Pascal's Wager is brilliant!

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 :slight_smile:

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.

Instead of defining good, there need to
demonstrate how they are different. diffetent.

If we can’t then they may not be.

How is the godless good or how did he gain goodness?

Was he born that way, in that case he can not be credited with goodness, or was he thought goodness by parents, teachers, friend’s , then similarly the credit goes to other then him.

Then to determine that other’s notions of goodness differs from himself, then the gap between others and god narrows considerably.

To respond to your post requires an explanation of eternal forms, limit theory, and infinity… any of which freespirit can’t understand.

Morality is simple: that which never violates consent

Freespirit cannot hear the call of freedom though, freespirit’s consent violations are all part of gods plan.

In game theory, freespirit is not considered what is called, a rational agent.

But! Someone with the type of mind and understanding of freespirit, on that level, can understand "goodness with no motive (ape bangs its chest) purer than goodness with motive.

That’s something freespirit can understand, and by the way, has no answer to except to fold.

Because it’s a fact. EVERYONE knows that’s true.

And what you did instead of responding to the points I made was just restate your opinions.

I’m not an atheist. And notice that instead of responding to my post, you label me.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

[/quote]
As I pointed out in an earlier post - which you did not respond to - you are quite incorrect about Pascal’s Wager. It is only for those who already believe. And he believed that belief came as grace. It is not something to hurl at atheists.
So, you can decide if you have any responses to the points I made
or you simply like to make assertions.

So far you are not participating in a philosophy forum, you are throwing your opinions at people.

My mistake for calling you an atheist, I’m used to dealing with atheists when I deal with religious topics because they are now the majority in the Western world.

Pascal was writing to people that thought Christianity could be true but were not 100% convinced. So, he was basically writing to agnostics.

Free spirit,

This is starting to get absurd.

Karpel clearly stated that to a believer, belief is only given through gods grace.

Plain as can be.

Yet you ignored it a second time, just like you ignore my posts.

You have no argument here.

I’ll tell you my theological mind if you’re curious:

There really may be a theological man named “god” who has the most power (currently) in existence. That however does make “God” THE CREATOR, nor anyone!

If I remember correctly, Karpel is a pantheist or a panentheist.

That’s because I disagree. I think belief can come through evidence (like the evidence for Jesus) and through logic (because the benefits of religious belief, as Pascal taught.)