Pascal’s Wager
Blaise Pascal invented Probability Theory. Then, he used it to decide which religion should be chosen. He picked The Roman Catholic Church. Boiled down, he said, “If the potential gain is great enough, a risky bet is a smart bet.” The ultimate wager we make is for our soul’s salvation.
“If you could win all the money in the world with a two dollar bet, you should make that bet. Similarly, if you could obtain eternal and total joy by spending an hour a week at Mass and obeying The Church’s rules, you are a fool not to do so.”
Many are discouraged from making that bet because that been led to believe that God is not real enough to worry about, and if He is, He’ll automatically grant us salvation because “I am basically a good person”.
In every generation, most of us are led from that belief by any number of worldly agencies that exist to focus souls on the entities God and men have programmed rather than on The Loving Programmer of all that is good.
Catholic Fundamentalism Updates
Before we make the short step of realizing that we human programs have been written and downloaded within The Creation Program, we may consider the fact that “Human programs can write and download movies so realistically that they appear to be ‘real’. We must realize that it is also a fact God, The Loving Programmer, could have programmed and downloaded energies and particles and compiled them into the reality that we know. That’s not a big step to take.”
Vanity keeps us from taking steps to get closer to God and His Church. No matter how many degrees of separation there are between us and Him, we derive a great deal of self-satisfaction from whatever position we hold. To become a Catholic is to admit that we need help in moving from admiring our self and obeying its drives to loving and obeying The Loving Programmer.
Those who make that admission, and put it in light of Scripture and history, have begun to move beyond vanity into obedience. Smart bet!