2015-01-30
Explanation
The Joke
A person is praying to Jesus, explaining their plan to skip church and religion since it is boring and no fun, and then repent right before death to get into heaven. Jesus responds by laying out the actual math: the odds of getting hit by a bus are about one in ten million, so in exchange for believing in God about one ten-millionth of the time, he will be absolved of sin in the case of bus-related death. The person keeps trying to negotiate -- what about other causes of death? -- and Jesus keeps calmly doing the probability calculations, showing that the deal keeps getting worse for the person. As their age-based mortality rate increases, they would logically need to start attending church at a commensurate rate, eventually needing to spend all day in church just to be safe. The person exclaims in frustration, "Holy crap, this is why people get more religious over time!" and Jesus replies with mock surprise about his own omniscience.
The Humor
The comic applies cold, rational expected-value calculations to the concept of deathbed repentance, essentially turning Pascal'''s Wager into an actuarial problem. The humor lies in the absurdity of treating religious devotion as a mathematical optimization problem -- how much church attendance per unit of mortality risk is needed to maintain the loophole. The punchline ties it to the real-world observation that people tend to become more religious as they age, reframing it not as spiritual growth but as a rational response to increasing mortality risk. Jesus'''s deadpan statistical analysis makes him function more like an insurance adjuster than a deity.
References
The comic riffs on Pascal'''s Wager, the famous argument by Blaise Pascal that it is rational to believe in God because the potential payoff (eternal salvation) outweighs the cost (some religious observance), and the potential downside of not believing (eternal damnation) is infinite.