Mopologetics and the 5 stages of grief

[dastardly stem]

Pascal’s wager isn’t useless for the reasons you mention, pg. it’s useless because it doesn’t work. It’s meant to be a wager sans any consideration of evidence. Is the decision to believe better because if there is a chance there’s a god you could be rewarded. But, the same probability would assigned to a god who favors disbelief over belief. And the same probability for a heaven with no god at all (like some heaven where spirits get sent after they die as part of a process). On this there’s no wager. There’s no benefit to belief at all. It’s as likely to be punished if they be believes or not and it’s as likely for heavenly benefit to believe or not.

Problem is, there’s no wager at all.

[Gadianton]

I can appreciate that Pascal and these other blokes were brilliant for their time and theological excess was fashionable back then, and so in historical context, it's less nutty than it comes across when preached by DCP. The farther you go back, the greater the handicap needs to be, but we should refuse to apply the handicap in proportion to the zeal and fanaticism of the messenger.

Socrates, for all his wisdom, said a lot of stuff that sounds ludicrous. I stumbled across his defense against the charge of denying the gods the other day; it's an expertly constructed syllogism that otherwise sounds like pure nonsense. But back then, few of us would have been able to do better.

To assess whether the bet is wise, the probability of winning is not the only factor to consider. You also have to consider the prospective reward.

During the Heaven's Gate documentary I watched recently, they played a clip from the 90s that showed one of the members (I think) presenting a t-shirt to the camera that said "Heaven's Gate" and underneath in small letters it read, "what if they're right?"

Considering the prospective reward may have been novel for the time, I don't know one way or another, but today, that's certainly not lost on anybody with a scam.