Words Without Edges

Dave Brisbin 1.18.26 Before Scott Adams—the creator of the Dilbert cartoon and pundit/podcaster—died recently after a long bout with cancer, he released a video stating that he “planned to convert” to Christianity. A lifelong religious skeptic, he had Christian friends imploring him to convert before it was too late. He appreciated their sincere concern and said if it turned out that at death he simply ceased to be, he would be no worse off for his belief, but if Christianity were true, he’d have a much better outcome than unbelief would allow. Scott seemed more interested in comforting his friends than genuine conversion, which is Christlike itself, but his reasoning simply restates Pascal’s wager: that the best bet is to convert, since if Christianity is false, you lose nothing, but if true, unbelief means forever hell and paradise lost. Perfectly logical, unassailable even, but depends entirely on a contractual view of Christianity—a reward and punishment paradigm that is tightly focused on personal advantage, reducing faith to contractual terms. It also keeps us word-based, only focused on and aware of what the mind can conceive. Like looking at a ball game through a hole in the fence or trying to capture a big sky on a cell phone, there’s too much to possibly fit in such small containers. Trying to capture spirituality in words is equally impossible. The infinite has no edges, nothing to hold on to, which scares us. But as soon as we put the infinite in words, it’s no longer infinite. Words have edges, defined limits, so the best we can do in words is poetry, which points to meaning without creating edges that limit the experience of all we can’t express. The majority of the bible is poetry or poetic prose that points, never defines. Jesus is a poet. Genesis, Job, all the prophets are poets. They know anything we can think is limited to our hole-in-the-fence minds. The tools of poetry open us to vastness. What kind of belief is a good bet? Not after death…here and now? Only non-contractual, belief-turned-conviction through experiences of awe, expressed in words without edges always pointing back to deeper experience.