We're All Wrong On This Bus

In this instance, I will link, because while I may disagree, the comic is funny.

The relevant text, as usual:

No matter who (if anyone) is correct in their beliefs about a deity or deities and the nature of any afterlife that may or may not exist, at least two-thirds of humanity is wrong.

At the very least. The actual number of people who are wrong in their beliefs about such things may well be significantly closer to 100% than that.

At any rate, no matter what the afterlife is (or is not), it's going to be acutely embarrassing for most of humanity.

This quotation typifies the problem I have with religion, or organized atheism, or any number of opinion/belief-systems. Because to some extent, it's true. If some people are right, well, a lot of us are going to be wrong, me in particular. If fundamentalists of any stripe are right, then anyone who's not right with them is wrong.

Obviously (well, I hope it's obvious), this is a bit of a tautology, because what I'm essentially saying is that if one isn't right, one is wrong. And logically, that would seem to be true; proof implies proof, and all things disproved make up the set of disproved things. I won't point out the problems with this statement, but from a basic standpoint, being wrong implies not being right, therefore all those people who are not right must be wrong.

Leaving aside logic, because we're talking about axiom and thus logic has very little to offer, I certainly hope that those people who hold the belief that their beliefs are right and all others are wrong... are not right in their beliefs, at least the belief previously stated. Which brings us to our second issue: the incompatibility of belief. Many people, in fact I think probably a majority of people, good or not, believe that differing belief systems are mutually incompatible, and thus we'll wind up, when the universe comes to an end, with a lot of people being wrong in their beliefs and being embarrassed (well, embarrassed if they're lucky).

Which is what gives so many people a hard time with belief. Either they feel that they must save others from this sorry fate of being wrong when the angelic choir rings down the curtain, or they are paralyzed by indecision, not wanting to pick a belief in fear that they might, as seems likely, be wrong. It seems like a crap-shoot to a lot of people: there's probably some correct religion or ethos, but which it is won't be certain until Judgment Day, when SkyNet kills us all (yes, I am making that joke). I think this explains the religious attitude of a lot of people, honestly.

And it's not just religion; atheists seem to feel that they will be right, and thus anyone who believes in God (Gods, divine power, what have you) will be wrong. The word is dualism, either one way or the other, and ne'er the twain shall meet. We don't hold with it in morality any more, but a lot of people seem to hold fast to it, of whatever stripe, when it comes to belief in general. Either you're with us, or agin' us. The attitude has been satirized by numerous people ("Yes, the Mormons was the correct answer."), and perhaps the above quotation is an example of this, although if it is, it's not good satire.

Well guess what? Maybe we're all wrong. Maybe every single being that professes an opinion on this subject in the Universe and all parallel universes is wrong. Maybe, being real, we cannot form the proper opinion on something which is, for all intents and purposes, surreal, ab-real, ur-real, something other than what everything else is. Maybe it's Gödel, maybe it's Heisenberg or Schrödinger. Or maybe it's something else completely. You can be scared of that if you want.

Or maybe, and I consider this far more likely, nobody's wrong. The above quote assumed that there is one answer. Maybe it's not multiple choice. I'm not saying, "Oh, tolerance, yay!" I'm just positing that maybe that's the thing to bet on in the Pascal sense, because if everyone is right, then I'm right, and really, what do I lose by someone else being right too? I'm not going to be bitter. Why should I try to convert people from their beliefs, if those beliefs don't really harm me, and seriously, how does someone not believing in an afterlife, or believing in one, harm me?

Again, this is not to say that I think that belief should be allowed to ruin life on earth, just because you happen to believe that God wants us all, right now, so you're going to blow up the world. But I hope that, when you die, you get what you want, whatever that is. I hope we're all right about it.