Divina Commedia

I’m making my way through Dante’s Inferno again.  It’s such a hard read, lots of dry exposition but well worth the revisit.

Whenever I get into the discussion, I am often assailed by well intentioned Christians wielding Pascal’s Gambit as their argument for me to give in and submit to belief.  If god exists and I don’t believe, I lose everything: If god exists and I do believe, I gain everything.  If god doesn’t exist, I lose nothing regardless if I believed or not.  Therefore the only possible way to gain paradise, is to believe.

This has always troubled me.  If I believe (truly believe.  I’ll give their god enough credit to know whether or not I really believed or just pretended) and I live my life according to their rules, I lose a lot.  I lose myself.  I am no longer living my life, I am giving up control of my actions and I leave them to be governed by a 1700 year old Science Fiction anthology.

Another point I like to add to the discussion comes from Inferno.  If I don’t accept Christ and god does exist, I’ll spend eternity in the first circle of Hell.  An eternity of mourning my separation from god.  Because I never accepted his rules, I am not guilty of breaking them and my eternity is spent sitting around in pastoral fields being sad with other sad people.  So it’s kind of like being at a Smiths concert.  Another perk of not believing is that many of the people in this circle are the great poets and philosophers from the past.  Pretty good company to hang around with for eternity.

If, however, I accept Christ, I unlock the remaining circles of Hell and I am in danger of spending eternity in a tornado, immersed up to my neck in black ice, pushing huge rocks around, fighting and drowning in a swamp, being lost in a flaming labyrinth, hanging from a tree while large birds tear away my flesh, being dunked in boiling blood and tar or being whipped by demons while fire and poop rain down upon me.  Shit, hanging around in a castle and talking to Plato and Aristotle sounds really good after all of that.

Of course, the discussion dissolves into Inferno being a fictional (and Catholic-based) book and the Bible being factual.  At this point we are an an impasse.  Belief in god seems to go hand in hand with believing the Holy Bible is the inerrant, factual word of god.  I am willing to allow (only for the sake of arguement) that there may be some form of a creator but I’ll never give any creedence to that book of lies.   God may or may not exist but if he does, that Bible is a hateful depiction of him.