Pascal advised them to go to church and pray for faith.
Of course, the word “religious” means different things to different people, but I think it generally means something like adherence to a particular creed and/or participation in the rituals of an organized group sharing that creed.
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Many atheists I have spoken to, say that they start getting curious -when in their 20s/30s- about what church entails, and start attending a sermon here and there… they see the appeal in attending mass and how it makes them feel.
Pascal would be pleased. 
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One rebellious way to act out is to go to church just to pick up on chicks using all the “keywords” to which their ears are tuned. Just saying. Would you go to church if that happened to you repeatedly? Define church, religion, yada.
Nice!
Building something off of a wager like that, a pure leap of faith as Kierkegaard would say. Very nice. Something the cynical atheists and lazy agnostics can’t understand: taking a risk and then see what occurs as a result. With patience.
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Amen.
Preach it.
Then just imagine… what is every, or at least many or most, truly epic and meaningful things in life are actually structured like this? Requiring something non-derivative, a leap as it were, into the direct experience trusting the world around you, your own soul and all accumulated intuitions and courage, optimism for example? The goodness of the human heart, a lifeblood.
What if this is actually the way it works, but with the scientific skeptical and obedience-worshipping mindsets today we forgot?
I had another thought about Pascal’s Wager. Most religions don’t condemn Christians so the Wager goes through even if Christians have the wrong religion.
Buddhism, Hinduism, pagans, Jainism, Daoism, Sikhism and Judaism don’t condemn Christians.
Some Muslims do. Maybe 50/50.
So if 90% of the world’s religions are true, Christians will be fine.
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So if 90% of the world’s religions are true, Christians will be fine.
How can 90% of the world’s religions be true? How are you using the word “true”?
The way I look at it, true can only mean One.
From Google,
****Pascal’s project, then, is radically different. He aims to show that we ought to believe in God, rather than that God exists"
What does this mean I wonder. In other words, "believe in…"have an intimate relationship with God, a personal one - rather than just thinking "okay God exists - that’s it.
I think that for Pascal’s wager to work, one does need to believe in God, have trust and confidence in Him and do all that God would require of us to be saved.
And he seeks to provide prudential reasons rather than evidential reasons for believing in God. To put it simply, we should wager that God exists because it is the best bet.May 2, 1998
I dont know. This second part seems to really water down the first part.
I remember reading somewhere that Pascal was afraid of hell. He used to have visions of hell chasing him, being behind him.
Most religions don’t condemn Christians so the Wager goes through even if Christians have the wrong religion.
The focus is too much on the word religion and not enough on the God who actually came to live on this Earth for 33 years, trying to show us how to live and then died for us so that we could live eternally. How many other religions can offer that?
Pascal’s wager or not, which would be the only “true” and logical religion to have in order to get eternal life?
Arc, I am still here in Dubai, just ready to leave, returned ‘somewhat-but it’s beginning to look like universal norm, so found a copy of the QUR’AN and started to read it, and try to make sense out of the universality of all faiths, last time hit the same message while visiting a temple in Los Angeles, there were indiscriminately positioned marble figures of Jesus, Mohammed, Jehova , and it made an impression on me to this day.
Oh yes , it was The Self Realization Fellowship.
Hi Meno. Didn’t realize that you were in Dubai. Isn’t that where Roger Federer, the ex-tennis champion lives?
Why do you think the statues were there - and indiscriminately placed - to tell us that we could pick and choose who it is we want to believe and follow?
I am curious. What did Jehovah look like? Did Jesus’ statue depict Him in a particular way which would show His character or what He was about?
Can you explain in lay-person’s terms to me (you know me lol) what the self realization fellowship is? I do understand the words separately but what does that phrase mean?
Meno, it would actually be interesting to read the below…
but…
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The PhilosophicL Research Society
. and Arc, I will try to fill in the next couple of days how this came to be associated here, within and without the huge bubble lived in all throughout life, and how that has been framed, into a self identification which extends beyond identification.
(The flow- see : how unimaginably difficult to seem authentic role-play vis. Literal postscriptive association— Who said he had to act in order to exist?:
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Marlon Brando
// hard to play the part especially one whose existence consists in a flow of images, intermittently filled and voided then reset.
to play that role or role play.
Correct. Pascal’s Wager is indeed valid and sound.
The only possible problem is, what if God decides that our believe or worship of him being based on Pascal’s Wager is inferior or unacceptable compared to belief or worship motivated by something else, like love or fear or hope or joy? A cold logical calculation to maximize the chances of our own best interest may be offensive to God. Then again, maybe not. So we should come up with a Pascalian meta-wager to account for this.
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When he says “I desire mercy and not a sacrifice” he is saying he doesn’t want rituals (or transactional deeds) based on “just in case” (there is a reward/punishment) scenarios. It entirely misses the point. That was the entire point of him being the sacrifice himself, and giving freely to all informed consenters. If he doesn’t beat us up for our junk (WE do), and blesses just because that’s where IT is at…we need to stop beating ourselves & each other up, stop jumping through hoops, & forgive/love ourselves & each other likewise.
Those who take advantage of that once they see it—know misery & abysmal vanity faster than those who are ignorant of the whole thing & still learning. But they who are forgiven more (the first step of recovery is ¡acceptance!)… love from a deeper well.
The well of IT. We all float down here. Just kidding. But seriously.
A wager like that can also persuade people to join a devil worshiping baby-eating cult.
Pascal’s Wager only works as part of a panoply.
That page is an interesting summary but the rest of the website is inflammatory Islamophobic trash talk. This reveals a soul not at peace, a soul that loves to slander chaste Muslim people that believe in God and go to greater lengths in worshiping God than the author of those insults does.
I insult everyone on earth.
But I’ll still be nice to you.
Thank you kind sir / madame. In my faith, insulting people is seen as one of 4 signs of Hypocrisy (all 4 together make a proper hypocrite). By hypocrisy we mean someone that is play acting, having multiple faces for multiple roles (like an actor in a Greek play, that’s the word’s origin).
Funny thing is, Judaeo Christians often take pot shots at our religion with the most vulgar insults (ignoring that the Bible itself warns that every Prophet was slandered. Matthew 5:12 ). Yet, if we wished, Muslims could fill the world with insults about the Bible, Talmud, and more, but our Prophet was not like that, and the Qur’an forbade it: 29:46.
Sorry for detracting by replying to a person taking it off topic. Pascal’s Wager was never a standalone argument. It was a way to show that skepticism requires skepticism, and thus it must be neutralised. That would then be a stepping stone to faith, by curtailing the sinfulness that no doubt ensues from skepticism and the bias toward gorging on every pleasure at hand.
Indeed, motivation to place Pascal’s wager to save one’s ass and win in the end seems inferior to loving and committing to a god without gaining from it personally… as in when the wager is only a means to a selfish end.
There is also the problem of Nietzsche’z Wager, which is as follows: if the eternal recurrence is true (and there is no heaven, hell or afterlife) and you live this life with Christian prohibition and meekness, sacrificing your freedom and blackening your conscience with feelings of guilt and shame for being this strange lurching creature, then you will be that pitiful thing forever. And worse, you always were that pitiful thing.
How is that possible? Changing yourself and what you always were by what you are going to do now? By the spontaneous collapse of a quantum-maxwellian history loop connecting two or more four dimensional branes, that’s how.
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