Pascal had lost all sense of self respect.
He was also very patronising about God as if an intelligent god would not see through the obvious fraud that is Pascal’s wager.
I’ve noticed most atheists remain profoundly ignorant of it.
Re your post: Jesus mentioned eternal rewards for His followers. The Bible is full of verses about eternal rewards. Pascal knew this.
“… everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or property, for My sake, will receive a hundred times as much in return and will inherit eternal life“ (Matthew 19:28-29 NLT)
I believe you are thinking of the case where a person is good to get a reward from God or to avoid a punishment from God. A simple belief in God would not make a person less “pure”.
I didn’t see how Dr Jackson added anything and I don’t think she presented a very compelling case for the traditional argument. She touched on a few of the issues - nothing that couldn’t be easily defeated in court.
Are we no better evolved than other animals are? Reward and punishment are how you train your dog. Surely we humans can achieve a higher spirituality than is offered in coercive wagers. As Pascal states the wager, only a fool would not opt for the good. Because of the coercion, there is nothing of free choice about Pascal’s wager.
This parallels my own thoughts this morning about the wager. I have exactly the opposite intuition that Pascal does : in my view, any religion that preaches eternal torment for not believing their religion is a sure sign that that religion was made by sociopathic people for nefarious reasons. Therefore any religion which Pascal’s wager would lift up, I would say that entire class of religion can be dismissed out of hand.
Pascal’s Jansenism is a lot like Calvinism. They ate from the same nominalist exclusionary tree. No wonder the moderns reject them. And they do so from the same ontology and epistemological presuppositions.
I can’t imagine how a good god would torment anybody for merely not believing the correct thing. It’s just an absurd proposition to begin with. “You were wrong, so you deserve the worst possible existence for eternity”. That sounds worse than Hitler. That’s not a merciful God, that’s the worst level of pettiness there is.
I’m quite comfortable betting against the existence of the Christian God for sure.
Such a god, if it existed, which fortunately it does not, would be the wickedest entity in history, infinitely worse than Hitler. A cult that believes in this evil nonsense is worthy of nothing but utter contempt.