Life Without God: Non-Believers in Post-Soviet Russia

By Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti:

A bus full of people, covered in inscriptions in Russian such as “You don’t believe in God?  You’re not alone!” romps across Moscow streets.

The bus is a shabby flash animation on the Web site Atheists.org.ru.   It is the only Russian incarnation of the international Atheist Bus Campaign, launched in Britain in 2009 in response to a similar campaign promoting faith.

All attempts to stage a similar offline drive in Russia have fallen through, said Artem Jouravsky, the head of the atheism and secularism Good Sense Foundation lobby group.

“We wanted to do our street billboards saying, ‘There is no God,’ in response to billboards with religious propaganda in Russia in 2009, but it turned out to be impossible,” he said.   “This prompted us to create our foundation.”

Atheists are sorely underrepresented in Russian public space, despite comprising about 13 percent of the population, or a solid 18 million people, the latest polls show.

Atheism spokespeople blame their lack of media exposure on the dominance of the Orthodox Christian Church, one of the biggest national institutions whose many hierarchs are putting every effort into turning its teachings into the country's dominant ideology, a role fulfilled by atheism in the Soviet times.

“It’s plain scary to be an atheist now.   I know cases where people were sacked for this from police and the army by former Communist Party bosses, no less,” said atheism champion Alexander Nevzorov.

But religion analysts say the situation is rather due to Orthodox Christianity becoming a staple of the post-Soviet Russian national identity, if only for a lack of alternatives.

“Something needs to unite the people and society into a nation,” said Sergei Filatov, an expert on religion with the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences.   “For us, it is currently World War II and Orthodox Christianity.   We have no other big ideas to be supported by the populace at large.”

However, atheists comprise a significant part of the Russian society, and the church’s increasing involvement in political and societal affairs is creating a backlash that will only give them more adherents and public representation, experts and non-believers say.

“We’re just late in deploying our forces for the battle, like the Soviet Union in 1941,” said Jouravsky. “Give us another year or two.”

The Invisible People

There are at least a dozen atheist rights groups in Russia such as the Good Sense Foundation, which is a member of the Atheist Alliance International, Jouravsky said.

He avoided saying how many members his own group has, noting only that it limits its activity to Moscow and the surrounding region.   The foundation’s Facebook page has earned a modest 800 “likes.”

Most atheist groups are unknown to the general public, while their most renowned spokesman, Alexander Nevzorov, is a controversial star of perestroika-era shock journalism who has not had his own TV show since 1999.   Church spokespeople, such as the heads of the Moscow Patriarchate departments Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin and Vladimir Legoida, make headlines on a weekly basis.

This is a distinct imbalance between population and representation, given that the most recent survey of Russians’ relations with the divine, by pollster Sreda in the spring of 2011, showed that 13 percent of the populace did not believe in God.

Another five percent were undecided, possibly – but not necessarily – marking them as agnostics, according to the poll, which covered 1,500 respondents and had a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

The poll showed the number Orthodox Christian Church followers as 42 percent, with the rest divided between various other traditional religions and a belief in some divine being without following a particular faith.

“Atheism is now invisible, like Christianity used to be in Soviet times,” said religion expert Filatov.

Swinging Back and Forth

When Russian Navy Officer Alexander Voznitsyn abandoned Orthodox Christianity for Judaism in 1738, the Senate ordered him burned at the stake along with the Jew who converted him.

Christianity was the dominant religion in Russia for almost a millennium, with its status protected by criminal legislation in tsarist times, when apostasy was a felony and being irreligious was forbidden.

But when the old order was brought down by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the church went down with it.

“The poor peasants and the working class brought down the crosses in the 1920s,” said Sergei Solovyov, editor in chief of the Scepsis, a self-described online “magazine of science and social criticism” that promotes anti-clericalism.

The church was too firmly associated with the tsarist state, which was too obsolete and retrograde, hampering social progress with its old ways inherited from feudal times, some historians say.   The Bolsheviks, for whom religion was an ideological enemy, did their best to foment widespread negative sentiment toward the church, both through promises of a new, better, godless society and relentless repressions of the clergy.

Next came the time of militant atheism. Though religious worship was not banned outright in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, believers became pariahs in the eyes of both society and the state, which had arguably the world’s fiercest repression machine at its disposal and was not afraid to use it against priests and their flock, thousands of whom were jailed or executed.

