i agree with the crazy guy, ecmandu. i’d bet my left arm that pascal went straight to hell. god might be clumsy, but he’s no idiot. if the only reason you’re giving him props is so you can have eternal life, you’re also dissing him unless eternal life is part of the deal.
the lord is supposed to be thy shepherd, and thy is supposed to shalt not want, right? well pascal sure as shit wanted something because he went all in on the bet.
Not according to Christianity. I posted this already.
You find out which religion is most likely to be true by studying the claims and evidence for it. We know that Islam is probably not true because they claim that Jesus was not crucified, and almost all modern scholars agree that he was.
The Gospels were written during the lifetime of Jesus’s Apostles. This is very recent in terms of ancient biographies. Saint Paul wrote much of the New Testament and he personally knew the Apostles. The first biography of Alexander the Great was written hundreds of years after he died yet no one questions it’s validity.
catholic.com/magazine/print … spels-myth
Of course, we have good historical evidence for Christianity but we can’t know for 100% certainty. that it’s true. That’s where Pascal’s Wager comes into play. Each of us are bet our lives on Christianity. If we believe, we gain everything. If we believe and are wrong, the downsides are limited.
Moreover, Catholicism doesn’t teach that “half the world is going to hell simply by being born in the wrong part of the world.” There is something called “invincible ignorance” which posits that people that have never heard of Jesus can still go to Heaven. Just because someone was born in the Amazon rainforest and never heard of Jesus doesn’t mean he’s going to Hell.
zarathustra’s wager is much more cost effective, and the house can’t win either way.
one reasons:
if god exists and i don’t believe in him, i go to hell but i keep my wits.
if god doesn’t exist and i believe in him, the most exciting thing i do while alive is attend a cookout at my church on sunday where i get to have impure thoughts while watching annabelle eat her hotdog.
if god exists and i believe in him, the most exciting thing i do while alive is attend a cookout at my church on sunday where i get to have impure thoughts while watching annabelle eat her hotdog.
if god doesn’t exist and i don’t believe in him, i keep my wits and issue a sexual innuendo to annabelle about the hotdog she’s eating.
…
if the eternal recurrence is true and i don’t believe in it, i keep my wits and issue a sexual innuendo to annabelle about the hotdog she’s eating, like i’ve done over and over and over without knowing.
if the eternal recurrence is not true and i believe it is, i keep my wits and issue a sexual innuendo to annabelle about the hotdog she’s eating.
if the eternal recurrence is true and i believe in it, i keep my wits and issue a better sexual innuendo to annabelle about the hotdog she’s eating, than i did the last time.
if the eternal recurrence is not true and i don’t believe in it, i keep my wits and issue a sexual innuendo to annabelle about the hotdog she’s eating.
OK, let’s look precisely at your thinking process. Which religion is most likely to be true? is answered by comparing to one religion, Islam, and related to one, single belief, in religions with thousands of beliefs. Do you see the problems here? Chrisitianity is the most likely religion to be true because it has one belief that is supported by more scholars today. That is unbelievably weak evidence. And it is not evidence that the core beliefs of the religion are true: that Jesus was the son of God, or anything at all in the OT, for example, or even that God exists.
There is a hidden assumption in here, further, that one of them must be correct, so if we pick the most likely, we are making a good bet.
We have incredibly good historical evidence for the existence of Christianity but that is not the same as evidence that the ontological beliefs of Chritianity are true.
this is correct, but it’s absurdity should be obvious to anyone. Why would God make it such that some people, briefly informed something about Jesus should go to Hell for eternity, those bred into Christianity having thus a vastly better chance of coming to Heaven, while at the same time the whole Russian Roulette with souls is actually not important since the good Jivaro hunter in the amazon will get into Heaven without hearing any of it. Makes you wonder what was so important about Jesus if some souls get into Heaven (and an unbelievably large number in the early years of Christianity since vast swathes of the world has no exposure to Jesus. Makes Jesus look quite superfluous, expect for this threat, suddenly, people who hear a tiny bit about Jesus, but grew up, say in Islam, are suddenly in front of an eternal firing squad.
I disagree with your entire post.
First, have you read any Catholic apologetics? Saint Thomas Aquinas? Have you read arguments from brilliant and quite devout Bible scholars? If not, I recommend that you do.
catholic.com has some great resources.
The reason all the other thousands of religions and belief systems died out is because they were clearly not true. Christianity has endured for 2,000 years because of all the evidence that it is true.
Regardless, getting back to the original point, Pascals wager is about the benefits of belief.
You atheists are in the worst imaginable spot because you are rejecting the possibility of an infinite good.
If atheists are right, you’ll never even know it. If you’re wrong, you may suffer eternal loss.
Death is coming and it’s coming quick. The rational choice is to believe in God.
Don’t good people go to heaven, even if they made a mistake and picked the wrong religion or no religion at all?
No. Heaven or hell are what we choose. It’s completely up to us. Atheists that continuously reject God are rejecting heaven.
I chuckle when atheists all claim they’re good people. All of us have huge flaws.
That’s pretty sad.
I know lots of non-Christians who are decent, good people. It seems to me that God ought to give them a break and let them into heaven. What harm would it do? His house has many rooms.
God won’t override their free will. I certainly don’t think all non-Christians are choosing hell but I do think the average Richard Dawkins internet atheist does.
