The Desk.

It seems I have been challenged, and I must now address Pascal's Wager. The wager, if you are unfamiliar with it, is between an atheist and a theist, regarding what they each stand to lose should they be proven wrong. The theist declares himself the winner, stating that he stands to lose nothing if it should turn out there is no god, where the atheist stands to spend eternity in Hell. The problem of course, is that apparently no atheist was around to proofread for Mr. Pascal. Indeed your life may be satisfactory, and you may spend it in pleasant idealism, and if you're wrong about god, you have lost nothing. Except the truth. And freedom. Go ahead and think whatever you want; I've got something better. While you're wasting away concerning yourself with whether you have enough brownie points to appease your god, I'll be living. Christianity is especially concerned with the afterlife, even moreso than many other theistic belief systems, and so I find it very negative. I'm a positive person, and I prefer the idea that we ought to concer ourselves with life. Death is death and it happens, but what really matters is life. It's a quest and an adventure and when I get to the end, I will have rather spent it living. I might figure it all out by that time, and if I do at least I'll know I'm right, and not have closed the door too early on the quest for truth. To borrow from Thoreau, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."