A cynical old Veteran I spoke with felt he had all the answers. Basically he had built himself a fortress that kept him safe. He had been hurt by others and reasoned that everyone is motivated by selfish choices. His favorite example was helping an old lady cross the street: no one does it for her; they it because it makes them feel good about themselves.
Alas, I thought of this too late to try it on him. (All my life witty rejoinders have come too late, after the moment is no longer ripe for it.) But what came to me is that Pascal’s wager can be used not just for belief in god, or belief in reincarnation, but belief in compassion.
Pascal was a brilliant mathematician in his day, in the 1600s, when gambling was a French national pastime. Some of his mathematical genius lay in the field of probability. But he gave up math and science for God, because he proposed a wager, the logic of which ran thus: if you wager that God does not exist and he doesn’t, you lose nothing. But if he does exist then you spend an eternity in hell. On the other hand, if you wager he exists and you are wrong, then you still lose nothing. Ah, but if he does exist you spend an eternity in heaven.
I wanted to suggest to my Veteran that by the same logic even helping an old lady across the street might make the world a better place. What have you got to lose?