Comment by mbubb

It is interesting that Pascal gets cited in this. With Pascal's Wager there is no leap really. It is very internal idea - an individual's relationship with God. "I might as well believe, there is no risk if I do so. If I am right there is a great reward. If I am wrong the result is what it would be anyway."

This is what I believe is a distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Belief vs a pragmatic ethic.

Pascal is identifying a throughly modern disconnect between what we privately might think and believe and how we act in public. His idea is radical because that split would probably not been conceived in the same way before. Over time this idea would become more socially grounded. Weber in "The Protestant Ethich and Spirit of Capitalism" would put forth a similar idea in terms of 'visible forms of God's grace'. Thus I am more blessed because there is an Audi A8 in my driveway and you are driving a Jetta...

Another perhaps more relevant case is Kierkegaard in "Fear and Trembling". I am probably misremembering political threory classes from 20+ years ago but the idea I retained is:

Think of Abraham and Isaac. In a nutshell Isaac is the much loved (and only) son and God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He takes his son up to the mountaintop and builds an altar. At the last second an animal is substituted. (Hmmm just occured to me that Miyazaki could do an interesting treatment of this)

The key idea is Abraham's resignation - which is different from passivity. He is willing to follow through. He hears God's voice telling him to do something batshit crazy. Because it is God he is willing to follow it through to its logical end. He has belief and resignation to God's will is the first step of that belief.

Now to the outside world Abraham is the worst kind of criminal. You would imagine him thrown in a dreadful prison and the guards looking the other way while that staple of tv dramas - prison justice is meted out. That doesn't change.

And Abraham doesn't even know if he is hearing God or if he is just crazy. And no one else knows either.

Back a decade or so ago when Intel's 'Trusted Computing Platform' was cause for debate, I remember someone saying "Just because Richard Stallman is paranoid doesn't mean that Microsoft is not after you" which I thought was hilarious and true and adopted it as my email footer for a while...

When I think of Stallman - I have enormous respect for the man, for his beliefs and his courage in following out his convictions. In my everyday life I use a Mac and install nonfree packages on my Linux servers so my actions are not consistent with that respect. It is too hard for me to browse the web in emacs and I enjoy twitter and the various inane 'Distractions from distraction by distraction' that are the internet.

I think Stallman is more right than wrong. I also believe in a Kantian imperative sense that we would all be better if we aligned our ideas of freedom and use of technology with his ideas. Without his ideas and his actions which broght thse ideas to life, we would be in a very different situation.

But I am much more 'pascalian' in my everyday life choices and actions.