Ripples

Amazon had a sale on Grateful Dead MP3s recently, so I picked up a best-of.  I'm not a huge fan, and never have been, but I like them well enough, and - more to the point - I hang out with enough musicians that eventually, someone is going to ask me to sing "Uncle John's Band" while they jam out. It's kind of like "Hey Jude" that way - everyone knows it, no matter what their normal musical style is.

On a parallel track, I also recently, as a fumbling way of completing an assignment I was given, ended up constructing a small ancestral shrine.  (I also dropped a cinder of burning frankincense, and melted a hole in a plastic pot before I noticed.  Fortunately, it was on concrete and I had a watering can at hand, so no harm done except to the pot.)  It's a eclectic, or possibly syncretic, hodgepodge of elements.  The central piece is a small cedar stela, marked with a solar winged disc (a symbol for Shapshu of the Corpses, one of the Ugaritic protectors of the dead), an eight-pointed star (specifically Astarte's symbol, but it shows up a lot in Levantine and Mesopotamian religious art in the context of various heavenly deities, not just Astarte/Ishtar), and the names of both of my paternal grandparents.  It's currently flanked by two jar candles (the sort you see in the Hispanic foods section of the grocery store, with various saints on them), and has a spot for incense in front of the stela (stick incense, now, after the goof with the resin incense).  I need to see if I have any photos I can scan and print to add, at least temporarily.

I don't normally do a lot of regular ancestor veneration; I've historically avoided it on the grounds that it would be disrespectful to my ancestors' beliefs.  This is particularly true on my distaff side, unfortunately; every ancestor for whom I know more than a name was a rock-ribbed devout Lutheran, and the same will be true of my mother when she joins them.  I am fairly sure that, even if they have found out by now that there is more than they imagined, they would still be grossly offended by being offered veneration due (in their minds) only to their god.  And my father's father's line runs to standard Southern Protestantism, although they seem to have been generally less devout than my maternal side.

But my father's mother's side is Catholic, and Louisiana Catholics at that.  My paternal grandmother was a fairly devout Marian; I trace some of my initial respect for the female Divine to her reverence for the Mother of God.  She was also a bit of a drama queen and attention-seeking scene-stealer.  At some point in my contemplation of the assignment, I realized that, orthodoxy or not, anything that involved someone making a big fuss about her, in Mary's name, would probably not displease her.  And her husband lost whatever vestiges of his childhood Presbyterian faith he still had on the battlefield in WWII; he might dismiss the whole project as foolishness and nonsense, but he wouldn't find it offensive in the same way that my two-church-founding, organ-playing, Bible-loving maternal grandfather would.  So - fair enough.  There's a Virgin of Guadalupe candle for her, and a plain red candle for him.

So what happens?  They complain that I didn't get them tobacco and bourbon instead of incense.

*facepalm*  Talk about your ungrateful dead!

But then, why should they be any different in death than in life?  And, at least they turned up.  And - well, they're right; they were both smokers and social drinkers all their lives, and part of ancestor reverence is to get them what they want(ed).  And I can get them tobacco and bourbon, even if I don't remember their brand (and they get pipe tobacco; I am not buying them cigarettes).

Taking Our Chances

Pretty much everyone who's had much exposure to Christianity has probably heard of Pascal's Wager.  You may not know what he knew a thing or two about wagering; he's not the father of mathematical probability - that distinction goes to Fermat - but he was instrumental in developing it beyond its initial foundations.

In case you don't know Pascal's Wager, it goes something like this: Either God exists, or he does not.  Either you believe, or you do not.  If God does not exist and you do not believe, nothing happens.  If God does not exist and you do believe, you miss out on some of the joys and pleasures of this world.  If God exists and you do not believe, you will be tortured for all eternity.  If God exists and you do believe, you will exist in eternal bliss.  Since the reward for believing if God exists is essentially positive-infinity, and the reward for not believing if God exists is negative infinity, it doesn't matter what the payoffs are if God does not exist; as long as the probability that God exists is not zero, the rational thing is to choose to believe.

Now, there are a lot of problems with that, starting with the question of whether one can, in fact, choose to believe (Calvin had some opinions on that subject).  The biggest objection brought by most mathematicians is that Christianity and atheism are not the only two options - Islam is usually brought up, and sometimes Hinduism and Buddhism as well.

It turns out that there's a Pagan version of the wager, which in at least some form predates Pascal by quite a bit; it's sometimes known as the skeptic's wager, but it stems at least in part from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (thanks to Libby Anne for this particular formulation), so I'm going to call it Aurelius's wager.

And Aurelius's Wager goes something like this:  Either the gods exist, or they don't.  Either the gods are just, or they are unjust.  We may act with justice, or with injustice.  If the gods exist and are just, then we will be judged according to whether we have been just or unjust.  If the gods exist and are unjust, then we should not care what they think.  If the gods do not exist, and we act unjustly, then we will be remembered with infamy.  If the gods do not exist and we act justly, then we will at least be remembered well.

Note that Pascal's wager is actually covered in Aurelius's.  A god who is capable of inflicting a non-finite punishment on a finite being, and does so, is clearly not a just god.  Indeed, if a god did so, the just thing to do would be to either struggle against it, not to serve it.  As Huck Finn said, "All right, then I'll go to Hell."

Star Foster wrote yesterday about rejecting Jesus Christ.  I actually have a bit of a soft spot for the rabbi Yeheshua ben Miriam; for a man of his time, he was remarkably progressive.  I think his followers were far more mired in conventional thinking, and the religion they founded got co-opted by the Empire a couple of centuries after Aurelius.  But I have no love whatsoever for Yahveh, and the above is part of it.  I have absolutely no way to square Yahveh's behavior with a just god, no matter how his prophets attempted to spin him later.  So - I will not worship him, in any form.  If you go back far enough, to before Yahveh and El were syncretized, I will happily worship the physical, fallible El who loves humans and is concerned with (although not perfect about) justice.  I have no problem with Mary Theotokos, and the deified version of her kid I can take or leave, depending on the context.  But Yahveh the Lonely, the Angry?  The sky-father who divorced Asherah and disowned Baal?  No, not him.

I've actually had this argument with a couple of atheists.  They wanted to know what would happen if, as Yahveh did to Abraham, one of my gods told me to sacrifice someone.  They seemed to be startled when I told them "I'd say no," as if accepting a god's existence meant always obeying it.  But I agree with Aurelius - an unjust god is not worth obeying.  (I'll admit, the fact that I think the gods have a fairly limited influence on one's afterlife also helps.)