Page 57 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
often waste so much time worrying about getting to Heaven when earth problems need so much attention. Or angry when conservatives call us sinners for
not kowtowing to their lifestyles. But we can also understand their beliefs in these areas.
Getting down to practical day-to-day communication: If a fundamentalist says you’re going to Hell for not believing and acting as they do, give the standard reply: “I envy your certainty, but I don’t believe a loving God would permit something as incredibly sadistic as Hell.” If they say that’s the just the way it is, then you say “Well then I have to gamble it isn’t. I may be incredibly sorry some day.”
Pascal’s Wager bets that you should live as though God exists because if he/she doesn’t you will have only a finite loss of some pleasures in exchange for the infinite gain of Heaven and avoidance of the infinite loss of Hell.45 But liberals mostly no longer believe in a literal Hell so we can now replace the wager with Branyon’s Bet: “If we don’t concentrate on saving and enjoying Earth life, there may not be an afterlife to replace it.”
And this is what liberals need to do in general with our free-thinking abilities. To use them to be as mature as possible in addressing those who believe differently in areas where there is no factual answer. In the case of the God vs. no God controversy we realize that there’s not sufficient proof either way.
And again, we also don’t want to make the
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