“Religion belongs to the infancy of human reason which we are now outgrowing” said Bertrand Russell. John Lennon put this sentiment to song - “Imagine there’s no heaven... And no religion too… Imagine all the people living for today”.

But why imagine such societies when we have seen them in reality? Alas, avowedly atheist Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were brotherhoods only of slavery and death with self interest and force the only laws. The history of all religions is punctuated by unreason and cruelty. But no wars have been so terrible as those of men like Stalin and Hitler who believed only in might. If there is no God, cried Dostoyevsky, then everything is permitted. How much more horrifying would the story of man have been without some general belief in a higher power.

Science eases our physical ills. Yet what scientific discovery can alter the human condition? We all want to be happy. But in every time and place all men complain of their lot.

“We look before and after, and pine for what is not;

Our sincerest laughter, with some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

In Blaise Pascal’s words “We desire truth and find nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. But we are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness. What else does this craving and helplessness proclaim but that there once was in man a true happiness, of which only the empty print and trace remains? This he tries in vain to fill with everything about him. Some seek their good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry, some in pleasure. But this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite object; in other words by God himself.”

Pascal invented statistics, public transportation, and the first computing machine. And Pascal’s law and Pascal’s theorem are cornerstones of physics and mathematics. But his greatest achievement was “Pensees”, the most penetrating analysis of the human condition ever written.

“Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go that far. If natural things are beyond it, what are we to say about supernatural things? I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself. I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else. I do not know whence I come, so I do not know whither I am going.”

But who can be happy to accept existence as a meaningless trajectory between a painful birth and obscene death?

“What reason for joy can be found in the expectation of nothing but helpless wretchedness? What reason for vanity in being plunged into impenetrable darkness? Do they think they give us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction? Is this then something to be said gaily? Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?”

But reason can not prove God’s existence. “If I saw no sign of a Divinity I should decide on a negative solution: if I saw signs of a Creator everywhere I should peacefully settle down in the faith. But seeing too much to deny and not enough to affirm, I am in a pitiful state.”

Thus Pascal postulated his famous wager. To live piously meant eternal happiness if God existed and oblivion if he did not. To live impiously meant oblivion if God did not exist, but eternal damnation if he did. A rational man must choose the first alternative whether he believed or not. As Socrates had said, no harm can come to a good man either in life or death.

Belief in God offended Pascal’s principles of reason. But so did disbelief. “It is incomprehensible that God should exist and incomprehensible that he should not; that the soul should be joined to the body, that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, that it should not. But everything that is incomprehensible does not cease to exist.”

Yet “the heart has its reasons of which the mind knows nothing.” It is not reason that makes us love ourselves – can we prove we ought to be loved? And if we can not justify self-love, still less can we our love of others. God’s reality, Pascal concluded, lay in the rationally inexplicable existence of love.

Some say religion is merely a crutch for the weak. Here is Bertrand Russell again - “There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.”

Though lacking in imagination and empathy, this attitude is common among the healthy, rich and famous. But as Pascal wrote “The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever”.

Many eminent persons assuage fears of death with thoughts of posterity’s praise. But how quickly passes the glory of this world.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Even artistic “immortality” is as nothing compared with “the eternity which comes before and after”. And if our own existence is meaningless, so must be that of our loved ones. Either all human lives are pointless or none are - zero times infinity equals zero.

Religion, said Arnold Toynbee, is the serious business of mankind. And man’s search for a higher meaning in life is surely more important than the exact expressions of his belief. Do not the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, the Tipitaka and the Koran all contain a measure of truth? “In my father’s house are many mansions.”

The birth of Jesus Christ was the most important event in history. Why else would the world use this date to fix itself in time? But it matters little if Jesus Christ was born precisely on December 25^th 2000 years ago. What is truly significant is that 40% of humanity are Christians who revere his words, and even most non-Christians admire his teachings. The question of whether Jesus was the Son of God is one of faith and not argument. But the precepts propounded in the Sermon on the Mount are an unsurpassed guide to life. “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you” sums up all human morality.