The Desk.

You might have thought I'd lost the fight out of me. You'd might have thought that because my voice is a little softer lately and my words have been a little more tempered that I don't have the old raw steel in me anymore. You've probably been expecting me to turn my pen to a scathing manifesto condemning some ill-imagined adversary. That might have been justified, after you made your decision a question of grand philosophy instead of something more concrete. That's my world after all, and you opened it up for me to have many words on why your position is not only wrong, but positively evil. That is, if you really want this to be a question of metaphysics. But that would do neither of us any good. Assuming and of course begging the question that what we are both after is in fact the good, which is a question I am justified, if not obligated, in asking.

But I have produced no such fiery and visceral retaliation, which is unlike me, so maybe you thought I just laid down. Perhaps you thought I was just okay with everything. I wouldn't want to give you that impression. I have not laid down at all these last days but for a very little sleep, when my body demanded it. Some passions go up like a dry hay barn when a negligent farmer tosses out his cigarette, but others smolder, keenly tended, like the hickory wood beneath a long, sweet barbeque.

I have thought about the rivers I have paddled. I have considered the words of the Tzus, both Sun and Lao, and what they might say if they had seen my country. The strongest seems the Colorado or the Arkansas, with their wild rapids, roaring falls, and rugged canyons. They have an unbridled rage that carves through the sandstone with the careless motion of the reaper's scythe. They roar through the canyons, wild and free with no regard for jagged earthworks in their way, as their boisterous voices echo through the badlands like barbarian battle cries. And they are impressive creatures. But these are rivers still in their youth, with their pot-marked faces and the anxious urgency of an awkward adolescence in their stride.

Just because a river speaks a little softer or a little slower, don't think it's lost any of that wild spirit or that power. The Nantahala, ever patient, carved itself a gorge so deep and narrow that it only sees the sunlight for a few minutes around noon. I've been in that water, and believe me, it's cold down there. It's even colder when it pulls you under and knocks you so hard you don't know which way is up. It'll snatch the breath out of you and won't give it back until you do what it says. But it still has those dark corners where the gorge divides that still recall the troubled dreams of youth, where it hides those ripping scars beneath the white. The ancient Gauley, like an old ornery cowboy who chose a trail too hard for any man, just to see it done, still does battle hand-to-hand with West Virginia's granite hills after all these centuries, still blazing out its impossible course through the miles of solid rock.

But the wisest have taken that path of least resistance, whatever it may be. By yielding to the mountain, he comes to where the mountain yields to him. Water must take the shape its vessel demands, but in the end overcomes its vessel because it can change and pour out, or over, or through anything that holds it. This is a river older, wiser, and stronger than the rest. This is the one who has already broken and beaten the mountains in his way. He has already tamed and polished all the jagged boulders into a smooth mosaic tile floor. Don't let the gentle waltz of the cool, clear waters across the parquet eddies fool you. If he's already won his war against his equals in the other elements, a war even the mighty Gauley and the brazen Colorado are still fighting, imagine what he can do to us. I've seen too well what that river can do. The seeming warm, sweet arms of that quietly rambling giant can grab quicker and break harder even the strongest of men's hearts, and not give them back.

So just because I speak a little softer or a little less, don't think I've lost any of that spirit or any of that fight. And don't think it means I am content. I am far from content. I will not confront you, even when you have brought the fight into my realm. I'm trying hard to break that old habit of burning bridges I'm still crossing. I don't want to do that anymore; I've seen where that gets me, like I've seen the Gauley hurl itself headlong into a solid granite wall and make a sharp turn. Believe me, I've still got those dark corners like the Nantahala where my old fierce tongue hasn't quite been smoothed out, and I always will. But I also know that the best in me, and the best for me, always comes like the strongest and wisest in those old rivers, on the path of least resistance, but keeping in a deep reserve that same fight of their brash and brazen youth. And with a visage of complacency to steady my stride over troublesome ground, still keeping that sense of vicious urgency, when the time is urgent. And it is.

