A Mirror for Fools by Terry Lindvall

Author:Terry Lindvall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633930247
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2015-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

P is for Pascal, a thin thinking reed

Whose pensive thoughts could see human greed,

Found it folly to wager against life’s well-stacked odds

You might as well stick with the same bets as God’s.

Philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), sat and thought and scribbled out his witty Pensees and his Provincial Letters. In the former he described man as just a reed, but a thinking reed. Pascal, a clever provincial eiron of the Jansenist sect, set forth his wit against certain arrogant Jesuits. When the follows of Xavier Loyola argued with customary casuistry that one who committed acts in ignorance of God’s laws could be excused, Pascal ironically said, how delightful this was, as more people can now be saved by ignorance rather than by God’s grace.

The various fragments of his thoughts, like a collection from the Hebrew books of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, offer insight into the Christian life and faith. His own insights are gentle satires of human frailty and folly. He observed such nuggets as “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction” and “all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.”37

He devised his famous wager, his arguments for believing in the existence of God. Pascal begins, “God is, or He is not. But to which side shall we incline?” He sets forth four options. If you bet on His existence and He exists, you win big. If you bet on His existence and He doesn’t exist, you live a good and virtuous life. If you bet He doesn’t exist and He doesn’t, you don’t gain anything. If you bet He doesn’t exist, and He does, you lose. Damn.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.