Meaning From Experience Akira The Don (Ft. David Foster Wallace)

Here’s another didactic little story
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness
One of the guys is religious
The other is an atheist
And the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer
And the atheist says
Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God
It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing
Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard
And I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing
And it was 50 below
And so I tried it
I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out
‘Oh, God, if there is a God’
‘I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me’
And now, in the bar
The religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled
‘Well then you must believe now’ he says
‘After all’
‘Here you are’
‘Alive’

The atheist just rolls his eyes
‘No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.’

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis
The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people
Given those people’s two different belief templates
And two different ways of constructing meaning from experience