Wrestling with Religion

    As if my latest refusal To make sense called the bluff Of an intransigent demiurge, His dada clockwork. Well, My pout is hardly the first And not likely to make Mr. Big Punch skylights in his Platonic cave. Everything’s infinitely more likely To have been some other thing— Like you, who only last week  Were here alive, and here I am Sitting across a blue table From you, and you are again.

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...

There was an Irish girl named Clara whose father sailed to America before the Great Famine. He left his family in Ireland, not wanting to expose them to the dangers of the “coffin ship” that was the only passage he could afford, but he promised to send for them soon.  Clara was barely three when her father sailed away and had no memory of him, but every night her mother talked about the man and how deeply he loved them. During the Great Famine, Clara never tired of hearing how clever her father was, how he was  certain to succeed and take her to a land of plenty. At night she talked to her father and imagined she could hear him answer. A few letters came from America, not written by the father himself, but by friends who had met him, and Clara memorized them, untroubled that they postponed again and again the day of his return. His final letter reported that he had staked a rich claim in a California goldfield.  After that, Clara and her mother heard noth...

The 2001 film cartoon Monsters, Inc . imagines a corporation of monsters that feed off scaring children through doors that are portals to their bedroom closets. This is a variant on the motif of the monster under the bed. In both cases, a presence is felt but never seen. It’s the opposite of the refrigerator light that seems to be always lit. Just as we never see the light off, children in the cartoon world never see the monsters. They can never confirm or disconfirm the existence of beings who exit through magic portals whenever closet doors are  opened. Despite their ontological indeterminacy, the monsters do frighten children. They power Monstopolis with juvenile screams, so there's clearly a psychic drain caused by the children’s belief in monsters. But if monsters are unfalsifiable, why should children believe in them at all? Why scream needlessly? Shouldn't they imagine more pleasant unfalsifiable creatures in their closets? Shouldn't they imagine, say, magica...

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." ...