This is for Christians and non-Christians. For non-Christians, let this serve as a guide to dismantling an argument that you no doubt here as often as I do. Take your pick of my disputations, because any one of them is more than sufficient to bury the feistiest of Christians. For Christians, I'm going to show you why even you should reject this steaming pile of an argument, because it's not helping you and I'm tired of hearing it. No reasonable person of any faith should accept this argument in any form.

Pascal's Wager, named for 17th Century theologian Blaise Pascal, is the proposition that one should believe in God based on the idea that if God does not exist, the believer has lost nothing from his belief, but if God does exist, the believer gains eternal salvation and the atheist has earned himself eternal damnation. As dumb as this sounds, I hear this argument more often by far than any other argument for the existence of God, even if not especially from my more intelligent, reasonable Christian friends.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's much more than one thing wrong with Pascal's Wager. I'll start by examining why reasonable people are suckered into this gamble, then move on to it's obvious flaws, and finally to a refutation allowing even the most generous theistic view.

First of all, the Wager is not an argument for the existence of God. It presupposes an agnostic view that we cannot know whether God exists, and does not seek to prove the He does. Instead it is an argument for the belief in God, aimed at agnostics. It suggests that this belief will do good things for your life, and even if it a false belief, you will have lost nothing. I think this attitude is at the heart of why relatively liberal, intelligent Christians maintain their commitments to their religion. They know that they can provide no actual evidence for God in the face of scientific knowledge, so instead of going for a teleological or ontological argument, they seek to justify their belief in this way. That makes Pascal's Wager parachute apologetics at its worst. So what's wrong with that? A lot.

1. The most glaring problem is that the Wager assumes several false dichotomies. Pascal would have us believe that the only two possibilities are for the Christian God to exist or for no god to exist. This is a problem because the Wager can be equally applied to any set of religious beliefs. Suppose some other god, or some other religious belief is correct. You must believe it or face eternal damnation. Which do you choose? And of all the thousands upon thousands of possible gods, what more evidence is there for one than another? Do you simply worship the one who's hell is the most horrible? That seems to be what Pascal wants to propose. The other false dichotomy is that there is only eternal salvation or eternal damnation. Even within the Christian traditions, there is disagreement on this. Perhaps God allows multiple paths to righteousness, perhaps there is a purgatory of sorts, where sins are paid off, and then grace is attainable. There are any number of possibilities, not the least of which is that it's all made up. Pascal's argument is already self-defeating, as he proposes at the beginning that we cannot fathom the nature of God. If we cannot fathom the nature of God, how can he declare that we are safe wagering on one set of practices and not some other? Replace God with any other mythological creature and you expose the absurdity of this scenario.

2. The Wager is an appeal to fear. As I said, it is not actually an argument for the existence of God, only for justifying a belief in Him. But whether we fear the myths about hell has no bearing on whether they actually exist, and whether we believe in them has no bearing on whether they are actually true. It also presupposes that God's existence is subject to some kind of spectrum of probability. This is just wrong. The reason god exists or does not exist is not based on probability. The reason square circles do not exist is because they cannot, by definition. This is a priori and tautologically true. The reason God does not exist is the same. If he did exist, it would not be due to probability, but some kind of reason. Since there is no such reason, we can conclude, without invoking chance, that He does not exist. The Wager is irrelevant. All that matters is reason, and Pascal's Wager gives us none, and worse, it promotes a dangerous superstition.

3. Oh, it's wrong by the way. It's wrong and really, really bad for you. God doesn't exist. Hell doesn't exist. And Pascal was horribly wrong in his assessment that belief loses you nothing. He imagines that religion, even if it is false, has done the world much good, and has done individuals much good. He couldn't be more wrong about this. You only need to look around you or open up a history book to see that. This wager has destroyed us. This wager loses you everything that could possibly matter. You lose your freedom, your right to dignity, your right to free inquiry about the world. And worst of all, you have lost your right to the truth. What does this wager allow you to gain? Absolutely nothing but a dangerous, lethal superstition. Call this the atheist's wager, but it is an empirical fact that we stand to lose infinitely more by taking the Christian bet, and we lose nothing by taking the atheist's bet. Worst case scenario, we reject the wager, allow ourselves free inquiry and find out that it's all true. At least know we have learned this to be true, rather than taking the bet out of fear alone.