It took the greatest war in history to turn things around. In 1943, when the Nazi Wehrmacht and the Red Army were still locked in a deadly fight and thousands of churches were opened by the Germans on occupied territories to the population’s liking, Josef Stalin allowed reopening the churches for service, spelling the end of active anti-church repression.

After another crackdown under Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the surviving churches were allowed to operate under strict government control, but being an open believer would ruin one’s career as surely as dissident thinking would.

The unexpected consequence was that religion itself became associated with protesting against the oppressive and increasingly rotten Soviet bureaucratic machine.   It came into vogue for the intelligentsia to keep Orthodox icons at home, and some of the dissidents, such as Gleb Yakunin, were priests.

The next turning point came during perestroika.   When the Soviet state actively promoted the celebration of the millennium anniversary of the baptism of Russia in 1988, it was a clear sign that things have changed again, and the pendulum was swinging back toward the religious quarters.

In 1991, 24 percent of Russians identified themselves as believers; in 2005, the figure stood at 53 percent, with a further 24 percent registering as “not sure,” according to in-depth research into new Russian religiosity by Kimmo Kaariainen of the University of Helsinki and Dmitry Furman of the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, published in 2007.

Corporation Church

There is an old building on Leningradsky Prospekt in northern Moscow, an almshouse in Tsarist times and part of a state hospital under the Bolsheviks, which is now being leased to various commercial establishments, including a plastic surgery clinic.

The building belongs to the church, which won it back in 2002 as property unlawfully confiscated after the Revolution, said Solovyov of Scepsis magazine.

Creeping clericalism is the main complaint of the Russian atheists, who say the state relies on the church for ideological support and lavishly rewards it with money and assets to the delight of many priests, who are more concerned with earthly riches than with heavenly salvation.

“The Russian Orthodox Church is part of the state’s ideological apparatus,” Solovyov said. “No wonder the authorities dislike criticism of the church.”

The alliance of the church and the state has indeed been a hot topic in recent years.   Both President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stress their religiousness, attending important church services in front of the cameras.   There is hardly a single atheist politician on the political scene, including Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.

The list of atheists’ grievances includes the introduction of taxpayer-funded chaplains in the army, the city-backed program to build 200 (previously 600) churches in Moscow’s suburban districts and a new subject that would allow teaching religion basics in schools, though only at the student’s discretion.

In 2010, the Kremlin authorized a sweeping restitution program that has seen the government return real estate confiscated by the Bolsheviks to various confessions, even though the buildings now often house secular establishments, including hospitals and museums, such as the one on Leningradsky Prospekt.   Commercial real estate once owned by the church is not part of the program.

The current church is among the country’s richest non-governmental organizations, with assets in real estate, banks, factories, publishing companies and funeral services firms, according to research by the Openspace.ru online magazine, which estimated total church assets at above $1 billion in 2011.   The church itself is notoriously opaque about its business activities, and while it often denies allegations of financial misconduct, it rarely provides credible information on its economic record.

The Kremlin’s benevolence was not for nothing.   During the presidential election this year, the church leader, Patriarch Kirill, endorsed Vladimir Putin’s candidacy while urging the flock against attending the anti-Putin rallies that swept across Moscow.

Atheists also complain of a media ban. “In federal media, criticizing the church was taboo until recently,” said Solovyov.   “They were either not interested or afraid of being accused of insulting believers’ feelings.”

Nevzorov said some atheists have lost their jobs over their convictions, but refused to name anyone, saying this could land the allegedly aggrieved in more trouble.

However, the situation may not be as straightforward as church critics describe it.   Nevzorov himself admitted in a recent interview to the Russian edition of Rolling Stone magazine that he was asked to spearhead the atheist effort by a lobby group in the Kremlin, campaigning for secularism on ideological grounds.

He revealed no names and said that the group is being overpowered for the time being by its opponents, who see religion as a useful tool for population control, but that the balance of power could shift in the unspecified but near future.

“I was asked to spend some time in this foxhole with the promise that the Red Army is on the way,” Nevzorov said about his championing of atheism in a separate interview in March. But, as he told Rolling Stone in June, “[the Red Army] will probably not come.”

