The Tragedy of Pascal's Emotional Terrorism

Oh, how Pascal's Wager is pure emotional terrorism, let me count the ways....

Pascal's Wager is an argument that basically make's believing in God a better bet than not believing in God, because if you believe God exists, than you win eternity in Heaven if you're right, and if you're wrong, so what? The flip side being, of course, that if you do not believe in God and it turns out you're wrong, you could spend eternity in hell. 

This probability equation reduces the question of God to a lucky hand at poker, basically, but in truth, it is one of the most deceptive and 'fruitful' lies Christians have ever been seduced by.  

Christians so reflexively offer this reasoning to anyone who challenges their "beliefs" that it is obvious that they have apparently never considered it to any real degree. So let us count all the ways this "wager" can cost you your soul, and in exactly the opposite way from what Pascal, and what Christians today who use his "wager," intended. 

First, to simply "believe" that something is true because you could roast forever in an eternal hell that's hotter than an oven at Auschwitz, is only the highest form of emotional terrorism there is. No such decision can be "free," on the one hand, let alone ever be made out of genuine love, on the other.

Second, that "hell" is ready and waiting for anyone who failed to "believe" in a God who has pretty much done everything in his power - and he is an "all powerful God, by the way - to either hide the fact that he does exist, or has only ever provided evidence that is so incredibly ambiguous to our flawed human sense of interpretation, that to punish us for failing to properly "believe" it necessarily all points to the existence of a "God" is like throwing kindergarten children into a volcano for failing to accurately interpret Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, after the teacher was benevolent enough to provide them with the Rosetta Stone!

Third, even if we simply choose to "believe" there is a God - to say nothing of the problems of whether there are two to an infinite number of Gods, or whether the angry Christian God of the Old Testament is all alone because he simply killed all the other gods - there is no evidence that proves we should necessarily worship that God at all, or what such "worship" will supposedly accomplish, let alone how such worship and groveling should necessarily be performed, given the tens of thousands of different religions and variations of religion there are. 

Fourth, if this Al Capone like God really gave us our ability to "reason," it would be to make a mockery of that "gift" to simply conclude that, because of the lack of evidence or ability to find a any bullet proof reason to simply "believe" something is true without any evidence that it is - even though we live in a world of "caveat emptor (buyer beware) that literally requires us to NEVER do that with anything else, ever! -  and plenty of evidence that it is clearly false (Crusades, child rape, defending racism and slavery and oppression of women and homosexuals, etc etc), we should simply "wager" that it's true and "believe it" without asking too many questions.  Besides, it makes others really happy when everyone just goes along with it. 

Fifth, What do you have to loose? Everything! 

Let's assume there is an afterlife, for example. If our reasoning ability is so flawed that we must simply accept Pascals Wager as the best grounds for "believing" in God, then how could we ever verify that the religion we select to pray and worship that God, is not actually just an incredibly clever deception, created by that most talented and famous advertiser in history, the Devil, who has a far greater reputation for convincing us of lies than Edward Bernays or Ivy Lee ever did? 

And if we are wrong, and there is a God, and we worshiped the wrong one, as Homer Simpson once remarked, "every time we go to Church, what if we are simply angering the real God?" In other words, simply "believing" without evidence  is exactly what cost Adam & Eve Eden. So how can anyone "know" that doing the same thing with God won't cost them eternal paradise? 

Assuming there is no afterlife, on the other hand, what would you dare to try and be in this life, if there was no chance at any other, and the only experiences you will ever have in all of eternity as YOU, are the ones you can only have now, while you are alive? 

Bet on an afterlife, and complacency robs you of the infinite possibilities presented to us in this Earthly Eden of ours. Indeed, to "believe" in a heaven is to give up, at least in part, on the world you are living in, or simply make it a means by which a person can obtain, for themselves, eternal paradise. (I mean, talk about "The Virtue of Selfishness," as Ayn Rand put it.)

 Worse, it is to abandon the notion that we must improve ourselves, not by the yardstick of some "perfect" idea of a morality based on our ideas about a man-God, but by how to learn about ourselves FROM EACH OTHER, and FROM EACH OTHER ALONE!  The former is like a family that defines "love" based on how closely those in that family measure up to some standard of a "man-God," that each insists is totally objective, even though none of them agree about exactly what it is.

At the point we decide that there is a God standard to being human, set by Jesus and by which all human beings must be measured (in this life and the next), we have forgone any need on our part to accept we could be wrong about what it means to be human, and can then judge anyone who fails to live up to that standard (which we dubiously fool ourselves into believing is "just" because we tell ourselves we are big enough to admit we are flawed too - what a piece of self manipulation is that!?), as well as blame all the world's problems on those people who have failed to live up to that standard.

News Flash: the "God" standard is the serpents lie!

It is to give up on helping humanity by actually forcing ourselves to LEARN that we are NOT GOD, and that some special group of us do not have some inside knowledge of God, or KNOW GOD better than others, or have any special sacred understanding of an infallible and "divine universal law" about what it means to be human. Such a lie is, and has always been, the basis for every discrimination and hatred preached by religion though-out history.

(Those ideas are about control, by the way, not by simply telling people "don't do that," but far more so by then convincing those who do "believe" this lie, that they should blame those that refuse to believe it as well, for every problem there is.)

Instead, we "wish" for some Heaven that we could come much closer to making real today, here on earth, with each other, than we could all ever hope to achieve after we are lying in the grave. 

The Christian scoffs at this because they are convinced the world is beyond saving, and people are too ignorant or corrupt or stubborn or self absorbed and so on. But what they are really saying, along with anyone who chooses to agree with such a perspective, is that they are.