For some, one of the more notable attributes associated with the idea of there being a God is the binary choice He is said to have offered mankind: be His friend, and you'll be blessed by Him for eternity; choose otherwise, and you'll be left with an eternity that, at best, will be damned regrettable...to say the least. 

Through the ages, many have wrestled with the rightness or wrongness of this concept, including the scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal.   It was he who put the real issue on the table with what has come to be known as Pascal's Wager: If you were to choose, would you bet that God exists or that He doesn't?  

Pascal concluded that betting on the former is an indication of one's wisdom: if you're correct, the benefits are immeasurable and eternal, and if you're wrong, you become worm food regardless.

Conversely, Pascal said that to bet otherwise would be foolish.  If you bet there is no God and are correct, your brightest hope after death is to become worm food, but if you lose the bet, you run the risk of being really wrong — if, indeed, there exists an eternal hell.    

The pure genius of Pascal's Wager is it provides a litmus test by which those who believe in God can evaluate the wisdom — or lack thereof — of others simply by observing whether how they choose to conduct their lives reflects their belief in a God...or not — and always remembering that the bet we may make today is not immutable, and, so long as we are alive, can be changed at will. 

For example, consider those who openly champion the thought that somehow it is their "right" to murder, mutilate, sell, have sex with, or market the body parts of our children.   For the purposes of Pascal's Wager, it matters not why they think they may have such rights — whether it be for them to make a profit, for their convenience, or to meet some distorted emotional need.   It matters only that, by their claim to such a right, they are obviously overlooking the possibility that there really may exist a God who not only created the children at issue, but, if He exists, will most certainly be offended by their systemic abuse of His most vulnerable creations.  When viewed through the lens of Pascal's Wager, the bet made by these people most certainly lacks wisdom and, indeed, is foolish in the extreme.  In time, will they change their "bet"? One can only hope.

Then consider some pharmaceutical industry executives who work in conjunction with politicians and other government bureaucrats to increase their bottom line.  Some might say that's "good business."  But not if it includes doing things like using politicians and executives at places like the Centers for Disease Control to misuse both a pandemic and their official positions to mandate that all citizens take an untested vaccine that these executives know in advance could quite possibly be injurious, and in some cases lethal, to many.   Most certainly, that would be evil, and indeed, foolish to do, unless their taking the foolish side of Pascal's Wager is correct, and there really is no God who might hold them accountable. 

The only thing that could be even more evil, and thus also foolish, is if one were to also discover along the way that many of these executives and bureaucrats knew that the pandemic that created the need for the vaccine they were selling was predicated upon the spread of a virus that, in fact, they had a hand in creating to generate future profits.  Again, if there is a God, most would agree that such a course of action would be a textbook example of foolishness.  Obviously, these would be people who have made the choice to make money their god for so long as they may be alive — which, again, can only be product of a fool who has chosen to bet that there is no God who will ever hold him eternally accountable.

Such a degree of foolishness might be equaled only by that of an 83-year-old woman who chooses to abuse the powers of her office to orchestrate a fake insurrection that she knows from the get-go will ruin the lives of hundreds of innocent people solely for the purpose of disparaging a president she has always hated.  And she hopes all this will divert the public's attention away from the unfathomable depths of not only her own corruption, but also the corruption of her allies in her soon-to-be former political party — i.e., those other foolish members of her cheering section in Congress who, no doubt, will quickly forget her forever soon after she is gone.

Of what eternal value is that?  And, in her case, what makes all this to be especially the acts of a true fool is the fact that she is still making decisions like this with complete disregard for her own imminent voyage eternal.  In fact, just this week, she dismissed a reporter's question about whether Joe Biden's age should be a concern in the upcoming election by responding, "Don't bother me with such frivolity."  

Oh, indeed, your highness.

Sadly, these are but a few examples of those who reveal by the lives they are living that, if they aren't already hoping there's no God...they really should be.

Cliff Nichols is the author of A Barrister's Tales, the curator of The American Landscape, and the drafter of The Declaration of Liberty.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.