Death is one result of an accident, but you are more likely to spend the rest of your life horribly crippled. Also, your risky drive to Miami might injure or kill someone else, which, though I’m not religious, seems to me might get you banned from Miami altogether..

Most observant believers don’t adhere to the religious moral imperative out of belief in the hereafter - Judaism has a pretty vague notion of the afterlife, without much sense of desert, if I’m correct.

Instead, the religious moral code is based on the idea that there is an inherent order to the cosmos that doesn’t correspond to the default nature of the human will. Devotional life is the process of retraining one’s will — wrestling it into harmony with the divine order. This applies to all sorts of religious doctrines, regardless of how much speculative carrot-and-stick they involve.

None of us knows how much time is allotted to us for this work, so we tend to guard life and limb about as vigilantly as the rest of y’all (not that I wouldn’t like to see the accident mortality survey that you speculate about…).

But look at the different things that have to be in place to really yield the kind of Christian that you and Orwell imagine:

1) Total belief in the reward of heaven and corresponding punishment of damnation, or at least enough certainty to think of it as the best bet

2) Precise understanding of the behavior required to attain that reward

3) Comprehensive self-scrutiny and self-awareness

4) The self-discipline required to implement all of #2 in light of #3

I understand your point to be that, given #1, there ought to be no self-discipline required, since the apparent reward is so great. In Orwell’s words, “If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it.”

But the “nuance and backsliding” that Ross is talking about are our failures to attain all four of the above criteria. I don’t have to be filled with a cringing self-loathing to view those things as difficult, and I really don’t see “meta-atheism” as explaining anything that can’t be accounted for by the limits of human discernment, prudence, and will.

1) That there is a God

2) That there is an afterlife (of presumably infinite bliss)

The latter doesn’t automatically follow from the former, yet what is revealed by the behaviour described is an unacknowledged scepticism of the prospect of an afterlife (entry to which is presumably based on conforming to certain standards of behaviour) rather than meta-atheism as such. This would tie in with the fact that for believers, existence itself is “proof” of a Creator*, while the afterlife portion must be taken on “faith”.

*Note, I don’t buy this at all myself, I am a convinced atheist, but it has the same ring of plausibility to many people as the notion that animals are capable of reflective thought.

By your definition, I don’t truly believe in eternal reward or punishment. In spite of myself and my religious inclinations, my own belief in the hereafter isn’t concrete enough to really influence my behavior in the here and now.

Your vision of the frustrated believer demands that I concoct layers of meta-belief in order to come to terms with my incomplete faith in the hereafter. Instead, I admit that it’s not strong enough to dictate my actions.

I think we both draw the same conclusions about the behavior we could predict out of someone who truly and completely believes in eternal reward. After all, plenty of such people provide an example as they blow themselves up in Iraq every week.

The rest of us make do with what we admit to be an incomplete faith in the hereafter. That’s not so complicated, but not as simplistic as the red button.

If Salma Hayek was performing a strip tease right next to the red button, I bet a substantial portion of men actually would push it. Because, well, Salma Hayek is really hot, and it takes a lot of willpower to turn her down.

There are all sorts of lesser examples of this sort of behavior– alcoholics who try to quit and relapse, despite knowing exactly what awaits them if they start drinking again. People who have unprotected sex with strangers despite the knowledge that pregnancy and STD’s could result. People who eat too much Thanksgiving dinner despite the knowledge that they’ll feel sick afterwards. Girls who keep buying clothes they don’t need with credit cards they can’t afford to pay off, despite the knowledge that they’re destroying their credit and risking bankruptcy.

People simply don’t posess the capacity to behave in a way that reflects perfectly consistent intertemporal preferences. Many of the people I cite above know perfectly well the bad fates that await them for their poor choices. It’s just that at the time, Salma Hayek’s heaving bosom seems more urgent than whatever might happen the following day.

I of all people understand lack of discipline and lapses of prudence. But discipline and prudence tend to improve when the cost of not improving is very very high. If you genuinely believe the cost is infinitely high (and not simply believe that you believe), I simply cannot buy the idea that, because of lack of discipline, foresight, and prudence, this belief might turn out to have only a marginal effect on one’s behavior. I think the hypothesis that these people don’t really have this belief is a much more persuasive, and much more charitable, explanation than that they are are completely and utterly irrational. If you think incentives matter at all, and that you can understand something about human behavior by understanding incentives, you ought to be eager to avoid the idea that we might systematically fail to heed even massive incentives because of irrationality.

If the concept of religious doubt is really all this new to you, those Mormons you grew up with must have really kept their eyes on the prize better than I do.

(As an aside, it’s particularly delicious to see a discussion framed around the idea that some method exists to prove one’s beliefs and thoughts wrong, and recruit Orwell to support such a thesis.)

As for the rest, I suppose I disagree with the premises:

- I have been to funerals–several, actually–where joyful songs were played, often at the request of the family or the deceased.

- I have also seen people weep and mourn at the airport when their loved ones leave on long trips. Is this, too, irrational, seeing as the probable result will be only a short separation? If not, then why is it irrational to mourn separations that may last years or decades, but not to mourn separations that only last days or weeks?

(One wonders whether statisticians, upon mourning the departure of their spouses on long trips, could be said to have committed treason against their own profession!)

- There is belief in an abstract God, and the resulting foolish behavior that may imply, and there is faith in a rather concrete idea of God, which might include moral strictures against foolish behavior, senses of purpose on this earth, faith that God is the best judge of whether one should continue to live, etc. I fail to see any way that the latter faith is somehow invalid.

- On sin, I suppose someone who has never violated his or her own moral code in a moment of weakness might see such a rationale as plausible. But I think the rest of us, who know just how capable we are of acting irrationally whatever our creed, might be a little more skeptical. Count me among the latter group.

- Finally, I think this essay proves fairly well that economics is no more a universal theory of knowledge than any of the other candidates frequently nominated for the job.

Of course, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt, as I have not independently confirmed my own beliefs.