My morning meditation was on Pascal’s wager.  Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French Mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian.  Pascal’s wager was posthumously published in Pensées (“Thoughts”).  The wager essentially states that if you bet against the existence of God and God does in fact exist, then you lose “an eternity in Heaven in [the]Abrahamic tradition,” and are subject to “boundless losses associated [with] eternity in Hell.”  On the other hand, if God does not exist, then what have you lost?  Finite pleasures and luxuries in this world.

Two of my oldest and dearest friends are Christian and Muslim, both part of the Abrahamic religions.

From the Crusades to the present day, Christians and Muslims have engaged in actual and theological wars.  The followers of both religions believe that they have “exclusive access to divine truth.”  What I have learned in my study of theology, is that you can’t win a debate from the confessional-religious approach, which is rooted in belief.  We can look at and analyze the history and interactions of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in order of historical revelation, and even deconstruct the literary motifs in their Holy Books, but we cannot, though we do, debate about belief.  If I have not learned anything from my studies, I have learned that belief is essentially not up for debate, regardless of your faith tradition.

I have this vision…that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will all meet in the afterlife, and because they didn’t bet against God, they have made and secured their places.

In these religious debates, we often don’t hear about the core things the Abrahamic (Ibrahim) religions have in common, only the differences, where we are, at the very least, willing to engage in a war of words.

I have this vision, which isn’t up for debate, because it’s my dream, that Jews, Christians, and Muslims will all meet in the afterlife, and because they didn’t bet against God, they have made and secured their places.  To paraphrase Gibran Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese American writer, poet, visual artist and philosopher, the major religions are like the fingers on the hand of God, all leading to God.