They clearly are choosing hell.
It doesn’t override free will. They are either good or bad while they are alive. Then when they die, God decides where they go. Since they chose good behavior, they were on the right path all along. The choice was always between good and bad, not between heaven and hell.
No one is completely good, though. Jesus said if we do something bad in our hearts, we’ve done it.
Richard Dawkins only claims to be a biologist, and he only speaks from the evidence.
You claim that by simply believing in god, you are one of gods chosen.
The evidence in god is not in the Bible …
Per Phyllos argument, which of the hundreds of sects of Christianity is the correct one?
That means that the Christians who get into heaven were not completely good either. All people have flaws. God can look past that.
I believe Catholicism is the best because it goes back to the Apostles and doesn’t change doctrine.
I also don’t believe that other Christians (or Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, etc., etc.) are choosing hell…
P.S. Richard Dawkins has repeatedly described himself as an atheist and he also has a 7th grade level understanding of Christian theology…
There are no means by which to directly study the alleged events. If you’re familiar with academic research, you will know Christianity is all source based, and Saint Paul is a secondary source, the Apostles being the primary source. So the claims and evidence there is available to study is not just indirect, but indirectly indirect. Add to this the adjustments that have occurred over history, problems of translation, metaphor being confused with the literal, on top of all the stuff I said about the people at the time being uneducated, mostly illiterate, gullible, not necessarily seeing the events close enough, just as susceptible to Chinese Whispers and recreating memories as we are now - it’s no wonder the books of the New Testament are inconsistent with one another in various ways and merely echo the same old tropes of older religious saviour stories. I’m sure they were very popular in all forms seeing as how so many people wanted to be saved from their desperately horrible earthly lives.
In any other subject than religion, such “evidence” would be laughed out the room. This is why you might need to resort to Pascal’s Wager - in case you have the intelligence to doubt the quality of such evidence. It’s not to say that the events are unfounded entirely - I have no problems in believing that plenty of people were called Jesus from that time and place, probably one or more started some following, that schizotypal personalities existed in that time in history just as they do today, and that the repeated events were probably metaphors about natural events that really occurred without any supernatural stuff involved - plagiarised from previous stories just as Christianity did to traditional events that pre-dated it. You can even grant all the stuff in the New Testament actually happened and it would still not prove Jesus was the son of God etc. There’s a lot of borrowed wisdom flowing through all the many ancient religious narratives - by all means learn from what still rings true today in the same way you could about Aesop’s Fables for example. Perhaps make a wager that Aesop’s Fables is true and live a good moral life. It lacks the alternative of “hell”, in which case the most compelling wager to make is with the story that speaks of the most serious costs for not believing in it: the most fear-based representation of these old wisdoms. What is worse than eternal hell? It was a race to the bottom for these stories, and that’s exactly why the monolithic “God of All” with omnipotence and omnipresence, who threatens with the maximum pain over the maximum time “wins” this race to prevail over all religions in an aesthetically presented “trinity” of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Of course the majority are going to be weak enough to fall for it.
I have a logical proof that God does not exist, so even though I am open to evidence I’m hardly expecting any possibility at all of the existence of a square circle. If I confront a sqaure circle after I die, likely I’ll struggle to understand how I’m seeing one, but maybe it’ll all make sense once I see one, in which case I’ll be equally mystified by how the road to reward was to believe in things with grossly insufficient evidence. I’d also be confounded by the fact that death, the shutting down of all my physical and mental faculties one by one ends in them all being completely restored. When the trickery is logic and reason that demonstrably apply best throughout life by a gigantic shot, I struggle to accept how the exact best thing in life that every fibre of my being unifies me towards, and away from religion, could be the exact thing that damns me. Pascal’s fleeting afterthoughts born of his still-entirely-Christian environment throughout his life are no consolation.
Saint Paul was not ignorant. He was highly educated and graduated from a school that was the equivalent of Harvard at the time. He was brilliant.
All of the Apostles including Saint Paul were murdered because they believe Jesus rose from the dead. Why would they make it up?
If you look at other religions, the founders had reasons to lie. Mohammad was a warlord and very powerful. Joseph Smith had dozens of wives. The Apostles had no such reward on Earth.
The vast majority of Scholars agree that Jesus was executed and his tomb was empty and that the skeptical Apostles reported seeing him risen from the dead.
Of course, we can’t prove this with 100% certainty. We also can’t prove with 100% certainty that we’re not living in the Matrix 
So, we should be like Pascal and look at the outcomes. If we believe in Christianity and we’re right, we get an eternal gain. If we’re wrong, we don’t even know it.
Freespirit,
Like I said before, and you totally ignored, a good person who doesn’t believe in god and/or karma is an INFINITELY BETTER person than one who does.
Their goodness is necessarily MORE PURE!!!
So, if god and or karma exist, it is these people who will be given more dominion over the believers.
It’s called the reverse wager. And it’s a fact. The goodness of these people really is purer.
Not according to Christianity.
And how do you define “good?”
As I’ve already stated, atheists think they’re really good. They define goodness as them. But, they are completely wrong.
I could define good, but that’s completely irrelevant to the argument.
If an atheist does the same thing a theist does, such a volunteering to feed the poor. They are necessarily MORE good than a believer.