Kabui’s Wager
The cure to Pascal’s Wager
Pascal’s Wager
For many years I've had some small knowledge about an argument for faith in God, known as “Pascal’s wager”. It wasn't until recently, I'm embarrassed to admit, that I gave it the thought which such a mental landmine deserves. It was a recent discussion with a very religious coworker of mine which inspired me to give it much more attention. I had left all religion nearly a dozen years before, and this fellow thought to entice me back to deism through Mr. Pascal's famous wager.
I looked up the synopsis of the idea for the purposes of this essay. It goes like this:
“Pascal's Wager is an argument in philosophy presented by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–62). It posits that humans bet with their lives that God either exists or does not…if God does not exist, the individual incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries. However, if God does indeed exist, they stand to gain immeasurably…”
As a result of my religious upbringing, I was programmed with religious tolerance. I knew there were many other faiths besides mine, and that others were just as entitled to their beliefs and conclusions as I was to mine. I simply knew they were wrong, probably in the exact way that they knew for sure that I was wrong.
Now, I’m strongly questioning the cost of such tolerance. Not just the tolerance of one religious nut for the nuttiness of others, but tolerance for an epistemology (approach to knowledge) which demands so little in the way of objective validation.
Let’s look at the famous wager a little more closely. Pascal, or those who talk about the wager now, argue that the cost of faith is minimal, while the potential rewards are literally out of this world. Should we say “unfathomable”?
Right at the beginning of this argument is a monstrous contradiction. A member of God’s “chosen people” is very tolerant of other people’s freedom to employ faith as they wish, simply because they know they are one of God's people, while unbelievers (of their faith) are not as fortunate. It’s a crazy mind game the religious play with one another, telling themselves that they are extremely tolerant, loving, and forgiving, while what hold this condescension in place is a “knowledge” that those who reject their own belief are going to hell, not to the supposed reward which their doctrine says awaits them at death.
So rather than, as Pascal’s wager supposes, the gamble of a belief in god imposing nothing more than minor inconveniences, we see that even the most faithful must face the ultimate Eternal Russian Roulette and hope like hell that they picked the one true church, if it happens to exist on the earth at the time. My religion of origin taught that the “true church” only appeared among various societies infrequently, and was often absent for centuries and at a time. So the starting cost of Pascal’s wager couldn’t be higher.
If we assume that you are lucky enough to be born into a family of “god’s chosen people”, and that your god is the actual god, not a false god, mind you, let’s explore the further supposed “minimal” inconveniences of a new child or young adult accepting Pascal’s wager.
Steffan Moleneaux of freedomainradio.com once provided a great example of the mental cost imposed by religious epistemology on a child. He talks of a family at the dinner table, where parents and siblings pass containers of food to one another, as normal. But at this meal, one of the dishes is a bowl that contains some sort of invisible apples. The newest member to this faithful family sees everyone else, one by one, reaching into the seemingly empty bowl, and removing something invisible, which they bite into without any noise or other observable clues as to the magical food’s mysterious nature. Each older family member supposedly really enjoys their chewing and tasting experience. As the bowl is passed around, eventually it makes it to the youngest, the new kid. Now it’s their turn to look into the bowl and into everyone’s eyes, as they expect them to reach in and take an “apple”.
Religious doctrines across the earth, all 4500 or so of them, are presented to new family members in a very analogous way as Steffan Molyneaux’s bowl of invisible apples. A baby is taught by their family and community to use their mind and senses. They are taught to expect consistency, objectivity, and rationality from their world. Everything they learn is taught in this way, with just one exception. Like a bowl of invisible fruit at an otherwise sensible family dinner, the child is asked to accept the idea that rationality applies to everything in the world that they do, think, and discover, with the notable exception of all things “spiritual”.
The problem with this logic is that the definition of “all things spiritual” includes life, death, and one’s mind. When religions refer to things that are “spiritual”, what they do is hijack everything that is human. Love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance are all human faculties. Many religions, however, teach their members to treat such aspects of human nature as somehow “divine”, “spiritual”, or “mystical”. They’ve claimed as “theirs”, something that is as natural to humans as breathing. Just as the gay community seeks to hijack the rainbow as exclusively their exclusive property, while having no effect on the physics of a rainbow, religious communities attempt to hijack the nature of the human experience, and claim it as the virtues or the vices of their own specific doctrine. They haven’t changed or described a secret aspect of the supernatural. They’ve merely redefined the natural so it can enliven their narratives.
So the second casualty, or cost, to accepting Pascal’s wager is rationality. That poor child at the family dinner must make one of two no-win choices. The most common choice is to reach for an invisible apple at the cost of having to then fake reality from that time forward. The second choice which almost no child is equipped to make is to reject the thinking of their faithful family members who will be providing their next several years of key life support, labeling them as crazy, deluded, or perhaps actual enemies in some freakish imaginary eternal war. What kind of post-traumatic stress could you hope to avoid in such a nightmare scenario?
I could go on, but after my discussion with my friend, the horror of Pascal’s wager truly came into my view. What it is proposing is that one set aside their rational mind in order to accept a random set of mental programming that they hope, despite all evidence, rationality, and in the face of billions of dissenters, might be accurate, and greatly reward them–not at some point later in their life, like a most good investments, but long after any investment could sensibly matter–once they are in their grave.
I know very well the religious rebuttal to my conclusions. My religious family members and friends would advise me that I certainly don’t have to give up my rational mind, but only a small portion of it, which needn’t interfere with the objective scientific approach to the rest of life. That’s what my friend told me. But it is a blatant lie. That child, and everyone who accepts the gamble of faith must pay terrible and life-changing costs in their personal lives. The reason why they accept such costs and refuse to see them or their magnitude is that they are all under the illusion that they’ve already won the eternal lottery, so price is no object. Observe the interesting fact that even the Bible refutes Mr. Pascal, referring to a reward in heaven as a “pearl of great price”.
