'Bridge-players tell me there must be some money on the game "or else people won't take it seriously". Apparentely it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how how serious it was until the stakes are arsised incredibly hard; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpence but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man - or any rate a man like me - out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.'
CS Lewis, A Grief Observed, p.33.
