The Catholic religion teaches that the reason we’re on earth is to find Christ. Whatever else we do is gravy: paint, write, work in a bank, teach French philosophy, pursue whatever our individual passion may be. Hearing that sounded like the rules to a game: find Christ and win eternal life, a bit like Where's Waldo with a heavenly payoff. “Is life a game” I wondered?
I'd felt the same when reading the Old Testament. Its story is of a group of people learning the hard way to play by the rules. God gives the Jews the Law and says: Follow these rules and you’ll inherit the land of milk and honey, don't follow them and “I will come and strike the land with a curse.” It’s like the choice between buying Boardwalk or “Go directly to jail, don’t collect $200.”
Religious belief suggests there is always a game-like element between available choices—the right choice (God’s) and the wrong choice (the one springing from our human nature). The first thing God did after creation was set up rules in the Garden of Eden. In that case the game was simple with just one rule: "You can eat all the fruit in the garden except from the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge.” Adam and Eve didn’t play by the rules, and we’ve been paying for it ever since.
As in life—business, sports, all competition—games are found everywhere in the Bible. One of my favorite examples is the bargaining of Abraham with God over Sodom. God wants to destroy the wicked city but since Abraham’s cousin Lot lives there, Abraham gets God to agree that if he can find 50 just men in Sodom, he won’t destroy it. God says okay. Then Abraham suggests finding 40 honest men. God agrees. Then 30, then 20, and finally Abraham gets God down to 10. However, for the Sodomites, 10 just men were nowhere to be found, so though Lot and his family were allowed to leave, the city was destroyed. We can bend the rules, we just can’t break them.
Ritual, the form of religious expression, can be seen as theater, which is a game form. During communion, the priest represents Christ at the Last Supper. This is one of the rules that the participants have agreed upon. If these rules didn't exist, then everything would be an empty show. One must believe that the scene unfolding is real, and that it corresponds to something that was real when it happened.
Within this context, it's interesting to consider the occasional miracle that occurs in the physical world. These are debated in a game-like spirit as well. Miracles are like glimpses behind the curtain in a theater. We live our daily lives and have no reason to think that what we’re experiencing is anything other than complete reality, but occasionally the curtain falls for a second to expose another mechanism at work. The rules are suspended for an instant. In the Book of Job God gives Job a glimpse behind the curtain of Creation, allowing him to see the Divine Mechanism. He shows Job "how things work" once you leave the human sphere.
It's also possible to dismiss the entire religious idea as an invention. But do we win a chess game by overturning the board? Or by standing up during Romeo and Juliet and saying you know the actress, her name is Sally Smith and she's just faking? These aren’t proofs. We must learn from what we experience, and if it’s true, even if it’s at odds with what seems feasible, we must change our way of living, thinking and being.
I once heard a scientist explain that love was just a set of chemical reactions. My first thought was “Why shouldn’t it be?” After all, we’re physical beings in a physical world. The mistake was the limiting word "just." Chemical reactions are the necessary modes of expression of a physical body in time. It's like having to drive to get to the beach: the roads are the means to get there, but they aren't the meaning of the trip.
What’s the meaning of the trip? Consider the evidence: The tendency to think in terms of game-like structures is a mental schema inherent to our nature. The same is true of our innate physio-chemical mechanisms. Taking both together, they’re how we experience life and express ourselves, combined with a game-like tendency to move towards a goal. That goal’s the perennial nagging question behind our existence. And how we respond determines who we are and where we’re going.