Thinking about high school drama class last week reignited some thoughts I had about philosophy classes I attended and tutored in a  college, oh, ages ago.  Since I seemed to just “eat up” the textbooks and was naturally argumentative, my professor employed me as a tutor for five years or so and had me grade papers and the like as well.   My favorite class to tear up students and work on Frankenstein-like brain transplants (or implants?) was the philosophy of religion class.  My list of  “what the HELL were they thinking” essays is far too long to bore you to tears over; suffice to say EVERY student wanted to convert me.  The sweet faced Islamic student in the headscarf just knew I’d find happiness in submission to Allah.  She wouldn’t quit following me around campus until I rather brusquely told her I would convert just as soon as Allah got off his all-compassionate ass and did something about starving Somalian Muslims, woman-stoning Wahabi Arabian Muslims, genocidal Kurd-murdering Iraqi Muslims, and a host of other hot button issues I have ever had for ANY deity aspiring to what I call “omni” status.  You see, if a deity is going to call him or herself  omniscient, omnipotent, and all good, as well, it is going to take a lot more than the usual C.S. Lewis definition to make me stop slavering for a bite of some preacher’s fat, complacent butt.  Cause I am just that kind of a hard-ass “put up or shut up” sort.  Fundamentalists of the usual Protestant Christian sort who had to take the class for their degree (always under protest, it seemed), contented themselves with smirking and telling me exactly how fast I was going to hell.  Calvinist leaning students were appalled at my brazen announcement that since I was predestined to either hell or heaven ANYway, I was going  do exactly as I pleased—-drink, screw, and as many of the other mortal sins as had any appeal for me to my heart’s content, because predestination made choice irrelevant.  The professor loved watching them try to refute that argument.

He didn’t much like one of my other arguments.  He was an agnostic, but he accompanied his wife to church because of Blaise Pascal.  Now, Pascal was probably not a bad sort, he was the kind of man I imagine you might find at the average cocktail party trying to get folks to stop arguing by finding a happy point of view on both sides.  Pascal thought that if you just couldn’t find necessary proofs of God, you might as well believe anyhow because you stood to win “Heaven” and there was nothing to lose whatsoever.  Poor man, he would stand aghast at how the odds have changed since his century….like many philosophically minded sorts, he was trapped in his own time and couldn’t extrapolate the odds for the future.

Back then, I found it easy enough to tear up Pascal’s famous wager with examples from behind the “Iron Curtain”….Christians in Russia and China didn’t fare so well against the state “religion” of Communism, for instance.  Even if the dead believers were assumed to win the wager with the trump of heaven, others suffered untold miseries. My professor thought that my argument was a bit abusive because it made use of a historical “aberration.”  I thought that history was and is largely a string of one aberration after another, but that isn’t the point here.

Nowadays, were I to go back on campus to shellshock more vulnerable students?  I would certainly use George Bush and the Iraqi War conflagration to tear Pascal to bits.   The odds are far, far worse than mere Marxist dialectic ever could have envisioned.  We have a President who may, just may, in his nightly just-before-drifting-to-sleep moments, envision the Apocalypse of Christian belief as something that will come in his lifetime.  We have a certain sub-culture out there that buys and reads really gruesome novels about just this event.  We have a planet where 1st world nation states are hitting financial rock bottom and even nuclear bombs could be on the block in some dark alley, and even if that is not as threatening as it sounds; we have a nation where corporations are being granted rights once sacrosanct to individuals and they WILL guard their precious prerogatives with every sword available.

So, how does this put Blaise on my hotplate?  Well, we have this continual “war on terror” which sounds bad enough, but in practice it is a rolling disaster of dead soldiers, civilians, and ever-richer war profiting corporations.  First, we went after Afghanistan where nasty Taliban sorts were protecting the architect of 9-11; but somehow George got distracted before that mission was accomplished and diverged into Iraq.  I could speculate on the whys and wherefores of that piece of stupidity, but you have all heard it before—but clearly it was a mistake.  No, wait, I don’t have to be nice here; this is MY blog—lets be really clear: it was a GIANT FUCK-UP.  In the meanwhile, Afghanistan is going to hell and getting ready to take Pakistan along for the ride; even Britain and Canada are going “Uh, George…this is not working, could you please get your ass back here to finish THIS job before we lose it?”

But George is moving to greener (read not-yet-bombed) pastures in Iran, he is sure he will be able to really wrap up the trouble if we just give him (or let him take) the green light.  So, it is completely possible that the western nations could see a huge swath of the “Mid-east” as we quaintly call it, embroiled in war.  And Turkey, a good friend in the area, is getting restive as Kurdish unrest grows on the border with Iraq, her troops are poised to strike.  The Moslem-majority nations involved believe America does all this at the beck and call of Israel, so an attack on Israel is not at all something unlikely.  Israel has the bomb.  So does Pakistan.  So, naturally, do we…and so does Russia.  Russia is not terribly sure she approves of our neo-imperialist behavior so  the good old “bear” may decide to get a piece of this action, too.

So, basically, Blaise, you imbecile?  ALL of these people (even the Russians again!) are being motivated by their belief in God.  Cause yes, lest anyone forget…Allah IS the same God of the Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah.  All these vast numbers of excitable and armed people took that wager and will ignite the world for it.  Is that what should properly be called nothing to lose??   Now, the Fundamentalists of both sides are ‘good’ with this…Islamic dead will have their virgins in  garden paradise, and Christians will see Christ return to open pits for such unbelievers as me….that IS the way the bloody story goes.  And the world can be laid to waste even without nuclear recourse—but that possibility gets higher with every additional nuke-holding nation joining the game.

Just examine this postulation, please: the wager is that nothing is lost save the doom of hell.  Here is my wager.  If there is no Omni-God out there, and no happy joy joy post apocalyptic heaven for the true believers, what is lost if you take that damned wager?  The world.  The world of six billion people is lost.  A planet already near its limit in human suffering is lost….and not instantly, but slowly by degrees if you aren’t the lucky ones at ground zero.  I hope Pascal is spinning in whatever grave they committed his body to all those years ago.  I don’t even bet on football games, and I sure as hell think it is time for my nation’ s leaders to stop betting on God and Second Comings.

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