(FORTUNE Magazine) – Last fortnight, faithful readers will recall, we glancingly registered dismay over the page-one homage paid Pierre Trudeau by the New York Times and Washington Post on the occasion of this person's copping the $50,000 Albert Einstein Peace Prize, and now the time has come to enumerate a few of the reasons the whole event was so disgustful to the present writer and only fortified his mounting suspicion that God is either not omnipotent or not benevolent. We begin with the Times's gee-whiz account of Pierre accepting the Einstein award. Under the terse subhead ''Famed Style in Evidence,'' readers were encouraged to see the man as a combination of Cary Grant and Bertrand Russell. ''It was a day marked by the famed Trudeau style,'' adulated reporter Douglas Martin. ''He wore his familiar red rose, effortlessly tossed off quotations from thinkers such as Kant and Pascal, and was accompanied by the actress Margot Kidder.'' Unfortunately omitted from the color commentary was the fact that Pierre totally botched the reference to philosopher Blaise Pascal. He began the speech by stating the obvious: nuclear war is possible. He then analogized that ''we are indeed enacting in our 20th-century lives the terms of Pascal's 17th-century wager: if eternal damnation is possible, no sacrifice is too great to prevent that possibility from becoming a reality.'' In fact, ''Pascal's wager,'' justifiably famous in the history of religion and also of betting, had nothing to do with making sacrifices for a good cause. Pascal was arguing that agnostics--people unsure of God's existence --are best off betting that He does exist. If He does but you end up living as an unbeliever, then you could be condemned to spend eternity in the flames of Hell. If, on the other hand, He doesn't exist but you live as a believer, you suffer no corresponding penalty for being in error. Obviously, then, bettors on God start out with a big edge. It's fairly obvious why Trudeau got the logic of the argument all screwed up. Unlike Pascal, he couldn't bring himself to admit that his own professed beliefs--in this case about how to prevent nuclear war--might possibly be wrong. Among the beliefs professed in his acceptance speech, our own instant favorite was the thought that the problem of war avoidance is especially urgent because of ''the pervasiveness of violence as a form of entertainment by the mass media.'' Also fascinating is the fact that all those years on the world stage have somehow left Pierre thinking Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians have essentially the same relationship to the Russians that West Europeans have to the Americans. ''I can fairly guess that the party line is adhered to every bit as much on their side as it is on ours,'' the man solemnly told the Einsteinites. Elsewhere he characterized East Europeans as ''beneficiaries of the Soviet nuclear umbrella.'' Cary Grant would have known better.