There's no title 'cause this post is too long

Life is but a big fat gamble.

Who has gone fishing before? Hands up! If u haven't be warned: it's no activity for the impatient-hearted. Fishing is - i'd like to apologise to all reel-happy enthusiasts out there - an extremely boring, mundane and downright stupid activity. Can u figure out the point of sitting by the beach or in a boat for hours at a time, waiting for a moron of a fish to bite the bait? Well i can't. That's why i don't dislike it.

Here's the story. Couple of weeks ago my two cousins and i went on a miniature fishing escapade. Miniature coz our plan to fish overnight was foiled by fuming parents. Still, 7 hours by the sea, smelling the salt, being eaten by mosquitoes and intruded by unwelcome nostalgia is no small feat. And all that when the only thing keeping you busy is holding on tightly to a stick, whose every wobble sends your heart apounding but is more often than not caused by the wind or waves.

As i was 'fishing', thoughts began flitting into my head. Stuff like, "how the friggin hell am i sposed to know if the bait is still there?" You see, this is the biggest dilemma while fishing. The bait, usually a prawn, is pierced with the hook and thrown surreptitiously into the ocean. Henceforth, you wait. There is absolutely no way of knowing if the bait has been washed away by the tides or eaten by a fish that got away. OK, maybe there is and i'm just noob. Still.

My point is, it takes a l-o-t of nerve, to keep believing that your bait is still there. If you lose patience and pull the rod up early and the bait is indeed gone, lucky you. If you pull and the bait is still there, chances of catching fish decrease and sense of self stupidity increases, and all your built up effort is in vain.

Life is but a big fat gamble.

That i noticed while i was fishing by the sea. And that i noticed as i was kneeling down in church tonight.

Religion. God. Faith. All three are interwined, but not the same. Religion is a man-founded institution. God is, er, God. And faith - this was what stirred up my thoughts tonight.

Let's talk about faith per se. What is faith? With no reference whatsoever to the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, i define it as the belief in something that cannot be proven. So as in the case of fishing, it takes faith to leave your rod be and not reel in your line. And of course it takes faith to believe in God.

Why do we strive so hard, go to such great lengths, lecture our children endlessly to believe in God, let alone that there is a god? There has never been solid proof that God exists, so he or she might as well be a figment of our imagination. God has never given a press conference before. He has never spoken to us before (He has to u? Schizophrenic?). Then why do we pour so much effort into believing? It'd be so much better to work on something whose effect you won't have to wait until the next world to enjoy.

The longer i type, the more i feel my spare faith sapping away. *pull myself back together* The only explanation, or rather defense, that i could come up with to the above which sounds right to me is thus: probability. Yes, the math kind. Everything in this world is affected by probability. Why? Because probability does not aim to prove or disprove, it merely shows the possibilities. Probability = number of successful events / total events. As total events are infinite, the probability of something at every instance is never the same, and hence, probability can never be deemed incorrect.

A little more elaboration. Say, Assho flips a coin 10 times. 9 times, he gets heads. So the probability of obtaining heads is 9/10. Now Assho has a friend, say, Astard. Astard says that Assho's conclusion is false, as the coin has an equal chance of falling heads- or tails-side up. Who got it right, Assho or Astard? Assho formed his deduction from real-world results, whereas Astard merely used math.

In my opinion, neither of them is wrong nor right. I know this sounds like a goody-two-shoes remark, but hold your horses. Both their concepts, though logical, are not the only available set of answers, for they only considered TWO possibilities: heads and tails. But what if the coin landed on its side? What if the coin never reached the ground? What if it got destroyed in an Iraqi suicide mission? These outcomes, though admittedly absurd, are nevertheless still POSSIBLE. And so, they should be plugged into the probability equation under 'total events'. But they weren't.

What does this prove? It proves that nothing has a fixed number of outcomes and everything is possible. Right now, i'm lying on my bed with my fingers skimming across the keyboard. The chance of my laptop short-circuiting and exploding is like, 1/10000000000000. But just because the value is so infinitesimally minute, doesn't mean it won't happen. In fact, my laptop self-destructing could very well be highly probable, but i wouldn't know it.

So. Faith is nothing but a gamble, a guess, a bet. Why do people choose to believe in God? Because God has empowered their lives and shown them absolute proof that he's no hoax? Rubbi- oh wait, if i type that, i'd be contradicting every darn word i just painstakingly typed. I mean, that is very improbable. The most probable answer would be, we humans want to believe so. We want to be sure there's a higher being up there who watches our every move, who guides us through the darkest of our days and who forgives our many faults. We find consolation in a friend who never turns away from us and relish from the idea of heaven, that our woes will be justly repaid after going through a fcuked-up day at work.

Faith exists because we desire something to be true as we thought it to be. We have faith that dinner will be ready in 5 minutes - but that is easy faith, because we can observe see mum as she cooks in the kitchen. We have faith that we will ace a test - this is a little harder, coz although we prepared really hard, we do not know the questions yet. We have faith in the Higg's Boson, a hypothetical fundamental particle that gives matter mass - this is also easy faith, coz we would buy pretty much everything scientists tell us, and a scientist would never doubt himself. We have faith in love in a relationship - this is difficult faith, for it takes two to complete the belief. And lastly, the toughest of them all, we have faith in God - for then we would all be saved. Seriously?

Do you have faith in something, not because the world around you shouts "believe this!", nor rules and tradition deem it obviously so, but because you want it yourself? Can i?

Life is but a big fat gamble. So is believing in love and life. And personally i.... do choose to believe. After all, if i believed wrongly, what's the worst that could happen? I'd have to re-bait the hook. Known what it was like to love. Get laughed at by atheists. But if i'm right, a delicious fish will be caught, life would be happy and whole, and i get the right to bellow, "I told you so!"

And i really, really, enjoy the thrill of gambling.