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Religions make promises of Paradise and Hell and the gullible live their lives led by the nose and by the carrot-stick combinations of the paradise-hell versions. Blaise Pascal, a great Mathematician and Physicist, a philosopher of note and a would be theologian penned the famous Pascal wager.

Read more about it in:
[norealgod.com]

norealgod 6 Feb 20
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8 comments

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0

My response to Pascal's wager is
When you consider the quality of the people drawn to and produced by christianity it might be they who fail the test and are kept away from god. So there are actually 3 possibilities.

  1. There is no god in which case devoting your life to a nonentity is a wasted life. You lose.
  2. There is a god but he is nothing like the Bible depicts and he wants those idiots kept away from him, Or
  3. There is a god and he's just like the Bible depicts him. So those who follow him get to spend eternity groveling and hoping that the worst monster in all literature doesn't find a reason to wish them into the cornfield.Getting into Heaven won't make you safe beyond the moment.

If it's 1 or 2 you're better off not being a christian. If its 3 you're still fucked.So you're better off not believing that crap.

MarqG Level 5 Feb 22, 2018
0

Daddy was agnostic, but a practicing Christian "for business purposes" you had to be in the deep south in the 60s or people thought something was wrong with you. (maybe they still do?) Anyway, he did believe that regardless of your belief in a god, if you lived your life according to the bible's tenets, you would have a good life, regardless of a heaven or hell. So he said, but he was also married five or six (?) times, suffered alcohol poisoning once and really liked to raise hell. Of course he went out of town to this, so no one knew but us.

Candy Level 4 Feb 21, 2018
0

Interesting that the author of the article @ norealgod mentions the major religions to include Judaism which at most optimistic estimate cover 20 million people or 0.3% of the total world population. Hindus who comprise more than 15% of world pop. do not get a mention.

I only mentioned Monotheistic religions.

2

Pascal's wager is a false dichotomy. I don't have nothing to lose by placing my bet on the Catholic faith because if another religion is right, I am still screwed. If I choose religion because it might be right, I give up reason, waste valuable time, and limit my freedom unnecessarily.
Pascal was a logical and intelligent man; so I assume his wager was intentionally deceptive.

JimG Level 8 Feb 20, 2018

Pascals bet was the only possible bet. I discuss the t possibilities in the article, but it does not matter. He bet on the only religion he knew. As a student of Pascal, I believe that he truly believed - as illogical as it seems. He actually devoted his last years to theology.

3

Pascal never addressed the possibility that thousands of gods besides the Christian one "might" be real ... and how pretending to follow one god might piss off a different one.

Nor did he address the issue of how the supposedly all-knowing Christian god would not know you were a poser.

5

I'm no fan of Pascals wager and how it tells you to more or less live a life of dishonesty with a little hubris sprinkled in for good measure. The hubris of course, is thinking that one can simply outwit and trick God by believing for the sake of it to ensure ones own salvation. I'm not going to waste time pretending to believe in something that has no proof of existing and selfishly expecting some reward for it.

I honestly pity those that fall into that line of thinking, because it just seems like unnecessary steps to follow in life that don't need to be there.

6

Pascal's advice for those who could not, no matter how hard they tried, accept the theism, was to go through the motions and behave as though it were true, anyway. In other words, 'fake it 'til you make it.' This of course would place even more hypocrites in the pews than there already are. Our beliefs sometimes choose us, not the other way around. Based on the evidence thus far presented (or lack thereof), I could no longer force myself to believe there is a god, any more than I could believe that the world is flat! Such notions fall into the realm of 'make believe.'

The fake it til you make it is much older than Pascal. About 1500 years older. Talmud commands a jew to study torah and adds if you study it for its own sake it is good and if you study it long enough it will become for its own sake.

@norealgod I had not heard of that before ... fascinating!

4

I believe people start out wanting to be good people and do the right thing. And often times they run into people who have a gift for selling 'snake oil.' The rightous preacher! And off they go...following the 'truth,' at that moment down the next snake hole! I can remember, ever so clearly in my late teens, making a conscious decision to be the 'most holy person that I could possibly be!' I felt that I was on my way! And, then real life set in...the rest is history! And I never became holy, as far as I could find! Lol. And better still, i never latched onto a Savior of any kind!

And you could not have become a Catholic priest, rabbi or mullah! Sexist religions aren't they? But why waste so much time when life is for living?

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