An Agnostic Talks To God

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.