In Soviet Russia, God Doesn’t Believe in You

“Real atheists are so rare, I’ve been saying for a long time that they should be put on the list of endangered species,” said Archdeacon Andrei Kurayev, a popular Orthodox Christian media figure.

“At the same time, atheism does not necessarily imply fighting God. I have deep respect for some forms of atheism, such as Sartre’s or Camus’s,” said Kurayev, a prominent Christian missionary whose first academic degree is in “scientific atheism.”

He dismissed atheists’ claims of persecution, saying they were just a means of attracting slipping public attention.

“Atheism has no state or media backing – and neither does the church,” Kurayev said.

This position is echoed by religion expert Roman Lunkin, who, however, conceded that some issues do exist.

“There is no direct censorship of atheists, but we can speak of certain ideological pressure, especially on state-owned television channels,” said Lunkin, who works at the Institute of Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“Federal television is turning Orthodox Christianity into some sort of a sacral symbol,” he said.

But Kurayev said this is not the reason for the lack of atheist presence in media.   “Some topics just lose immediacy and go away,” Kurayev said.   “Arguing with atheism is not relevant anymore. Such people have nothing to say beside criticism.”

He admitted the modern church is riddled with problems, but said believers are better equipped to expose them and actively fight them.

“I can criticize church life too. I’m inside it, and I see more shit than anyone on the outside looking in,” Kurayev said without elaborating.

Expecting a Backlash

On February 21, 2012, churchgoers and tourists in Christ the Savior Cathedral were treated to a sight they hardly expected in one of the country's prime Christian temples: five apparent females in tacky dresses, leggings and balaclavas shouted a song in the altar zone, asking the Mother of God to banish Putin.

Dumbfounded guards were too shocked to detain any of the young women, who scattered away after 41 seconds by the altar, police established later.

However, three of the performers are now in jail, awaiting a trial that threatens to land them behind bars for up to seven years.

This was the first in a series of scandals that rocked the church this year and damaged its reputation, especially among the educated urban population.   In the case of Pussy Riot, the name of the female group, it was not the event itself – but rather the church's endorsement of the jail term for the performers – that many critics deem harsh to the point of being repressive.

In March, the media reported about a relative of Patriarch Kirill living in his posh penthouse outside the Kremlin, trying to take over the neighboring apartment of a former federal minister-turned-priest in a lawsuit.   The story of a church hierarch owning a downtown penthouse generated a storm in the blogosphere, as did the lawsuit's questioned pretexts.

Kirill was also spotted wearing an expensive wristwatch, which was clumsily edited out of a photograph of him on the Moscow Patriarchate’s Web site.

Most analysts saw the string of scandals as the well-off, liberal-minded urbanites’ reaction to the church’s increased presence in social life and support for the government.

Before the elections, even non-believers saw the church as a moral authority standing above everyday political squabbles, but throwing its weight behind Putin has robbed it of its image of infallibility in the eyes of the opposition-minded public, Lunkin said.

The church was the most trusted institution in the country in 2011, with a support rating of 60 percent, beating the army with 58 percent and the government with 46 percent, according to a study by the GfK Verein pollster.

But between 30 and 38 percent of people who attended mass anti-Putin rallies in Moscow in February and March were non-believers, according to a Sreda poll.

The number of protesters associating themselves with the Orthodox Christian Church fell from 28 to 19 percent over the same period, after Patriarch Kirill said that believers should not go to political rallies, the Sreda poll said.

The negative feelings part of the populace has toward the church over its marred image and loyalty to the Kremlin have yet to be reflected in future polls, said Lunkin.

They Will Return

Atheism never was a free choice for the Russian populace, as it was imposed as part of Marxist-Leninist ideology, said religion expert Filatov.

But neither was Christianity, which was also imposed by the country’s rulers and upheld by draconian laws, said atheism defender Nevzorov.

“This is Russia’s tragedy: for a thousand years, the people never had freedom of conscience,” Nevzorov said.

As the church mounts its ideological pressure on society, criticism will mount and more people will embrace atheism as the main available alternative to religion, said Lunkin, who also works for the Sreda pollster.

“They think they came to stay,” said Solovyov of Scepsis magazine.   “They’re repeating all of their mistakes, imposing their ideology.    People will grow disgusted of it, and it will be another cycle [of destruction], same as during the revolution,” he said.

