Other than my love of transexual midget clowns, my strangest interest is my compulsion to eat odd, disgusting, or nearly inedible food.  My love affair with strange foods began when I was young.  My brother had offered me some crazy mexican lollipop covered with chili powder and said he would give me a dollar if I ate the whole thing.  Perhaps because I did not understand inflation or the declining value of the U.S. dollar, I agreed and put the thing into my mouth, and the taste cannot adequately be described with normal, everyday descriptions.  The best approximation of the taste is to simply say that eating this lollipop was like gurgling demon feces.  Nevertheless, I finished it and felt a morbid pride in doing so, and thereafter I was determined to eat as many weird foods as possible, so long as they were not Mexican lollipops covered in chili powder.

Naturally, I mentioned this to my atheist friend Ziztur (who blogs at Atheism Is Freedom), specifically alluding to the fact that I’d like to eat balut, which is basically a hard-boiled fertilized duck egg.  That is, it comes with a free prize inside the egg—a little duck fetus.  Because this was a prize greater than anything I’d ever seen in my boxes of cereal, I had to try it, and I had to write an angry letter to General Mills for not including duck fetus prizes in their fine breakfast cereals.

Somehow, she managed to find a place that sold balut eggs in St. Louis.  And then I was finally given the opportunity of a lifetime.  Not only did I get to eat a weird food, but I also got to finally become a baby-eating atheist, which is the only real kind of atheist.

Ziztur has detailed the baby-eating in her own blog, complete with pictures.  (I am the wild-haired guy pictured making out with his fetus.)  Some have criticized me for playing with my food, but I can only object by saying this is the normal manner in which I eat food.  I make out with pretty much anything I eat, including hamburgers, soups, and rice.  I am also the sort to put orange slices in my mouth to create a fake orange smile and to eat things that have been on the floor for days.  This is because I possess no moral table manners compass owing to my abandonment of God, and subsequently I do things like eat babies, put my elbows on the table while I’m eating babies, and refuse to use the proper fork for my embryos.  Who knew God had ordained various forks for various different courses and purposes?  Did I accidentally use the fetus fork for my embryo?  I suppose this is why atheists prefer unnatural sporks, which according to James Dobson’s group “Focus on the Utensils” are an abomination because eating utensils have traditionally been defined as a fork and a spoon and any unnatural union of these two causes the disintegration of society into an amoral, primordial soup out of which life can never arise because evolution is a lie made-up by Satan.

At any rate, I ate balut, and it was not as glorious as I had hoped.  When I was initially asked how the balut tasted, I replied that it was decent, but not something I’d order in a restaurant.  By the time I finished my second balut, however, my opinion had soured.  While the balut was not quite on par with demon feces, it could certainly compete in terms of unpleasantness with the sour taste of Satan’s armpit.  I definitely do not want to eat these again.  In order to maintain my future membership in the atheist union, I’ll forego my dues of eating the babies and instead choose the easier route of having homosexual sex with the devil while drinking blood.  At least that is somewhat enjoyable.

The next food I’d like to defile in my mouth is some sort of worm.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a decent worm.

Pascal’s wager has a long and ridiculous history among proselytizers, and the sheer stupidity of the argument is overwhelming and almost incomprehensible.  Blaise Pascal, the original formulator of the argument, was no doubt a very intelligent man, and that is exactly why the argument itself seems so inexplicable.  Of course, contemporary users of the argument have managed to pervert it even further, somehow distilling in it a maximal concentration of stupidity, and reducing the argument to the bare-bones rejoinder: But what if you’re wrong?

