Image by @GSATB
Polish-American poet and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz once observed1:
Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.
The solace of nihilism might be a stretch for the average bloke, but if you include or substitute in “total absolution” for “nothingness”, Miłosz captures something profound here: we’ve flipped the script on religious comfort. Where faith once consoled the suffering masses with promises of ultimate justice, now the “opium” is the belief that there are no ultimate consequences at all. This shift reveals something deeper about human nature: our tendency to flee from uncomfortable truths, especially when they make demands on our lives.
Blaise Pascal noted that “people arrive at beliefs based on what they find attractive,” as opposed to what’s inherently true (see my Safetyism post). And so we get the “Cafeteria Catholic” who accepts what’s convenient and discards the rest. But this same impulse produces hundreds of Protestant denominations and drives people from religion entirely. The common refrain is “well, the God I believe in…” and fill in the rest of the sentence with an idol of comfort/convenience to justify whatever you want and/or avoid that which could imply a serious life course correction.
So here’s my central argument: while we've watered down the faith in recent decades, real Christianity presents genuinely difficult truths that repel people for understandable reasons. But the stakes involved—infinite and eternal—are too high to simply avoid. Even if Christianity's positive case doesn't compel you, Pascal's Wager provides the minimum rational framework to consider when facing questions of ultimate consequence.
A couple months ago at Disneyland, walking with the morning crowds from the hotels toward the park entrance, we encountered a street preacher with a megaphone proclaiming the gospel. Predictably, everyone ignored him. But being the theologically-curious one, I found myself listening carefully to his message, and then, surprisingly, agreeing with almost everything he said. Granted, the time and place was off-putting, but here we all were stuck at the intersection waiting for the light to change, forced to listen. Of course you’d ignore the street preacher—same way you’d ignore anyone ranting on the subway. But strip away the megaphone and awkward timing, and you’re left with the same core Christian claims that are just as challenging whether delivered by a street preacher or a seminary professor: you need salvation, judgment is real, your life isn’t your own, etc. It illustrates our broader problem with uncomfortable truths: we’d rather dismiss/avoid difficult messages than engage to determine their veracity2.
I’m no expert evangelist, but I imagine the strategy is to lead with the more winsome concepts (e.g., the unconditional [agapic] love of Christ). However, there are concomitant truths and realities of the Good News that we selectively edit out. Take, for example, Christ challenging the Pharisees when they brought him the woman caught in adultery: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”3. But you need to keep reading, because the whole exchange ends with Him telling her “Go, [and] from now on do not sin any more”4—oh, Man, couldn’t He have just stopped right there with the zinger; now there’s this additional, life-altering command.
So how do we handle discomfort? Head on. Isn’t that the “anti-fragile” philosophy (to borrow Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s language) or Jordan Peterson’s “embrace the struggle” philosophy (borrowed from Jung’s “shadow self”)?
A good friend and I discovered many years ago that we were both apeirophobes (I can’t recall who confessed to whom), but I’ve realized recently that I may actually be more a stygiophobe. But, seriously, with all of our stimulation and distraction in this day and age, it’s tough to ruminate on anything for five minutes…and yet, I challenge you to take five minutes and consider the idea of eternal life (I have to moderate this activity before anxiety/panic strikes). This isn’t like another hundred-year lifetime, or a few of them, or a million years; this is e t e r n i t y11…
You know who did stare a reality in the face (albeit one he misjudged): Friedrich Nietzsche. To his credit, he followed his atheism all the way to its logical conclusions. Most atheists and existentialists don’t follow through to the same degree—they’ll pick and choose, hold logical inconsistencies, be intellectually dishonest—but Fred was different. Now, he did end up in the asylum, and you can draw your own conclusions about that, but I give him credit for his intellectual courage.
Now, I propose we remember Pascal’s Wager:
| God exists (G) | God does not exist (¬G) | |
| Belief (B) |
+∞ (infinite gain) |
−c (finite loss) |
| Disbelief (¬B) |
−∞ (infinite loss) |
+c (finite gain) |
Why? Because:
Image by @GSATB
It’s funny: at first glance, free will seems like a beautiful gift from God to creation—and, of course, it is—but upon deeper consideration, it’s also the means by which we can lose everything; not because God is vindictive, but because of spiritual metaphysics: if we separate ourselves from or continuously choose against the Source of Life, there is necessarily only death12.
Like my fellow Myer’s Briggs “INTPs”, I’ll take the uncomfortable truth over the self-delusion every time, especially given the “expected value” from Pascal’s Wager. But here’s what I mean by ‘choose your hard’: Life is difficult either way. The question is which difficulty has purpose. The ‘hard’ of Christian belief means surrendering autonomy, accepting moral absolutes, and living with eternal stakes—all genuinely difficult, maybe a fortiori in today’s culture. But the ‘hard’ of disbelief is finding purpose in what you ultimately believe is a meaningless universe.
Yes, critics will dismiss this as “fear-based religion” or reductive apologetics. But Pascal’s Wager isn’t meant to be the end of inquiry—it’s rather a rational starting point for pragmatic minds who need a compelling reason to take the next step. This isn’t about living in constant dread over salvation (scrupulosity), but about sober acknowledgment of what’s at stake.
So if the Wager strikes you as mere fear-mongering, so be it. But if it has any power to wake us from our slumber, bring it on—eternity is at stake!
— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.
Czesław Miłosz, Roadside Dog (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 22. ↩
So posits terror management theory, cognitive dissonance theory, motivated reasoning, self-determination theory, and attachment theory. ↩
John 8:7 ↩
John 8:11 ↩
Luke 9:23 ↩
Is 55:9 ↩
Matthew 7:14 ↩
John 14:6 ↩
Which is why one unconfessed mortal sin can condemn a soul to hell. ↩
Rom 2:14-15 ↩
I realize the Catholic/Christian afterlife is most correctly conceived as existing outside of time as opposed to living in a timeline forever and ever like a vampire—hence the panicky feeling for us mortal creatures situated here in time—but still, eternity is a scary concept! ↩
But totally check out some of my other posts for some lighter content! And yes, I realize how fire-and-brimstone this essay reads, but there’s arguably nothing more important than the question of salvation—I just mean to wake us up to what we already intuitively know matters. ↩