The Limits of Religion

But his attempt to scientifically ‘prove’ why one should have faith was, and remains, remarkably original. Pascal’s idea – which is probably history’s first really elaborate theoretical calculation – was that the benefits one gets by living in a godly way (that after death one will be rewarded with eternal residence in paradise) far outweigh the benefits of a worldly life, ignoring Christianity’s precepts. Mathematically, the argument can be boiled down to a formula that says however small the probability may be for God’s existence, the result will still be the same, namely infinite, when you multiply this probability with the infinite value of an afterlife in paradise.

One can imagine Pascal’s actor standing in an empty field after death; will he or she go to heaven or will nothing happen? In the latter case, there is hardly much to fret about. The task was still relatively small in relation to the extremely high benefit that was actually possible. But how does it look where, in the context of the Christian faith alone, there are hundreds of ways to act on earth to go to heaven (to the extent that now Christian theologians today at all promise an afterlife in Pascal’s sense)? And where there is also a plethora of small sects and a number of major religions with more or less apocalyptic beliefs, which in turn can be divided into factions with divergent conceptions of what is required in order to get to live their days with 72 virgins (or grapes as some interpreters think) in the sky, or be picked up by the spaceship (which the American Heaven’s Gate sect predicted)?

The matter becomes even more difficult when a number of these religions or cults also claim that whoever does not believe in their preaching will suffer eternally in hell, or be forced into a new suffering on Earth (in the form of Buddhist reincarnation). Given the high probability that, whatever religion you choose, you’ll end up in some kind of hell, it puts the question whether to devote one’s life to religiously imposed deprivation in a new light.

Secular society, which is an inevitable consequence of increased globalisation, and which also serves as a guarantor of religious practice in a multicultural context, means that religion has been transformed into a more private affair. The questions that modern people today ask are perhaps not so much about an afterlife, as whether religion can offer a meaningful existence in one’s lifetime, in a world characterised by consumerism and instant gratification.

The new atheism that has grown strong in recent times seems to – as with so many radical movements these days – live in the past, namely in the belief that the calculations of Pascal’s Wager still affect people’s life choices. For the more hardline atheists, it is about liberating all of us who do not share their opinions, from the delusions that have assumed control over our way of life. It is assumed that the central contradiction is between, on the one hand, rationalism, science and reason and, on the other hand, religion, faith and folly. This turns a blind eye to how crucial the Judeo-Christian tradition has been to the emergence of scientific thought – that, through the belief that the world was created by a reasonable and intelligent deity, it must be a rational order to uncover.

In addition, one wonders to what extent the liquidation of God can offer relief and greater freedom. If we look at the beliefs that guide the moralising classes in modern society, we note that these beliefs can hold the same kind of basic elements as Christianity, the difference being that the humility that is the inner core of so many religions, has been replaced by the sort of dogmatism and intolerance that tended to disappear with religion’s adaptation to secular society.

Christianity is cyclical about guilt, original sin and punishment reflecting this kind of modern belief system, where our alleged joint European guilt is perceived to arise from colonialism, from the horrors of World War II, from the patriarchal oppression of women, from capitalism’s ruthless exploitation of natural resources or from imperialist exploitation of the people and resources of other continents. From this experience of our common guilt and shame, emanate ideologies such as feminism, postcolonialism, and Marxism, which, like Christianity, is built around the idea of a millennial utopia that will appear when we come to grips with the evils created by our sinful behaviour.

With the conviction of their own undoubted goodness and rectitude when it comes to processing this debt problem, today’s moralising classes remind me not a little of the dogmatic priests of the scholastic Middle Ages, or during the 1800s, where we encounter them in ridiculed form in the breakthrough of modern literature. The dogmatism in this context is that all who do not share the ideas of our collective guilt and shame (and also about the coming millennial kingdom) are judged to be advocates of the same kind of evil that is found in Manichaeism.