But some predict a milder outcome.   “In modern Italy the two main ideologies are Catholicism and atheism, and they coexist peacefully,” analyst Filatov pointed out.

For this, however, Russia needs to drift closer to Europe, embracing secularity voluntarily and without being coerced into it by the government, like in the Soviet times, he said.

“When our recent past – say, 20 years or so – will look like Europe’s, we’ll have a secular conscience coexisting with a religious one,” Filatov said.

21:00 26/06/2012

Rian.ru

The rebellion against Christianity

"The spirit lusteth against the flesh and the flesh lusteth against the spirit."


Do you know it is vogue to be an atheist on university campuses? Do you know that every young person finds it interesting, modern and attractive when a professor or student says, "I don't believe in God" or "God doesn't matter." There is only one God, whether we be Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, animist. "God is the same for all religions and, therefore, Christianity is neither here nor there," our modern intellectuals would say.

There is also a popular sophisticated agnosticism which says, "I don't know if there is a God or not; it doesn't matter, we just need to live our lives passionately."

How can I deny an inner yearning, a deep desire, sometimes a desperate desire to kneel and bow before the almighty God and simply cry out: "I place myself before you, Almighty God. I know that I am nothing." Sometimes in exultation, sometimes in desperation, but always we want to submit ourselves to the almighty God as sinners, or, as someone yearning deeply for meaning. There are times we feel empty in this lonely and selfish world of ours, but better that than giving into the world.

Christ shows the way

Christ, the incarnate God, revealing the Father's will in the flesh, serving others, forgiving sins, performing miracles, dying on the cross, restoring the brokenness of our nature, loving us and calling us to repentance and to His heavenly Kingdom, suffered rejection and death as he fixed his attention on us, of His infinite love. He shows the way in an absolute world of absurdity, while we journey to the light and everlasting life.

There is a rebellion against the Church and Christianity in our modern times. We are like sheep who have gone astray. Many of us, pastors and shepherds, have lost the central focus of life, which is Christ.

There is also the media's lack of respect and its infinite variety of pagan values and pleasures. This flesh is always crying out to be satisfied. The vulgar part of us wants everything for me, my flesh, my popularity, position and prestige, rather than the spiritual desire to be one with the eternal God.

We no longer believe in the divine, the transcendence of God, and the longing of our spirit, our souls, to go beyond ourselves. Our materialistic and hedonistic flesh wants no moral mandates or restrictions. We want to be free, we want to be on our own, we want to do what pleases us.

Happy with atheism

Christianity - and its call (if it is the true brand of Christianity) - do not go along with the craving for self-fulfilment of every appetite. The market, or the world, is happy with atheism, individualism, and self-satisfaction. Thus, it needs to destroy Christianity and free us to live a hedonistic life.

We cannot continue feeding this valley of the flesh that Europe and North America seem to be encouraging all over the world, taking advantage of the poor countries and their naïve trust of rich countries which propose self-indulgent ways of living to be progressive.

The restlessness of our worldly appetites will only bring about death. We want to destroy the babies in the wombs, the old people, the people who are defective (by some people's definition), the poor and the non-productive people our world.

Wealthy, advanced persons of our world haven't been able to solve the problem of poverty. The rich must kill off the poor in order to eliminate conscience problems.

Yet, the call to self-sacrifice and service shall not stop. Christ, the crucified one, the one true God, the only God of all gods, who lived, suffered, and died for us remains indelibly on our souls, an everlasting image stamped in the very depth of ourselves, forever and ever.

The atheistic, materialistic world finds Christ dangerous. Today, He is ridiculed and mocked in movies, the general media, and the fuzzy-headed arguments at the universities and in our homes. But His word and His ways are firm: "I am the living bread of life: without me you will die."

We might rebel for a while but, finally, we must face up to the truth: "I am the way, the truth, and the life."

Father Richard Ho Lung is founder of Missionaries of the Poor Jesuit charity.

August 29, 2011

jamaica-gleaner

Bahamas Blog International

Why It's Not a 'Safe Bet' to Believe In God

AlterNet / By Greta Christina

The idea that you should believe in God "just in case" trivializes both faith and reality, and concedes your argument before it's begun.


