Saturday, December 22, 2007

Church of the Slag-Blah

With the Solstice today and the X-mas season drawing to a final close (thankfully), Phil Foglio's "Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire" just posted a relevant comic:

To quote the Priest, "Slah-Blah's philosophy is that of Militant Agnosticism; we don't know, and you don't either! So we believe in everything! No religion is too silly, no pantheon too crowded, no cosmology too counterintuitive!"

This is Pascal's Wager taken to its ultimate conclusion.

Christians attempting to address agnosticism or atheism posit that it is a better bet to believe in god, given that the rewards of that belief are infinite, than it is to not believe and risk the chance that the cost of being wrong is eternal damnation.

But if you're going to bet your faith on the chance that god exists and your belief in Jesus will save you, why would you then discount the possibility that Mohammad was right and Allah has a different reward waiting? How about the possibility that the Hindus or Buddhists or Sikhs or Zoroastrians or Pagans or Animists or Rastafarians or Scientologists or someone else may have it right? If you are suggesting that we atheists should abandon our belief in reality in favor of your's because of a slim probability of salvation, why don't you take that to it's logical conclusion, hedging your bets by adhering to and believing in every other faith?

It is because you are arrogant and will ignore any truly logical argument that does not support the conclusions you have already made. Were you, for just one moment, to accept that it's possible that another faith might have some value then you must inevitably accept that your own faith may not be the one way. You would be faced with the notion that the ease at which you discount Zeus, Odin and Osiris could be similarly applied to Jesus Christ and faith in an all knowing, all seeing, all loving, invisible old man in the sky would end.

And what's wrong with that?

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