, and don’t miss all of those oblivious eons. According to actuarial tables, I can expect to be dead forever again in about ten years. My longest reasonable expectation is a bit more than double that, and it overlaps with likely dementia and disability. At most, my life expectancy is one billionth the time I've  already spent comfortably dead, so why I should take health and safety precautions for a reward so trivial: a fifth of a lifetime and an infinitely smaller proportion of my inevitable death-time? Healthy behaviors are a game of diminishing returns, especially since many risky indulgences tend to kill or disable us slowly. It may take years, even decades, for fat to clog arteries, smoking to kill lung tissue, alcohol to destroy the liver, or speeding to kill. Most people die from only one of these (if not from someth...

Imagine that you and I are in the living room of an American suburban neighborhood and you are by a front window looking out, but I am not. You report that a neighbor is walking her dog. I may not look even up from my book. I believe you because dog walking is common on our cul-de-sac. Your word is all the evidence I need. Now, let's suppose you tell me she is walking a greyhound, which is far less common but happens. A family two blocks away owned a rescue greyhound last year, but it apparently died. They have a short life expectancy. I may lower my book to look, but, unless you are a terrible liar, I'll take your word for it even if the dog is out of sight by the time I reach the window. The event is interesting but ordinary. Now, suppose that you say that a cowboy is riding a pony down the street. I have seen riders in rodeos and on country roads but never in the neighborhood. I don’t doubt that a cowboy is possible, but he is far less ordinary than a dog-walker, so I ...

At the risk of beating a dead Pascal, I want to challenge two assumptions in his argument that belief in God is infinitely more lucrative than unbelief. One is that the main motive for unbelief is the unbeliever’s concupiscence (often sexual desire but not limited to that). People disbelieve so they can be free to misbehave. Another is that unbelievers benefit in a finite way by liberating themselves to pursue to unbridled pleasure. Pascal himself contradicts these elsewhere when he says that Christian belief  makes a person “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend" (418). Anything that deprives a person of this is hardly a benefit, even a finite one. I doubt, however, that these benefits actually proceed from belief, having read extensively in newspapers, autobiographies, and popular fiction from the 19th-century South, where the existence of God, sin, heaven, and hell were taken for granted. Belief in God was well-nigh universal am...

Even if we accept the possibility of a God that dispenses an infinite jackpot for belief and withholds it for disbelief, Pascal’s Wager--his argument that it is infinitely more lucrative to believe in his God than not to--is reasonable only absent the possibility of another God offering the opposite payoff. Here are some possibilities: (1) a God who rewards reasonable disbelief and punishes gullibility or (2) a God who insists that we make specific theological choices (such as Baal vs. YHWH, Catholic vs. protestant, Christian vs. Muslim) and rewards only the correct choice. The possibility of even one such Being creates an opposing infinity and invalidates Pascal's Wager.  Belief in a generic supreme being also seems not to be enough. The priests of Baal (who competed with Elijah to call down fire from heaven and were slaughtered for it) believed their god was more powerful than Elijah's Yahweh, whom Pascal identifies with the true God, so if all that is required is beli...

Ophelia is about my age, but GMO cat-people age so gracefully that she looks kittenish in bedroom light, and her greatest charm, besides long furry legs, is the wisdom of her years. Ophelia suggests that I blog these memoirs on 21st century Earth, and she ought to know, being a time traveler. She’s extra-dimensional far too much for my comfort, but when she does intersect my spacetime, we meet Thursday afternoons in her laboratory-boudoir. "Your friend Sax creeps me out," Ophelia said last Thursday, biting my big toe. "It's nothing personal, Banjo. He thinks too rutting much like a cat. I know he doesn't look it."  “He is a brilliant detective.”  “And lucky to have you around." "How's that?" "It's about limits, baby. Cats are smarter than humans. That goes without saying, but even we have our limits. Sometimes we need a little of that human trait. . . . I won't call it stupidity." "Kind of you." ...

My great-great-grandfather Green was a devout lay Methodist who founded Sunday Schools wherever he went. He founded Green's chapel in north Alabama, which was my grandfather's and father's home church. My paternal grandfather, Papa Green, was a gentleman and a scholar, retired businessman, and farmer who kept a Bible and newspaper on the table by his rocker. My mother's grandfather donated land for a Baptist church down the hill from his house in central Alabama, where her father and mother, were pillars of the church and sustained a one-room school, also on family land. Grandaddy worked road maintenance in addition to farming to send my mother to Montevallo, the nearby women’s teacher’s college. Mother and Daddy were the first college graduates in their families. Both became teachers and settled in Auburn, Alabama. I grew up in a house just a few blocks from the university and within sight of one of the best public schools in the state. Daddy had converted t...