"Why not believe in God?   If you believe and you turn out to be wrong, you haven't lost anything.   But if you don't believe and you turn out to be wrong, you lose everything. Isn't believing the safer bet?"

In debates about religion, this argument keeps coming up.   Over, and over, and over again.   In almost any debate about religion, if the debate lasts long enough,  someone is almost guaranteed to bring it up.   The argument even has a name: Pascal's Wager, after Blaise Pascal, the philosopher who most famously formulated it.

And it makes atheists want to tear our hair out.

Not because it's a great argument... but because it's such a manifestly lousy one.   It doesn't make logical sense.   It doesn't make practical sense.   It trivializes the whole idea of both belief and non-belief.   It trivializes reality.   In fact, it concedes the argument before it's even begun.   Demolishing Pascal's Wager is like shooting fish in a barrel.   Unusually slow fish, in a tiny, tiny barrel.   I almost feel guilty writing an entire piece about it.   It's such low-hanging fruit.

But alas, it's a ridiculously common argument.   In fact, it's one of the most common arguments made in favor of religion.   So today, I'm going to take a deep breath, and put on a hat so I don't tear my hair out, and spend a little time annihilating it.

Which God? The first and most obvious problem with Pascal's Wager?   It assumes there's only one religion, and only one version of God.

Pascal's Wager assumes the choice between religion and atheism is simple.   You pick either religion, or no religion.   Belief in God, or no belief in God. One, or the other.

But as anyone knows who's read even a little history -- or who's turned on a TV in the last 10 years -- there are hundreds upon hundreds of different religions, and different gods these religions believe in.   Thousands, if you count all the little sub-sects separately.   Tens of thousands or more, if you count every religion throughout history that anyone's ever believed in.   Even among today's Big Five, there are hundreds of variations: sects of Christianity, for instance, include Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran, Mormon, United Church of Christ, Jehovah's Witness, etc. etc. etc.   And sub-sects of these sects include Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Southern Baptist, American Baptist, Mormonism (mainstream LDS version), Mormonism (cultish polygamous version), Mormonism (repulsive infant-torturing version), Church of England, American Episcopalian, Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod....

How do you know which one to wager on?

The differences between these gods and religions aren't trivial.   If you obey the rules of one, you're guaranteed to be violating the rules of another.   If you worship Jesus, and Islam turns out to right -- you're screwed.   If you worship Allah, and Judaism turns out to be right -- you're screwed.   If you worship Jehovah, and Jainism turns out to be right -- you're screwed. Even if you get the broad strokes right, you could be getting the finer points wrong. And in many religions, the finer points matter a lot. Taking Communion or not taking Communion?   Baptizing at birth or at the age of reason?   Ordaining women as priests or not?   Any of these could get you sent straight to hell.   No matter if you're Catholic, or Baptist, or Mormon, or Anglican, or whatever... there are a whole bunch of other Christians out there who are absolutely convinced that you've gotten Christianity totally wrong, and that you're just pissing God off more and more every day.

So how on Earth is religion a safer bet?

You're just as likely to be angering God with your belief as atheists are with our lack of it.

To many believers, the answer to the "Which god?" question seems obvious.   It's their god, of course.   Like, duh.   But to someone who doesn't believe -- to someone being presented with Pascal's Wager as a reason to believe -- the answer to "Which god?" is anything but obvious.   To someone who doesn't believe, the question is both baffling and crucial.   And without some decent evidence supporting one god hypothesis over another, the "Which god?" question renders Pascal's Wager utterly useless.

Unless you have some actual good evidence that your particular religion is the right one and all the others are wrong, your bet on God is just as shaky as the atheist's bet on no God.

And if you had some good evidence that your religion was right, you wouldn't be resorting to Pascal's Wager to make your case.

Does God even care? Pascal's Wager doesn't just assume there's only one god and one religion.   It assumes that God cares whether you believe in him.   It assumes that God will reward belief with a heavenly eternal afterlife... and punish disbelief with a hellish one.

But why should we assume that?

According to many religions -- the more progressive ecumenical ones leap to mind -- God doesn't care whether we worship him in exactly the right way.   Or indeed whether we worship him at all. In these religions, as long as we treat each other well, according to our best understanding of right and wrong, God will be happy with us, and reward us in the afterlife. These believers are totally fine with atheists -- well, as long as we keep our mouths shut and don't disturb anyone with our annoying arguments -- and they certainly don't think we're going to burn in hell.

