By Peter Fernandez
According to WorldAtlas.com, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine are the “least religious” states in the country.
“It could be that the history of Puritanism in New England paved the way for secularism,” the article speculated. “Puritans placed a premium on literacy and worked towards universal literacy so that churchgoers could read the Bible for themselves and form their own relationship with God.”
The same article referenced that the most religious states are Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
“Old time religion” practitioners are now the odd souls in the Green Mountain State’s nouveau humanist—pagan zeitgeist. Social justice has displaced divine law. School prayer is a fossil and the Pledge of Allegiance is looking a little like a doomed dinosaur, too.
In the past, the church or synagogue-attending Vermonters populated Vermont’s pious pews, households, workplaces, and schools. Not so much anymore, as the relativist who believes that “there is no absolute truth or universal standard applicable to all situations” has become the vocal majority.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” stated comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Certainly not, unless there really is a Heaven and a Hell awaiting us after our physical death.
I am reluctant to be perceived as a magazine’s cartoon character on the street corner sporting long hair and beard, dressed in sackcloth spun with camel hair, and holding a poster sign that reads, “The End is Near.” In this black ink parody’s foreground, an onlooker cracks, “Gee, That’s just what my wife told me yesterday,” rubbing the exaggerated bump on his noggin.
The 17th-century French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal believed so. He proposed what is now known as Pascal’s Wager:
God is, or He is Not.
A game where heads or tails will turn up is being played.
For this reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
You must wager. (It’s not optional.)
Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you win, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing.
According to Pascal, “a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God.”
Pascal’s Wager was perhaps the first reliable document to “posit that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist.” That gamble will end ONLY one way or the other! Given the possibility that God does exist and assuming the infinite gain or loss associated with belief in God or with unbelief, a rational person should and could live as though God exists and seeks to believe in God.
If God doesn’t exist, then you will have only missed out on some temporal kicks, hedonistic depravity, and decadence, i.e., $$$, sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. But if God does exist, and He is the Living God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the true author of the Bible? Then, you would have gambled with your life wrongly.
Maybe you will thank me not to evangelize. If I am wrong, and there is no afterlife, I simply cease to exist. But if you are wrong….
“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” 2 Peter 1:16
The author is a children’s book author and Vermont resident.