I would like to tell a very personal story, to get the reactions of people
on this list to an interesting intellectual puzzle.
In one of my responses to this "God and decision theory" thread, I related
that at age eleven I became an agnostic leaning toward atheism because I
told myself I'd rather go to Hell than believe in a God who would damn me
for not believing. I knew very well what I was doing. I believed there
was a significant chance I was sending myself to Hell. It was a heavy
burden for an eleven year old.
The burden was heavy enough that I proceeded to send myself to Hell. My
personal Hell culminated in a year of addictive dependency on pot,
unknowingly smoking some pot that was spiked with angel dust (a *very*
dangerous drug), over a month out of my mind in a mental institution, and
two years of crushing "post psychotic depression" (the clinical term for
the maxim that what goes up must come down).
During my "high" time before landing in the hospital, I talked to God. Or
to put it more accurately, I cannot shake the feeling that I recall not the
actual conversation, but that it occurred and was utterly, amazingly
beautiful. (Angel dust is a powerful hallucinogen.) God told me I was
being given an opportunity. I could do a lot of good with my life. I
could help a lot of people. But it would involve a great deal of
suffering. It was my choice. I didn't hesitate for a moment. Sure! I
said. Lay it on me.
Let me tell you, two years of post-psychotic depression is suffering. I
never for a moment regretted the choice I had made, if I had made a choice.
However, I have often wondered whether that conversation was "real,"
whether it "actually occurred" or was "just a hallucination." That question
used to cause me great angst.
I became free the day the realization hit me (OK, I'm being dramatic for
effect; the realization dawned slowly, in fits and starts over many years)
that it didn't matter whether it was real. All I had to do was adopt the
intensional stance that it was real, and behave as God would expect me to
behave if I were called to a mission to use my life to make the world a
better place.
I'm still very interested in the intellectual puzzle of whether my
experience was "real," or even what "real" means. I'm still very
interested in discussions about whether God exists and what kind of
evidence would lead to belief one way or another.
But as a personal matter, I have decided that in my own admittedly
incomplete and inaccurate model, I am going to place a probability of
near-unity on God's existence, on the proposition that the conversation in
question "actually occurred" and is "not just the product of a drug-induced
hallunination" (whatever that means), and that I am called to use my life
to make the world a better place. The reason I have decided this is that I
MUCH prefer the joy I get out of a sense of mission and purpose to the
emptiness I used to fill with marijuana. Not only that, every time a
student spontaneously hugs me and tells me she is glad to have me for an
instructor, I know in my heart that I wouldn't be making such an impact in
her life if I hadn't chosen to believe in the "reality" of that
conversation, because I'd most likely be dead or worse.
Now, I would like to ask you to consider: what probability do YOU place on
the propositions:
- That God exists?
- That God really talked to me and redirected my life at a critical moment?
- That writing this email is one of the things God is calling me to do?
Let me also ask you: Are the probabilities you assess your "real beliefs"
(what does that mean)? What probabilities to you think you SHOULD assign
(not in a moral sense, but in a pragmatic sense)?
Kathy Laskey