In fact, according to many of these progressive religionists, God has more respect for sincere atheists who fearlessly proclaim their non-belief than he does for insincere "believers" who pretend to have faith because it's easier and safer and they don't want to rock the boat. According to these progressives, honest atheism is actually the safer bet. The weaselly hypocrisy of Pascal's Wager is more likely to get up God's nose.

So even if you think the god hypothesis is plausible and coherent... why would it automatically follow that belief in said god is an essential part of this afterlife insurance you're supposedly buying with your "safer bet"?

In fact, I've seen (and written about) an atheist version of Pascal's Wager that takes this conundrum into account. In the Atheist's Wager, you might as well just be as good a person as you can in this life, and not worry about God or the afterlife.   If (a) God is good, he won't care if you believe in him, as long as you were the best person you could be.   If (b) God is a capricious, egoistic, insecure jackass whose lessons on how to act are so unclear we're still fighting about them after thousands of years... then we have no way of knowing what behavior he's going to punish or reward, and we might as well just be good according to our own understanding.   And if (c) there is no god, then it's worth being good for its own sake: because we have compassion for other people, and because being good makes our world a better place, for ourselves and everyone else.

Now, to be perfectly clear: I don't, in fact, think the Atheist's Wager is a good argument for atheism.   I think the best arguments for atheism are based, not on what kind of behavior is a safer bet for a better afterlife, but on whether religion is, you know, true. The Atheist's Wager is funny, and it makes some valid points... but it's not a sensible argument for why we shouldn't believe in God.

But it makes a hell of a lot more sense than Pascal's Wager.

Unless you have some good evidence that God cares about our religious belief, your bet on God is just as shaky as the atheists' bet on no God.

And if you had some good evidence that God cares about our religious belief, you wouldn't be resorting to Pascal's Wager to make your case.

Is God that easily fooled? And speaking of whether God cares about our religion: If God does care whether we believe in him... do you really think he's going to be fooled by this sort of bet-hedging?

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that God is real.   And for the moment, let's also pretend that God cares whether we believe in him. Let's pretend, in fact, that he cares so much about whether we believe in him that, when he's deciding what kind of afterlife we're going to spend eternity in, this belief or lack thereof is the make-or-break factor.

Is God going to be fooled by Pascal's Wager?

When you're lining up at the gates to the afterlife and God is looking deep into your soul -- and when he sees that your belief consisted of, "Hey, why not believe, it's not like I've got anything to lose, and I've got a whole afterlife of good times to gain, so sure, I 'believe' in God, wink wink" -- do you really think God's going to be impressed?   Do you really think he's going to say, "Oo, that's sly, that's some ingenious dodging of the question you got there, we just love a slippery weasel here in Heaven, come on in"?   Is he going to be flattered by being seen, not as the creator of all existence who breathed life into you and everyone you loved, but as the "safer bet"?

I don't believe in God.   Obviously.   I think the god hypothesis is implausible at best, incoherent at worst.   But of all the implausible, incoherent gods I've seen hypothesized, the one who punishes honest atheists who take the question of his existence seriously enough to reject it when they don't see it supported, and at the same time rewards insincere, bet-hedging religionists who profess belief as part of a self-centered attempt to hit the jackpot at the end of their life... that is easily among the battiest.

Unless you have some actual good evidence that God (a) exists, (b) cares passionately about our religious belief, and yet (c) is dumb enough to be fooled by Pascal's Wager, your bet on God is just as shaky as the atheists' bet on no God.

And if you had some good evidence for any of this, you wouldn't be resorting to Pascal's Wager to make your case.

All of which brings me to:

Does this even count as "belief"? This is one of the things that drives me most nuts about Pascal's Wager. Whenever anyone proposes it, I want to just tear my hair out and yell, "Do you really not care whether the things you believe are true?"

Believers who propose Pascal's Wager apparently think that you can just choose what to believe, as easily as you choose what pair of shoes to buy. They seem to think that "believing" means "professing an allegiance to an opinion, regardless of whether you think it's true." And I am both infuriated and baffled by this notion.   I literally have no idea what it means to "believe" something based entirely on what would be most convenient, without any concern for whether it's actually true.   To paraphrase Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word "believe." I do not think it means what you think it means.

