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One of the most famous christian saying to non Christians is

If i'm wrong then i've lost nothing but if you are wrong then you have lost everything. That in itself is no way to justify a belief. Even when i was a christian i thought this was a weak way to defend the faith. Thats just a manipulation tactic when you can find no real basis for your beliefs.

abyers1970 7 Aug 6
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0

No, if thy're wrong they spent a life worshipping something that didn't exist and thinking they had no control over their life, If we're wrong god's plan was god's plan and we had no control anyway.

lerlo Level 8 Aug 7, 2019
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Delusional whack job

0

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Marcus Aurelius

0

prett chickenshit way to hedge one's bets. i there were a god & i were him i'd zap those assholes with a bolt of lightening.

0

Honestly I had never heard of Pascal’s wager before now. Interesting to find out

0

The statement is ample evidence of a complete lack of basic logic; a common problem with religious thought. Start with your conclusion and rationalize it, ignoring all other possibilities. As t1nick points out, the fatal flaw is assuming there are only 2 possible positions: one (out of hundreds) particular christian sect or no religion, when in fact there are thousands of choices, any one of which has an extremely low probability of being correct. Pascal could have made the exact same wager with a Lutheran or a Mennonite. It illustrates how thoroughly religion destroys even basic concepts of reason.

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That argument is called "Pascal's Wager".

3

Pascal's Wager has at several flaws:
Would a true god approve of people worshipping him for a self-serving reason? To get into paradise after death?

There have been many gods invented and more yet to come. How would you know which is the true god?

Pascal's Wager creates a false dichotomy in the believer's mind, there are only two possibilities: either their god exists, or no god exists. What about all the other thousands of gods that also promise unpleasant consequences for not believing in them? What if Allah is real? Then both the Christian and the atheist burn just the same? What if Vishnu is real? Thor? Quetzalcoatl? The probability that any of these gods exist is exactly the same because the evidence for their existence is exactly the same.

Pascal's Wager assumes that there is no cost to belief so one would be a fool not to believe. But think about the actual cost of believing. If the believer's god is not real, then the believer wasted his entire life, the only life he has, worshiping a lie. Think of all the money, all the prayers, all the wasted time, all the wasted effort, all the pain, guilt, vanquish and subservience - for nothing. Meanwhile the atheist has spent his time enjoying life rather than beating himself up for being human. Also, the person has lied to others about it, and put them on a bad path if they have influenced them.

Pascal's Wager assumes that god is stupid, cruel, and vain and rewards blind faith over honest disbelief.

A variant of Pascal's Wager is the horse race analogy. Assume that every religion, every sect, and every denomination is represented by a horse in a horse race. In the starting block they are pretty much even. The question of course remains, which horse is going to ultimately win the race, which is unknowable. Therefore, pick your horse, go all in, and hope for the best.

Well said!

1

That is called Pascal's Wager. It is an argument to hedge your bet. The problem with Pascal's Wager is the premise is preposterous.

1

Ridiculous statement. I find religious people use circular reasoning. Even the most scholarly among them always come back to faith, which is believing something just because.

That’s why hell is introduced into the picture. You have to use something to scare people to disengagenthe critical mind in order to believe the stories

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