Wrestling with Religion

Decades ago, after I turned forty and one of my sons left home for college, I suddenly felt old and found comfort (or cover at least) in the quip: “Growing old ain’t bad when you consider the alternative.” This assumes growing old to be better than dying, and most people would agree. Otherwise, seniors would be immune to death threats and impossible to hold at gunpoint.  I remember when I was a teenager, alive in the fresh horror of realizing that personal immortality was no Kalashnikov Truth--not a thing objectively verifiable or universally accepted--that for all I could ever know, death is oblivion. I was flying on my bike down a steep incline one afternoon and suddenly reflected that a blowout and crushed skull might instantly snuff out, not just Billy Green, past and present, but (as far as that Billy was concerned) the earth, sun, moon, and stars—and even the absence of these spheres. Not only light would vanish, but darkness. Not only existence, but nonexisence. Not ...

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...