The more I consider the magnitude of the religious scam that has persisted throughout human history, supported by such appologists as Pascal, the angrier I get. Of course, all I’ve referred to so far are the personal costs. But the child being conned into taking their first invisible apple foreshadows the greater cost of Pascal’s priceless pearl–the social or economic cost.
Consider the fact that our civilization today is descended from thousands of years of slavery. Our species has never been free of it, except for the occasional pockets of brief freedom, when peaceful people were able to cooperate and to produce without the fear of pirates. Despite the history lessons, slavery persists to this day, having evolved into the incremental slavery of democracy. For the vast majority of our history, we’ve been plagued by the dogma of “might makes right”. Those with power, from tyrannical parents to the Genghis Khans of our nightmares, have used this excuse to enslave and plunder the productive within their reach, for all of our social history.
Humanity has never had the sense of a flock of sheep or a colony of ants to work productively together for any length of time without getting possessed by the demons of envy, fear, and the desire to control one another’s lives. We already fear our neighbor more than any other living thing on earth or in heaven. In this toxic environment, how well do you think we can afford to add the insane variable of Pascal’s wager? The devastating one-two punch of “Might makes right”, and “In God We Trust” has kept our ancestors crawling through pain and poverty, and with today’s power-enhancing technologies, it threatens to cause the end of our species.
Our pirate heritage and religious addiction has resulted in a global culture of death worship. Pascal may have sold his wager with the biggest understatement on record when he referred to “finite losses”. Finite just means “less than infinite”. For those who have paid the price in death, sorrow, and fear, as we’ve struggled against institutional stupidity, the losses have been infinite, as they encompassed everything in their shortened lives. I’m no longer remotely interested in considering Pascal’s wager. The cost is monstrous, and any god who would require such a thing could only be a nightmare in any possible heaven.
Kabui’s Wager
There are many wagers I would make. One of my absolute favorites is the one I discovered almost two years ago when I met a Chef from Kenya, Njathi Kabui. He proposed a wager which is focussed on this time here on earth, and on a subject which he calls “life worship”, centered on eating well.
From the fantastic visions of heaven discussed by Pascal to Kabui’s earthly passion with food, the two wagers represent opposite poles. Pascal, despite his scientific interests, was shackled by the mystical. Kabui is empowering himself and his audience through the most realistic and practical of all life-support: our food.
The reason why I call this essay Kabui’s Wager is because Chef’s thesis is so much harder to swallow than the products of his kitchen. He proposes that over the last 200 years or so, humanity has lost the common knowledge of the most basic skill of our ancestors–how to eat. Like religion’s hijacking of natural human feelings, Kabui claims that technological and political errors have hijacked humanity’s natural ability to eat. Mass production of food has erased the common knowledge of farming and sustainability from most of our minds, and a centralized global food system has deleted most of the nutrition from our food, replacing it with flavors, textures, low prices, convenience, popularity, security, etcetera.
I started taking a course from Chef Kabui almost two full years ago, and it has definitely enhanced my life. How can I summarize his coursework and state his wager? I mentioned death worship above, and I believe this has contributed to the fall of human food sovereignty. Our food today is killing us. Our dependence on government leadership and our super-abundance of “foodstuffs” leaves us senseless in the face of hotdogs, icecream, and high fructose corn syrup. Through his classes and lectures, Chef is trying to expose the full nature of the modern day character of our ancestral death worship. He’s trying to fight it, and I think he’s found a way.
Kabui’s wager is that we gamble with our life when we eat today. He claims that what we now call food is only food by decree, or fiat food. Every time we eat from the centralized global supply chain, we incur ever-compounding losses. On the other hand, if we were to eat food such as what he teaches in his Afro-futuristic cuisine, with nutritious and cleanly produced ingredients, our eating experience will be win-win, and will show rapid positive health results.
Chef Kabui asks that his students and listeners consider his thesis about the present alarming nature of today’s food system and gamble on his cuisine. I’ve had so much fun, here on earth, gambling on his ideas for life worship centered on my kitchen, that I’ve completely lost all interest in life after death worship.
[rework Kabui’s wager to reflect Chef’s son, Kabui, and his challenge to deal with the world, his dad, and the thesis of Just Food. At age of 4, Kabui could run on a treadmill for 56 min. At age 5 he saw his dad working out and managed 100 pushups. Today he’s competing easily with school kids 2 years older than him in running, He’s the #3 runner in his school, and the #2 & #1 position is held by 8th graders. Afro Futuristic Cuisine is like nutritional steroids. At age 9 he could easily do 20 pull ups. These kids are being raised by a dad who has lived his whole life fueled by nutritional steroids, so he is very energetic. Their dad keeps them active in summers, compared to other kids, spending a lot of time outdoors. He would take them on 2-4 mile runs. Sometimes they would run for 2 miles, then go play tennis. That is a typical summer routine happening 2 times a week. ]
[we are teaching students of JFU (Just Food University) to take Kabui’s wager. That wager doesn’t expect complete acceptance of his claim that we’ve lost the battle for our food, but that they make a bet on it being true. This will allow them to take the life-saving action necessary to save their health and to restore humanity’s food sovereignty. People know without the personal experience of eating off of Chef cuisine that food is a danger as well as their life support. J.F.U. offers the possibility that there exists a set of ingredients and a cuisine that offers food which is just life support, without the danger.]