Unless you have a good argument for why insincere, bet-hedging "belief" qualifies as actual belief, your bet on God is just as shaky as the atheists' bet on no God.

And if you had a good argument for this insincere version of "belief," you wouldn't be resorting to Pascal's Wager to make your case.

Is the cost of belief really nothing? And, of course, we have one of the core foundational premises of Pascal's Wager.   It doesn't just assume that the rewards of belief are infinite.   It assumes that the costs of belief are non-existent.

And that is just flatly not true.

Let's take an example. Let's say that I tell you that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will reward you with strippers and beer in heaven when you die -- and to receive this reward, you simply have to say the words, "I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, bless his noodly appendage," one time and one time only.   You might think I was off my rocker. Okay, you'd almost certainly think I was off my rocker.   But because the sacrifice of time and energy would be so tiny, you might, for the sake of hedging your bets, go ahead and say the words. (For the entertainment value, if nothing else.)

But if I tell you that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will reward you with strippers and beer in heaven when you die -- and that to receive this reward, you have to send me a box of Godiva truffles every Saturday, get a full-color image of the Monster tattooed on the back of your right hand, be unfailingly rude to anyone who comes from Detroit, and say the words "I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, bless his noodly appendage" every hour on the hour for the rest of your life... it's very, very unlikely that you're going to comply. You're going to think I'm off my rocker -- and you're going to ignore my pleading request to save your eternal soul from a beerless, stripper-less eternity. You're going to think that following the sacred customs of the FSM faith would be a ridiculous waste of time, energy, and resources. You're definitely not going to think that it's a safer bet.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Most religions don't simply require you to believe that God exists. They require you to make sacrifices, and adhere to rules.   Not just the ordinary ones needed to be a moral/ successful/ happy person in everyday life, either.   Religions typically require significant sacrifices, and obedience to strict rules, that can seriously interfere with happiness, success, even morality. Religions require people to donate money; participate in rituals; spend time in houses of worship; follow rules about what to eat, what to wear, what drugs to avoid, who to have sex with and how. Religions require people to cut off their foreskins. Cut off their clitorises.   Cut off ties with their gay children. Dress modestly. Suppress their sexuality. Reject evolution. Reject blood transfusions.   (For themselves, and their children.) Refuse to consider interfaith marriage.   Refuse to consider interfaith friendship.   Memorize a long stretch of religious text and recite it in public at age thirteen.   Spend their weekends knocking on strangers' doors, pestering them to join the faith.   Donate money to fix the church roof. Donate money to send bibles to Nicaragua. Donate money so the preacher can buy a Cadillac.   Have as many children as they physically can. Disown their children if they leave the faith.   Obey their husbands without question. Not eat pork. Not get tattoos.   Get up early to sit in church once a week, on one of only two days a week they have off.   Cover their bodies from head to toe.   Treat people as unclean who were born into different castes.   Treat women as sinners if they have sex outside marriage. Beat or kill their wives and daughters if they have sex outside marriage.   Etc. Etc. Etc.

Religion typically requires sacrifice.

And this simple fact, all by itself, completely demolishes the foundational assumption of Pascal's wager.

The assumption of Pascal's Wager is that any other wager is a sucker's bet. Pascal's Wager doesn't just assume that the payoff for winning the bet is infinite bliss, or that the cost of losing is infinite suffering.   It assumes that the stakes for the bet are zero.

But the stakes are not zero.

It's even been argued -- correctly, I think -- that the sacrifices religion requires are an essential part of what keep it going. (Think of fraternity hazing.   Once you've sacrificed and suffered for a belief or project or group affiliation, you're more likely to stick with it... to convince yourself that the sacrifice was worth it.   That's how the rationalizing human mind works.)