Indeed, atheists and disbelievers, what if you’re wrong?  The usual response to this query is to list off the endless possibilities of our being wrong.  Well, if I’m wrong because the great Groo-Rom exists, who abhors people with blue eyes, I am certainly fucked.  And if I’m wrong because the flying spaghetti monster exists, with his inordinate fondness for pirates, ninja-lovers like myself may find ourselves drowning in eternal spaghetti sauce.  And if I’m wrong because Kal-El exists…  And it is usually at this point that the theist interjects, screaming that this is not what he meant, that what he meant to ask was not for a listing of all the logically possible ways an atheist could be wrong, but for the atheist to consider what would happen if the Christian religion in particular were correct.  To which we only shake our heads.  Oh, you mean that silly religion?  I’m sorry, but Groo-Rom seems a bit more likely, though, as he isn’t proclaimed morally perfect while at the same time commanding the murder of infants, pregnant women, children (1 Samuel 15:3), and fucking trees (Matthew 21:19).   You’d think a deity secure in his omnipotence wouldn’t feel the need to take out his wrath on shrubbery.

But the failings of the wager are huge and insurmountable.  Even the most ardent theist who clings fervently to Pascal’s wager as the basis of his belief would find himself rejecting it in other circumstances.  For instance, if I were to propose to the theist that magical unicorns who fart deadly rainbows were waiting at his workplace to pounce on him and smother him with their colorful and odorous emissions, it is doubtful that the theist would take any heed of this.  If I went even further and proclaimed that these unicorn farts had the capacity to cause great suffering and had the magical power to sustain one indefinitely, keeping them alive solely to suffer the great, colorful torments for eternity, the grand upscale in suffering being proposed would still not sway the theist.  He would return to work without fear, barely worrying about any such creatures.  But why?  The wager applies just as well here.  The untold suffering that awaits the theist by going to work and being tortured at the hands (or hooves) of these deplorable unicorns is infinite and surely surpasses whatever limited negatives would result from not showing up to work, quitting, and finding another job.  Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume the unicorns exist and cover your losses?  Of course not, and the theist is quite reasonable to pay no heed to the potential consequences.

Ultimately, Pascal’s wager as it is often formulated fails because it doesn’t address probability or evidence in any legitimate sense.  For instance, we can be relatively certain that not showing up to work or calling the boss with wild tales about homicidal unicorns would lead to the loss of one’s job.  However, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any such unicorns exist, that there exists a mechanism by which a fart could sustain a life indefinitely and cause untold suffering (most of the suffering from farts is not untold, but quite told),  or that farts can indeed be rainbow-colored.  When we make decisions, we don’t just consider the consequences that could potentially result from every possibility.  We also consider how probable those possibilities are to begin with.  So while the fear of infinite punishment from unicorn farts is certainly very great, it is decidedly counteracted by the almost infinite improbability of such a thing even existing.  We can’t just assess consequences in the absence of any evidence.

With God, there is much similarity to these unicorns.  We have much reason to find God’s existence improbable based upon his rather odd qualities (moral perfection combined with omnipotence and having rather exagerrated anger toward trees), as well as the lacking evidence of his existence.  Of course, Pascal originally formulated his argument based upon the presumption that God’s existence could not be assessed by observational evidence, and that is precisely the major point where his argument falls to pieces.

Because evidence is not necessary to make decisions in Pascal’s scheme, one could formulate any possibility and would be forced to take it seriously solely on the merits of the seriousness of its consequences, and not the likelihood of the consequences actually existing.  We could conceive of Gods who reward skeptical thinking, who punish those who believe in Jesus, who give candy canes to child rapists, and so on and so forth.  There is no longer any reason to privilege a Judeo-Christian deity as the default and do our calculations with such a conception as our basis.  We may as well make room for the flying spaghetti monster and rainbow-farting unicorns if we need not concern ourselves with that pesky thing called evidence.

Clearly, though, a role for evidence is ever-present in such calculations, and that explains why theists don’t fear farting unicorns when they go to work.  The lacking evidence outweighs even an appeal to infinite punishment, because those appeals to infinite punishment are just one possibility among an infinite array of possibilities, and we no longer have any basis to assume just one possibility should we forego evidence.  In the end, Pascal’s wager is the wager of one in a dark, empty room who possesses neither the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, nor smell.  Thankfully, though, we do possess senses and our universe is not a dark, empty room, and we can incorporate evidence and prior probability into our calculations and decisions instead of stumbling about in the endless dark, fearing unicorns and Yahweh alike, and trembling at the awful fate awaiting trees and shrubs that should offend these wrathful entities.