'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Prize Enough

There is a book called Oscar & Lucinda by Peter Carey. To me it is an ugly story, badly told by a writer of great distinction. As a piece of prose, it is a tour de force but that does nothing to temper my dislike of it. Mr Carey has since written many other stories from which I have derived much pleasure, and as so many people seem to think that this particular book has great merit, I will leave it at that.

The reason I mention it at all is because of the parallel Mr Carey draws between faith and gambling. Oscar, one of his two principal characters is brought up by a father of sternly puritan persuasion, so stern as to see Christmas as a fabricated creation, designed to corrupt. Behind his father’s back, Oscar is given a taste of Christmas pud, and it doesn’t taste at all sinful to him. As a result, while still a young boy, he rejects his father’s faith, seeing him as on the pathway to perdition, and throws himself on the doorstep of the local Anglican vicar, who takes him in.

Later, at University he is confronted by the fact that the Vicar does not have the means to support his studies, and it comes to him that God can lend a hand by making good a wager or two on the horses. His reflection is simply that faith is also a gamble. You place your bet and take your chances.

If you accept this premise, it would follow that you can play the odds. For instance, if you say, ‘I believe in God’, you are probably on evens. Then again, if you say ‘The world was created in seven days’, or ‘It is a sin to be homosexual’, or ‘Women clergy are ungodly’, or ‘Catholics will roast in hell’, then you are surely on an outside chance, even though you know that the nag is going to win.

To make an outside bet that comes good would surely give you extra brownie points at the Pearly Gates, but then you are never actually given the odds so you could be told, ‘Well, you were right, but you could just as easily have been wrong, so down you go!

I have based the spread around Christian beliefs, but it is actually a Global Book with countless other faiths in the game. We tend to stick to our local track, but in this cyber age we are sure to run across many other bets, ehh, beliefs. This of course includes Agnostics who have put their money on there being nothing there at all. From where I stand this has the same 50/50 chance as the bet on God, but if they are right there is nowhere for them to pick up their winnings. No wonder they don’t seem that happy about it.

But betting on God is one thing, saying who or what God is, is another. It’s as if a bet on God is a bet to place, but a bet on the nature of God is a bet to win. Me, I’ll go for God and say that God is in the mind. In other words, God is abstract and is as much a part of us as we are part of God. Think of yourself as a nerve ending. It is through you and all other sentient creatures that God feels and sees at all. Without us, God is just a Universe waiting to explode.

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