Heathen Apologetics, Part 1: Pascal’s Wager
When I was in high school, I took a class called “Myths, Dreams, and Cultures” (or MDC, for short). Now, I attended a fairly upscale private Catholic school, and all but a very few students came from Christian upbringings. As such, one of the main goals of MDC was to open the students up to the understanding that we were a product of our culture, and that other cultures often had very different pictures of the world. To that end, we would play a game called “Stump the Aborigine.” Our teacher took on the role of an idealized traditionalist Native American, living off the land, completely divorced from modern, American culture. Our job was to be the representatives of Modern America in order to convince this “primitive” of the superiority of our way of life. If anyone could succeed at convincing the aborigine to leave his culture for the one we were selling, our teacher promised to buy that student a brand-new car.
It did not take long for me to realize that the game was rigged.
Boxing Pythagoras 