By Michael Nettleton
I’ve always been a skeptic. I was that kid in Sunday
school whose parent were most likely to get a call saying “It would be a good
idea if you came and took Michael home.”
Not that I went out of my way to be disruptive. It’s just
that I tended to blurt out questions that made the Sunday school teacher get
that “deer in the headlights” look and raise his eyes to heaven for help.
Questions like “Adam and Eve were the first and only people on earth. They had
sons. Where did the sons’ wives come from?” and “Noah put two of every living
thing in the ark and they stayed there for forty days and forty nights. Didn’t
it really smell in there?” The “God works in mysterious ways” answer never
quite cut it with the 9 year-old me.
Maybe it’s the imminent threat of the Corona virus or
just my advancing age, but lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about God
and Pascal’s wager.
Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth century philosopher, mathematician,
and physicist. He proposed that a rational person should live as though God
exists and seek to believe. If God does not actually exist, such a person will
have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas he stands to
receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite
losses (eternity in Hell). This was the Christian God Pascal had in mind, but
other religions advance similar propositions.
All righty then. Simple enough. Except . . . To tell
yourself you believe in God is to suspend the disbelief that comes with being a
rational, logical, thinking human being. Who, if you believe, God created the
brain that helps you reason things out. And
if you profess to believe in God, when deep down you don’t, and it turns out he
does indeed sit on a golden throne with a flowing white beard and a retinue of
angels, won’t he take points off for insincerity? Only one person (is a deity a
person?) to pose this question to and that’s the big Kahuna himself. Or
possibly herself. And, to be honest, I
feel funny about praying to either gender, when I can’t find any definitive
proof of their presence up in the clouds somewhere. After all, God didn’t
answer any of my prayers when I was nine. Ronnie Flanagan, the neighborhood
bully never got hit by a bolt of lightning. My parents never came into a
gazillion dollars so my mom could quit working her fingers to the bone. My dog
Panda never quit chasing cars, even after getting hit and almost killed by one.
Perhaps God will read this blog and leave answers in
the comments section. I’ll just pose the rest of this as a series of questions.
1.
Why did you let the election of 2016 come out
the way it did? Could this guy actually be your representative on earth like
some people believe? On which day of creation did you come up with liquid
tanning products? Aren’t the things he says and does supposed to send you
straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200?
2.
If I’ve been a sinner (and we all are) and I
don’t worship you during my entire life until the final 10 seconds before I
pass into the next world, but if I profess to be a believer at the end, will I ascend
to the same heaven as Jim Baker, who spent a lifetime fleecing his followers in
your name and is now hawking a bogus Corona virus cure to make money to fuel
his limo?
3.
Do you really take sides for fans of one team or
the other in NFL football games? How about hockey?
4.
Are you really that easily flattered? Do the
people who constantly sing your praises and drop your name into every conversation
really have an inside line to your Kingdom?
5.
Of all of the hundreds (or is it thousands) of
religions that exist worldwide, could it be possible that only one of them is
on the money? And what are the chances that it’s only one narrow interpretation
of that religion?
6.
Where did Adam and Eve’s sons find wives? (This
one’s bothered me since I was frog-marched out of Sunday school so many years
ago.) A tip. The “God works in mysterious ways” still doesn’t track with me.
Well I’ll post this
now and wait to read your feedback in the comments section. If you respond,
perhaps I’ll take Pascal’s wager and start believing. Then I could start
praying again. After all Ronnie Flanagan’s probably still out there beating up
people and stealing their lunch money.