4. Christians, this one's for you. Even the most devout Christian should reject Pascal's Wager outright as absolute nonsense. To demonstrate this, I will give it it's best fighting chance. Let's assume that you're absolutely right. Let's assume that God exists, more specifically, the God described in the Bible, and Jesus, and all of that is true. If we do not believe in him and worship him appropriately, then we will indeed face eternal damnation. Pascal's Wager is still bullshit. Why? Because belief is not, and cannot be, a choice. People believe things or reject things for reasons, not because of emotions. Only a Christian can choose to ignore obvious evidence and choose to believe in God. If God exists, it is surely an insult to him to believe only out of fear. I would imagine that any genuine belief is preferable to going through the motions simply because of fear. And I take it that God knows whether your belief is genuine. So Pascal's Wager is useless. If that is what convinces you to worship God, without genuine belief, you're going to hell anyway. If you believe, you don't need the Wager to tell you why, and if you don't believe, the Wager is only going to piss God off. So the Wager is irrelevant, no matter who you are.

So even if you are a Christian, Pascal's Wager should not be the reason for that. If Pascal's Wager is the best thing you've got to throw at me, that tells me right off the bat that you have absolutely no empirical reason for your belief, and that your belief is motivated by fear alone. If Pascal's Wager is the best you've got to throw at me, I've won before you even spit it out. The funny thing is, with most of the Christians I deal with, Pascal is the best they've got. So please, for the sake of my sanity, stop it.

We have all testified fiercely and at length on the crimes of religion. It's easy to point to the Holocaust, the Crusades, 9/11, the Inquisition, and the countless other tales of murder, genocide, and war incited by the belief in God and the dogmatic adherence to ancient texts. But these arguments are meaningless. Altogether they amount to nothing but circumstantial, anecdotal, and ad hominem accusations facing off against and endless army of strawmen and no-true-Scotsmen across the field. All of these are concrete and temporary, their victims and perpetrators limited to those in that specific historical context.

The greater crime, the greater cancer religion has wrought is one that touches all men, in all times, and it is much more abstract. It is the reason people, century after bloody century, are able to do these sorts of things to each other and get away with it. It is, as the scholar said, the hijacking of morality. It is the fact that religion has successfully claimed a monopoly on the production and interpretation of right and wrong, of justice, and worst of all, of truth. So much so, that it leads men not only to do these things, but to believe they are right, because religion has changed what that word means. Right no longer means right, it simply means God's will. For something so essential to be balanced on the whim of an invented deity is beyond dangerous - it's criminal. History provides us more than enough empirical evidence for that, but the concept alone should do more to condemn religion in the sight of thinking men than any particular holocaust. Because none of those historical events has opened us to any progress. It is only the principle, not any event, that is simultaneously committed against us all, and makes us all vulnerable at any time, no matter where you live or what your faith. And yet they feel at ease in their conscience about it, and in the public conscience, because religion has straggled that as well.

You say that because I am an atheist, I could not possibly demonstrate integrity, explore truth, or experience love - that these things can only come from God. Why? I could just as easily suggest the opposite. I should ask for evidence of God's love, compared to man's. I should ask where the integrity is in serving that God, as opposed to serving truth. And yet, in a peculiar and hypocritical game of rhetorical acrobatics, religion has riveted itself so thoroughly to all things beyond the concrete that a man can now be accused of religion every time he expresses an abstract thought. You say that because I talk about truth and justice and love, etc, that I must have some religion, that I must call that my religion if nothing else. That because I believe in something, that something must be called God. No. It already has a name, and God means something entirely different.

