Giving kids permission to gamble with Pascal
One of my favorite interview questions is this: What is the one things you hope to give your kids by raising them without religion? The answer is freedom from fear.
No, not all fears, ya tyke — but several of the most parasitic and life-destroying. Scratch the smiling surface of a good many people with strong religious convictions and you’ll find stark raving terror. Many (not all, dammit, never all) are convinced that only the grace of God, moment to moment, protects us all from catastrophe.
A relative of mine clipped out a prayer and taped it to his/her fridge. It begins: O Lord, please give me the strength to face another day… Even though said fridge is in a comfortable upper middle class home in the suburbs, it keeps my relative bowed and feeling somehow spared, like an abused wife. Husband or wife, I mean. Life, it says, is unbearable. Only God spares us from its horrors, and the horrors beyond.
My kids will have their share of fears, but I’d like to help them see life as an amazing privilege, not as a source of terror from which we must be saved.
When a believer tells me that he simply can’t bear the thought of a world without God, or that without God we would all crack open each others’ heads and feast on the goo inside — I get a glimpse of his terror, his absolute distrust of himself and of the rest of humanity. This person genuinely believes that we’re all felons-in-waiting, just itching for the Cop to look away for one second so we can stick a shank in the ribs of the next guy.
This is my cue to inch away from this person, and by all means to stop challenging his beliefs, since I’m the next guy. Yikes.
But this post isn’t about all the reasons that idea is silly — they are countless, and several essays in PBB (Mercer and Koepsell among them) go into it just fine. This post is about why that’s sad — and why I’m so eager to help my kids avoid those particular shackles.
Imagine you’re sitting in class, struggling with a single true/false question on the paper in front of you. The teacher stands behind you with a loaded gun. Picture Snape, if you wish. True or false? he asks. Mark your answer carefully. Oh, and one more thing. Choose ‘true’ and there’s no penalty, even if you’re wrong. But if you choose ‘false’ and you’re wrong — I’ll shoot you in the head. Concentrate, now…
It’s Pascal’s Wager — one of the more cynical things ever uttered by a smart person. Once that gun is cocked, getting it right is no longer the issue, is it? Instead of thinking about the question, you’re focused rather tightly on not getting shot.
The one message I try to instill in my kids above all others is not that God is pretend, but that even if God exists, it is silly to think that the most important thing to him would be your belief in his existence. Honestly, can you imagine anything more petty, more outrageously egotistical — more human? So I tell my kids this: If there is a God, he’s not gonna care if you guess wrong about him.
I had to discover that one on my own, and it took many, many years. Too many. Once I did discover that simple and obvious fact, the freedom from fear allowed me to actually think. At which point I had a chance to get it right.
Which gets me to the real point of the post. I value the freedom to think for myself above just about anything else (other than the love of a good woman and about six other things, shut up). I get (as my Baptist/Episcopal mother-in-law would say) pissed to the tits when someone tries to force me to accept the prefiltered product of their own thinking. As I edited PBB, I kept this cardinal value in the forefront of my mind. I had one central goal for content editing: that every statement in the book should be reasonable. I didn’t say I would agree with every statement in the book — I don’t, by the way — but unless I’ve missed something, I am prepared to defend the reasonableness of every jot and tittle that made it in.
Not every j&t made it in, you see. I worked with several of the contributors to revise or remove statements I considered to be unreasonable or insufficiently grounded. And all of the writers, with one exception (oh DROP it WILL you PLEASE), were extraordinarily generous and willing to collaborate to that end.
Some of the essays are harsher than I’d choose to be. I think some are too forgiving of certain religious ideas. Some give way too much credit to atheists as a group. Others I just flat disagree with. But if I had edited those elements out, there goes your chance to think for yourself. If you read something with which you disagree, be sure to be glad for the chance to do so.
We’re used to being fed a single predigested POV. If that’s what you were expecting in this book, there’s just one thing I can say: You’re welcome.