Brief Episode

The Annunciation — Arch Angel Gabriel with Mary

I recently discovered the often funny, sometimes insightful, and always interesting blog of Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert), and decided to catch up on older posts. He wrote about Pascal’s Wager and by using a “65 billion already served” rational, settles on a religion that’s often in the news these past few years:

“Personally, if I were more rational, and less focused on immediate gratification, I would become a moderate, peace-loving Muslim. My reasoning is that Islam has the best chance of becoming the dominant world religion in the future, and therefore probably has God’s backing, if he exists.”

Adams has also recently written that everything he would invent, has already been invented (See Inventing the Already Invented). In a synchronistic turn of events, I read this page in a novel the morning before I found the Adams post for Islam:

“… it had occurred to me that the God of the Saracens, Allah, might be the real one after all. Judging by surface area, the Mohammedans had conquered more territory more quickly than the Christians; in fact, the Byzantines had lost ground every year since Constantine.

This thought had led to the fear that I might pick the wrong God to pray to. I thought that, because praying to the wrong God was expressly a sin, and because a merciful God might forgive me for forgetting to pray, it therefore followed that, even without knowing which one was the right one, my best chances lay in staying quiet and hoping for the best. That strategy worked in class when I didn’t know the answer, so I supposed it might work in the arena of theology, also.

I do admit that sometimes, when I was particularly depressed, or sad, or hoping for some point or purpose to my life, I would pray to the Archangel Gabriel. Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans all believe in Gabriel, and apparently in the self-same Gabriel. Or Jibrael, as he is also called. I figured Gabriel, if anyone, would know what the situation was in Heaven, who was in authority there, and he could get the prayers to the right God.”

(from “Orphans of Chaos,” page 48, by John C. Wright)

——– I like this idea. It’s like we don’t need to figure out who the name of the CEO as long as the executive assistant passes messages to the right person. If we consider prayers to angels like a spiritual email system, and Gabriel sends messages to God, does Dilbert have God’s email address? And if so, does God have an out of office reply on?

© Brief Episode.

Photo by Anthony M. via Flikr.com.