Much like the rulers of earlier Muslims states, the rulers of Hausaland blended local practices and Islam. Yes, I repeat. Music is forbidden is Islam. When American soldiers like Chris Kyle used words like “savages” to describe Islamists, he was only giving voice to the least offensive description of those who kill in God’s, Mohamed’s, or Islam’s name. Near the end of Book II, then, Spinoza distinguished three kinds of knowledge of which we may be capable: First, opinion, derived either from vague sensory experience or from the signification of words in the memory or imagination, provides only inadequate ideas and cannot be relied upon as a source of truth. Jesus’ name ever so much as mentioned.’ In fact, there are just three sources of putative proof of life – all of them posthumous: the gospels, the letters of Paul, and historical evidence from beyond the Bible. The letters SOS do not stand for anything specific; they were chosen for their simplicity and clarity in Morse code. Most philosophers reject doxastic voluntarism, the view that we can directly control our beliefs.

Even if it’s possible to take Pascal’s wager, that doesn’t guarantee that the beliefs formed from wagering would be rational, at least from an evidential point of view. For more on permissivism, the view that one more than attitude can be rational, given a body of evidence, see Titelbaum and Kopec (2016). Permissivism doesn’t mean that more than one attitude fits your evidence in every case. Moreover, the fact that the charity is better than the usury also convinces one to do the acts of kindness. If the Southern Baptist church can’t be bigger, Russell Moore wants it to be better. The answers have enormous implications, not just for the Catholic Church and for faith-obsessed countries like the United States, but for billions of individuals who grew up with the comforting picture of a loving Jesus in their hearts. Thus, all options seem to have the same expected value. Combining the chart’s values with the assumption that we should pick the action with the highest expected value yields Pascal’s Wager. Even if the chance of God existing is small, as long as it is greater than zero, the expected value of believing is infinite.

It matters even when dealing with infinite values. Next are the liberal Christians who separate faith from history, and are prepared to go wherever the evidence leads, even if it contradicts traditional belief. Throughout history, Canada has had many important people. What do people put in the red envelopes they give out for Chinese New Year? For more than 1,900 years, Christianity has maintained the conviction that God sent his son to earth to suffer a hideous crucifixion to save us from our sins and give us everlasting life. In the spirit of full declaration, I should add that my own vantage point is similar to Ehrman’s: I was raised in an evangelical Christian family, the son of a ‘born-again’, tongues-talking, Jewish-born, Anglican bishop; but, from the age of 17, I came to doubt all that I once believed. They divide loosely into three groups, the largest of which includes Christian theologians who conflate the Jesus of faith with the historical figure, which usually means they accept the virgin birth, the miracles and the resurrection; although a few, such as Simon Gathercole, a professor at the University of Cambridge and a conservative evangelical, grapple seriously with the historical evidence.

Christian historians base their claims for a historical Jesus on the thinnest mentions of early Christians by the Roman politicians Pliny the Younger and Tacitus (who write of Christians they interviewed early in the 2nd century – in Pliny’s case, a tortured female deacon – all followers of ‘The Way’ who talked about Jesus) and by Flavius Josephus, a Romanised Jewish historian. And how robust is it by the standards historians might deploy – which is to say: how much of the gospel story can be relied upon as truth? When darkness falls, kerosene lanterns are lighted, and life continues inside the cabin much as it has for almost a century. Many children are also introduced to athletics when they’re young, with children participating in their school’s sports teams. Nevertheless, irrespective of who set up the routes, we may still explore whether it is unequally endowed regions that are differentially impacted. 3, you probably still can’t believe it.