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‘Hedging Your Bets’
by
“Jesus, Buddha, Allah, I love you
all!” Homer Simpson notoriously said
when praying for his life while being
pursued by an angry rhinoceros.
We laugh at this; we don’t know why,
except, if pressed, that it’s silly
of Homer to believe in all these deities at
once, and that maybe he’s
only sucking up to them all in his hour of
need just in case. Silly,
yes, but one could argue that all these
gods are the same, at least in one
form or another.
“Our God is an Awesome God” is
a song sung by Christian children in
Sunday school. It is probably telling that
Sunday school teachers instill
the idea in their disciples that their god
is an awesome god, and not,
say, “God is awesome,”
communicating the idea that there were at least
two gods to choose from and they chose the
awesome-er one. The
runners-up, perhaps Buddha and Allah, can
be inferred to be less awesome
than the Christian god of this song.
All this points to the theme that religion
as it is often seen today
is somewhat immature in concept. Freud
believed that religion was an
expression of the superego and it
represented an infantile relationship
between the individual and God, the
parent-figure. As discredited as
Freud is, it seems hard to escape that he
had a point. When we practice
religion, are we really that more advanced
in thought than children with
their vague ideas of rewards and
punishment?
Let’s go back to Homer covering his
bases by praying (or sucking up,
perhaps) to several deities. Some people
say that, while they cannot be
sure that there is a god, or who or what
god is exactly, they are
playing it safe. “What would
happen,” one young woman said to me, “If
there was a god, and I never believed in
him, and then I died and he sent
me to hell?” A good point, one I
suppose no one will ever be able to
completely disprove. Still, though,
isn’t this idea somewhat childish?
Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame said the
exact same thing about Santa
Claus: “I want presents. Lots of
presents. Why risk them over a matter of
belief? Heck, I’ll believe anything
they want.” I wrote before about the
god/Santa Claus dichotomy, which seems
obvious to an outside observer,
but this concept of hedging one’s
bets seems to carry over into
adulthood and apparently can determine all
religious motivation, once you
get to the bottom of it. If you believe in
God “just in case,” why not keep
kosher just to keep on the safe side? For
that matter, why not follow
every religion that there is, and others
that you have to conceive just
in case people all these years have missed
it? What about the stuff
that conflicts with the other stuff, which,
by the way, can easily occur
within one religion? And be
prepared—there are a lot of contradictions
that will be hard to compromise.
Religion, of course, is designed to teach
us to be good and kind, and
to keep the poor from killing the rich. The
purpose of religion
shouldn’t be subdividing into sects,
religious wars or arguing over minutiae.
If we want to grow up and not rely on
Freud’s superego, isn’t it time
that we stopped hedging our bets and just
followed our hearts, brains
and consciences?
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