To attribute love to God is one thing, even to claim God's monopoly on love is philosophically conceivable, but to say the two are one and the same is to grossly misinterpret the nature of both concepts. You could say that God is any number of things - love, life, time, the universe, the conscience - whatever you like. But if that's the case, then you're no longer talking about Yahweh, the God of the Bible. You're talking about something else, and to believe in that thing does not make one a believer in God, only a believer in the thing now being described. To demonstrate the existence of one does not imply the existence of the other, because you've arbitrarily defined the parameters. It is a very poor breed of the ontological argument to suggest that because you define God to be X, and I do not refute the existence of X, that therefore not only does God exist, but also that I am therefore a theist. You have yet to provide any evidence to suggest that X, be it love or life or whatever, is even evidence of God, let alone a manifestation of God himself. You cannot simply define God into existence. Is your god so weakly manifest that you have to change the definition of god in order to find him? Or are you just so arrogant as to lay claim on behalf of your god to things your god had nothing to do with? If you defined God as energy, then you could find him in a lump of coal, but I trust that's not what you're suggesting. But it is only by doing this that one could count Einstein and Spinoza among the theists. And it is only by doing this that you could accuse me of religion.

Mine is a war in the abstract, for the abstract. It is a campaign to take back the things religion stole from us. To take back our dignity as inhabitants of a natural existence, and not subjects of a supernatural creation. We need to loosen religion's strangle-hold on morality and truth in the minds of the people. Because if we can do that, if we can end their crimes of the mind, then we won't have to talk about any more crimes of blood.

Now you're going to hear everything you thought I didn't know about video games. It's not often I play video games, and it's even less often that I have enough to say about them for a review. That's because I tend to only play the good ones. But today I'm going to talk a little about The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning. When I was a kid, I absolutely loved the original Spyro trilogy for the original Playstation, made by Insomniac Games. For those of you unfamiliar, Spyro is a little purple dragon - has horns, breathes fire, hasn't learned to fly so he can only glide a certain distance, and he represents one of the finest and most successful, and yet most simple video game franchises for the Playstation family of consoles. I personally put this series ahead of Mario, Sonic, and PlayStation's other early flagship franchise, Crash Bandicoot, for one reason: the hours of gameplay and replay value.


I mean, I could play them for hours and hours, even after I had beaten them time and time again. I still could. That's because the original games were chock-full of side missions, minigames, and other hidden areas to explore and things to collect and what-not. The real challenge wasn't beating the bosses but completing the rest of the game to 100%, and experiencing the whole world the developers had created. So this weekend I had that itch to re-live some of that and maybe find some of those gems and dragon eggs I could never find. I didn't find the originals, though I'm pretty sure there is one more place I didn't look which might still deal in original PS games, so instead I got a hold of a copy of Spyro: A New Beginning.

This sixth Spyro adventure is a reboot to the franchise, made by Sierra Games now instead of Insomniac, and is intended as a prequel to the first and a reinvention of the character. Great, I thought, back to the basics, back to the original dragon universe that I loved, from which the series had strayed so far after the first game. And from the look of the graphics, music, and voice talent (Elijah Wood, David Spade, Gary Oldman), it looks like they've not only updated the series to fit the new platform, but also an older, darker gaming audience. It's even got a decent enough story (read: backstory) for the character and sets you up for the chance to set things right in the dragon world, after some evil something has taken it over and imprisoned the dragon guardians, whom you have to rescue, much like in the first game. All this looks and sounds very good until you start playing.


