Goodreads Bookshelf
Something else on religion
All the religion talk got me thinking about something again. I believe it was the lovely and talented Pimme who commented on someone's blog (Jane's?) about relgion, putting forth the argument that it's better to hedge your bets with religion, that if you believe in God and do what you're supposed to (whatever that would mean, given the variety of opinions on the matter) and if religion turns out to be false you haven't really lost something because you're just dead like everyone else, but if you don't believe and you're wrong, the price of being wrong is eternal damnation. This is an old argument that even has a name that I've forgotten. Nonetheless, I must respectfully disagree with Pimme and whoever it was who originally came up with the argument. Okay, and anyone else who's made the argument over the years. A few things argue in my mind against this...
In the first place, is this really believing, or is it acting as though you believe? That is, sort of going through the motions in the hope that it will get you a reward at the end. It just seems like if you don't already believe a bit more than you disbelieve, that you can't talk yourself into believing just because many conceptions of god include punishment if you don't do what he/she/it tells you too (but then, if you wanted people to believe in your god, that would be a pretty good thing to tell them, wouldn't it?).
Anyway, even disregarding this, there's another reason to mistrust this argument. It's simply not true that "if you believe and you're wrong you haven't lost anything." In every traditional conception of God, God demands something from you, some code of behavior, restrictions on what you can and can't do. So if you choose to believe one of these conceptions of god, isn't it true that you also have to follow these rules or you risk the eternal damnation that this argument points to? Sure, in our modern age, there are lots of conceptions of god in which he/she/it doesn't ask much of anything from us, but that conception raises a question: how do we know that god doesn't want anything else from us? For centuries on top of centuries, the people who claim to speak for god had told us that he wants us to do this and that; on what basis do we water down our conception of god to a nice old man who forgives pretty much everything or just doesn't ask you to do anything more than be vaguely good? So it seems likely that if there's a god that he/she/it wants something from us. And if this is the case, then the fact that god limits what we can and can't do, say, or think, it's no longer true that we haven't given up anything by believing in God.
This is particularly true of Christianity, the religion with which I'm most familiar. Besides all the rules, which are familiar enough to most believers, there are a host of places in the Bible where Jesus makes some pretty radical statements about what we should be doing--pronouncements that sound remarkably like giving up everything you have on this earth. Whether that's renouncing your family to pursue your spiritual goals or whether that's selling everything that you have in order to follow your religion, it's all right there in the scriptures. There's a passage a young man tells Jesus that he's always followed all the commandments and wants to know what else he needs to do to be saved and Jesus tells him to sell everything he has and give it to the poor and come follow him. I've been told by Christians who were obviously a bit uncomfortable with this passage in our materially-comfortable world, that this injunction was really just for this one guy, that he needed to do it because he was too attached to his possessions. Uh huh. And you're not, right? And never mind the example of Jesus and his disciples: they set an example of poverty, did they not? Or "it is far easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." Consider that every middle-class person in America today and maybe even a lot of "poor" people live materially better than the wealthy did in Jesus' time; suggest anything to you?
On the other hand, against this sort of reasoning, I've been told that this is only for those who want to be perfect in their faith. To this, it seems to me that if you really believe (as opposed to just sort of believing), how could you want anything else? I mean, if there is a god and this eternal reward god's offering depends on god's decisions regarding your soul, how could you not want to be as perfect in your faith as you could be? If religion is true, what could be more important than god and religion? It suggests to me that one of three things is true of a lot of Christians: either they don't read the book their religion is based on, they're not, as a group, good readers, or they don't really believe strongly enough to act as they are called to do. Or, I suppose, it could be that the book their religion is based on is such a big book, saying so many different things that contradict each other either explicitly or implicitly that they can find something to support whatever they want to believe rather than putting it all together.
My point in the preceding couple of paragraphs has been to show that, in fact, religion--if truly believed and practiced--demands a lot from you, not even just some rules to follow, but a lifestyle of renouncing worldly success (which could mean lots of different things) in favor of heavenly success. So what have you lost if you believe in God and you turn out to be wrong? You've lost a chance to live this life--you know, the one we can be prettty confident that we have, as opposed to the heaven that might exist--in a manner closer to the truth.
I suppose ultimately my point here is that you have to determine for yourself what's the true nature of reality and then live in accordance with the implications of that determination rather than simply choosing to believe something because you're threatened into it.
What do you think?