And if religion requires sacrifice... then Pascal's Wager collapses.   A bet with an infinite payoff and zero stakes?   Sure, that's an obvious bet.   But a bet with infinite payoff and real stakes?   That's a lot less obvious.   Especially when there are, as I said before, thousands of competing bets, all with contradictory demands for the specific stakes you're supposed to place.  And double especially when there's no good evidence that any one of these competing bets is more likely to pay off than any other... or that any of them at all have any plausible chance whatsoever of paying off.  Again: If you wouldn't bet on my Flying Spaghetti Monster religion, with its entirely reasonable demands for chocolate and tattoos and hourly prayer and fanatical Detroit-phobia... then why on Earth are you betting on your own religion?

If this short life is the only one we have, then contorting our lives into narrow and arbitrary restrictions, and following rules that grotesquely distort our moral compass, and giving things up that are harmless and ethical and could make ourselves and others profoundly happy, all for no good reason... that's the sucker bet.

Besides... even if none of this were true?   Even if belief in God required absolutely no sacrifice in any practical matters?   No rules, no rituals, no circumcision, no sexual guilt, no execution of adulterers, no gay children shamed and abandoned, no dead children who would have lived if they'd gotten blood transfusions, no money in the collection plate? Nothing except belief?

It would still have costs.

And those costs would be significant.

The idea of religious faith?   The idea that it makes sense to believe in invisible beings, undetectable forces, events that happen after we die?   The idea that it makes sense to believe in a hypothesis that's either entirely untestable... or that's been tested thousands of times and consistently been proven wrong?   The idea that we can rely entirely on our personal intuition to tell us what is and isn't true about the world... and ignore hard evidence that contradicts that intuition?   The idea that it's not only acceptable, but a positive good, to believe in things for which you have not one single shred of good evidence?

This idea has costs. This idea undermines our critical thinking skills. It closes our minds to new ideas.   It bolsters our prejudices and preconceptions.   It leaves us vulnerable to bad ideas.   It leaves us vulnerable to frauds and charlatans.   It leaves us vulnerable to manipulative political leaders.   It leads us to devalue evidence and reason.   It leads us to trivialize reality.

So all by itself, even without any obvious sacrifices of time or money or restricted lifestyle or screwed-up ethical choices, religious faith shapes the way we live our lives. And it does so in a way that can do a tremendous amount of harm.

Unless you have some actual good evidence that the sacrifice of time/ money/ happiness/ goodness/ etc. required by religion -- and the sacrifice of healthy skepticism and critical thinking and passion for truth -- will actually pay off with the reward of a blissful eternal afterlife, your bet on God is just as shaky as the atheists' bet on no God.

And if you had some good evidence that God exists, and that these sacrifices had a good chance of paying off, you wouldn't be resorting to Pascal's Wager to make your case.

Conceding Your Argument Before You've Even Started It. If you take nothing else from this piece, take this:

The moment you propose Pascal's Wager is the moment you've conceded the argument.

Pascal's Wager isn't an argument for why God exists and is really real. Pascal's Wager is, in fact, 100% disconnected from the question of whether God exists and is really real. Pascal's Wager offers no evidence for God's existence -- not even the shaky "evidence" of the appearance of design or the supposed fine-tuning of the universe or the feelings in your heart. It offers no logical argument for why God must exist or probably exists -- not even the paper-thin "logic" of the First Cause argument. It does not offer one scrap of a positive reason for thinking that God is real.

Pascal's Wager is misdirection.   Distraction.   It's a way of drawing attention away from how crummy the arguments for God actually are.   It's an evasion: a slippery, dodgy, wanna-be clever trick to avoid the actual argument.   It's a way of making the debater feel wily and ingenious, while ignoring the actual question on the table.

It isn't an argument.   It's an excuse for why you don't have an argument. And it's a completely pathetic excuse.

If you're relying on Pascal's Wager for your faith, you might as well believe in unicorns or elves, Zoroaster or Zeus, the invisible dragon in Carl Sagan's garage or the Flying Spaghetti Monster who brought the world into being through his blessed noodley appendage.   Pascal's Wager is every bit as good an argument for these beliefs as it is for any religion that people currently believe in.

If you had a better argument for God, you'd be making it. You'd be offering some good evidence for why God exists; some logical explanation for why God has to exist.   You wouldn't be resorting to this lazy, slippery, bet-hedging, shot-full-of-holes excuse for why you don't have to actually think about the question.

Pascal's Wager isn't an argument.

It's an admission that you've got nothing.

Read more of Greta Christina at her blog.

February 14, 2011

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