Oh no, they've changed the controls. Why would they do that? This franchise is six games strong and you're changing the controls? Add new powers, sure, but work them into the existing framework the gamer is accustomed to. This is all backwards. Which brings me to my next point: Sparx. Sparx is a little dragon fly who follows you around, and in the original series, serves as your shield/health meter (he takes a certain number of hits for you, changing colors each time until he disappears, at which point you will be dead in one hit), and also assists in picking up gems and what-not as you walk around so you don't have to walk directly on top of every one. Sparx doesn't do anything in this game. Nothing. It's just David Spade following you around and saying things that don't help.Why am I so mad about all this? Because at this point, we're not even playing with the same characters, which are the only part of this franchise that have remained consistent. No matter what adventure Spyro faced, and the rules around him changed, at least we knew what was going on with Spyro himself.

They've also changed the fighting sequences, in what I can only assume is an attempt to grow the game up. But this game doesn't need to grow up, and neither do I. Now you have a true health bar in the corner, accompanied by a bar showing your breath power (more on that later). And as you approach an enemy, their own health meter appears in the opposite corner. In the old games, it took x number of hits to kill an enemy (and you), but here you just fight them until they die. I don't have any specific problem with that. What I have a problem with is how you kill things. Back to the breath meter. As you free the guardian dragons, they each teach you a new breath type (fire, ice, electricity, and earth), and there's a little training session between each level to master them. There are slight differences; ice temporarily freezes the foe, electricity lets you pick them up and sling them, (which comes in handy against big enemies on cliffs), but the problem is they all do basically the same thing -- hurt the enemies, which are mostly variations on the size and color of this baboon fellow, but are all the same.


In the old games, and really in all good games, the whole point of having multiple means of attack is that certain ones don't hurt certain enemies, i.e. if an enemy has fire-proof armor, you had to ram him instead. Not so in A New Beginning, where you can basically kill any enemy with any of your attacks, which totally defeats the purpose of having to learn all these different moves. It also defeats the purpose of having all these different kinds of enemies. In any good game, when a new enemy is introduced, you should have to think about how to kill this new and more impressive threat. Instead, it's just a matter of more or less button-mashing depending on how big its health bar is. Yes, this includes the bosses. There are also special attacks and combos to use, but this lends itself to eventual button-mashing in a confused melee.

Speaking of confusing, there are some crystal things you get after killing enemies and breaking open pots and rocks and stuff. The different colors tell you what they do - replenish health, breath power, or give you the opportunity to upgrade your breath strength. I can deal with that. But it doesn't count them or keep track. So it's not something that you're trying to recover all of, like the gems or eggs in the first two games, nor is there any specific number or price for each power-up or upgrade. And if your health is full, then the health crystals don't do anything - I thought maybe you could increase your health or breath meters, and therefore fill up more and more, but no. It's all very static and arbitrary, and only furthers the phoned-in feel of the game.

But none of that still is my biggest problem with A New Beginning. It's a decent game on its own merits, and for the right audience. But it isn't Spyro. And my biggest problem with this game isn't the health bar or the fighting or the different powers and controls. It's linear. This whole game takes place in tunnel-vision, and much like the oldest Mario and Sonic platformers, the only way to go is forward. Sure, the graphics are in 3-D, but the game isn't. You can't do the one thing everyone loved so much about the original Spyro games, and that's walk around and explore a 3-Dimensional universe. Instead, it ends up playing surprisingly like Rygar, another short, simple, and oddly satisfying smash-em-up linear platformer. And besides all that, it's incredibly short; plays through easily in one sitting. It left me wanting more only because you just learn some of the new powers in time to beat the last boss, and then the game is over. If they went through all that programming, there could have at least been some more levels or some different type enemies.

To sum it all up, I think the main problem in this game is that they pulled a total about-face on the Spyro formula. It was always a simple character - you could breath fire and charge with your horns and glide a short distance - that's it, but you had an incredibly vast and complex world to explore, and you had to figure out how to find, beat, and do everything with the little baby dragon. That was the point. This game started the trend of Grand Theft Auto, Gun, and the like, in which you have any number of worlds, missions, and minigames to do, that don't all lead directly to beating the final boss, but to completing the game to your satisfaction. You could go back and forth -- you had to, after you learned how to open that door back in the second world, and do whatever was behind it, or whatever. Half of the fun was looking at your game completion stats and seeing what you've missed and going to get it. And here they've reversed it. You have a more complicated character, with health bars and all these different powers and breath types and special moves -- all of which are ultimately indistinguishable in combat, and yet you have extremely short, simple, linear levels to complete - levels that don't require you to do anything different from the last except ram the occasional switch. And there's nothing to go back and find or finish once you get through a level, which is what always made Spyro so much fun and provided hours and hours of replay value.

Let me repeat: Simple character + complex world = good, timeless, hours of replay. Complex character + simple world = weak and pointless, zero replay value. Damnit, I'm gonna go find the originals cause now I made myself want to play them even more.

"Watch and pray, that you do not enter into temptation." Mark 14:38

Amidst all the murder, theft, rape, genocide, incest, and hate-mongering, the Bible occasionally has some good suggestions, and I submit that this is one of them. If only he had left it at that. It is good to avoid temptation, and to live modestly and moderately in all things. It is good to weigh one's options and knowledge of a situation before taking the bait. But just like with "Thou shalt not murder," this one comes with some wiggle room.

Not surprisingly, the more the devout the Christian, the more things they consider temptations, and the more pleasures they forgo. The irony is that they have submitted to the greatest, and foulest, temptation of all. What is the prospect of Heaven but an elaborate temptation? What difference is there between that prospect and any Earthly pleasure? That's exactly what the Biblical descriptions of Paradise as a great feast, etc. are manufactured to invoke, and dangle before you. For one thing, Earthly pleasures are at least verifiably real. If a temptress comes to me and can't even demonstrate the truth of that with which she tempts me, why should I take the bait? What reason do we have to believe that God is true to his promises? If anything he has demonstrated nothing but the opposite. He's willing to forsake his own chosen people at the drop of a hat, so what makes you think you stand any better chance as a gentile?

If your answer has anything to do with an argument from anecdotal experience, about how good and merciful God is, I can offer you infinite others to the contrary, or in defense of the mercy of some other god if you like. But that's not the point. The point is that you're simple trading one temptation, one addiction, for another. If your answer is Pascal's Wager, then you've submitted not only to temptation, but to fear, which is an even worse reason for devotion. Fear does not equal truth, and even if it is true, I will gladly suffer in Hell for doing what is right before I am allowed to take pleasure in heaven for submission to evil and temptation. Would you do the unquestioned bidding of a tyrant simply because he threatens you with torture or goads you with rewards? Or would you see the thing for what it is? A trap.

One of a certain someone's favorite Bible verses comes from Paul, and goes a little further: "No temptation has taken you except what is common to man. God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will with the temptation also make the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it." 1 Corinthians 10:13

This is one of those rare occasions in which I, at least in principle, agree with the Tarsian. Within the human condition are troubles and temptations common to us all. There's not a religion on the planet that would claim otherwise. In fact, that's why we all managed to independently invent strikingly similar religions across the planet in the first place. Also common and inherently provided to us is the way of escape from such troubles. Like Paul says, we have encountered nothing that we cannot endure, except perhaps each other. But this is the end of my agreement with him. Is God faithful, or is Paul just saying that for the cash? I believe that way of escape to be reason. It has been reason which has lead us to solve the problems of survival, and to thrive, and it is reason alone that is both the rock on which our species stands, and the light by which we see. Again, I'm only willing to make this wager because at least the results and methods of reason are testable, verifiable, and antidogmatic, even with respect to themselves. Pascal cannot offer such a defense for his gamble, and neither can Paul hope to present his God as any less the tempter than his Satan. It's a trap.

But temptation is necessary, after all. Without temptation, there is no motivation, no effort, no capitalistic venturing, and no progress. And lest we forget, without temptation, there would be no nibble of knowledge, and more importantly, no continuation of our species or any other. Maybe some people like it that way. Indeed, maybe we would be better off had Cain not given to his temptation, or Yahweh to His.