Interesting.
Posted on: January 23, 2007 - 11:31pm
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Interesting.
You seem to try to promote discussion in this forum by allowing others to post their beliefs, and others to come in and refute them.
Why then did you retort against my statement of Pascal's wager, then choose to lock the thread. I would have taken the time to respond to each of your arguments and posed my own in response.
Are you somehow afraid that your viewpoint may be challenged? I'm quite intrigued since you seem to send the message of being a group of rational beings.
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Come on Sapient!
Although you might've refuted the wager to death, some of us still need more practice before we take it into the big wide world!
Talking of which, I'll have a crack on here:
Pascals Wager:
It basically says that if you don't know then it's good to go with Christianity just incase they're right and it's the only way to avoid eternal damnation.
Remember, it assumes that you don't know anything about God!
Refutation:
If you don't know anything about God then you don't know what he wants from you. I.e. you don't know that he wants you to be a Christian.
For all we know, God with his infinite sense of irony has decided that it would be funnier if all those evangelicals who used to preach about hell get the hellfire.
"Remember that hell you used to preach to atheists about? The joke's on you!!
Because we have no idea of what God wants then it makes no sense to try and please him and we have no idea of what will please him and save our afterlife.
If the Christian thinks they know what God wants then they have to give us reasons to believe that he really does. Incidently, if you accept those reasons then you have accepted that Christianity is true and are a Christian anyway. Therefore the wager is redundant.
Personally, I don't blame him for locking the thread. That argument is used way to much and has been refuted without hesitation everytime it's been presented here. A quick look at a few of the debates on this thread would have proven that. This is a place for discussion, though, so here is just one of many ways Pascal's wager can be handed its ass.
This is based around the idea that belief is a choice. Now, when I say belief, I mean the natural acceptance of an undeniable truth. You believe that sky is blue because you have looked up and senn that it is blue. Therefore, it is impossible to rationally deny that the sky is blue. Likewise, you do not have the choice to decide that you suddenly believe the sky is plaid.
There is no question that the majority of theists believe that god is a verified and undeniable truth. However, atheists do not. Therefore, an atheist cannot simply choose to believe in a god; they would need something to verify the existance of god and prove that god's existance is undeniable. Belief in an absolute like this isn't just a switch you can turn on and off. That doesn't nessecarily mean that someone can't adopt a religion and say they believe in god. This doesn't count as belief, though
It's assumed that if there is a god, he is omniscient. How this pertains to pacal's wager is that god can look inside you and see if your belief is genuine. I don't think that god would have anymore mercy on you if you were walking around lying that you believed in him than if you were honest about your lack of belief in him. In order to believe in pascal's wager, you would also have to believe that god is easily fooled.
Also, this argument makes no claims to the benefit of atheism. If you believe in god and it turns out there isn't one, it doesn't seem to me that you have nothing to lose. It seems more like you'd spend your life tied down by needless dogma. Why, you may never know the joy of eating meat of a Friday.
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine
Pascal's Wager is not a valid argument for theism. In fact, it has been refuted so many times that even wikipedia refutes it in it's "Criticisms of" section. However, here we go.
Firstly, it assumes that belief is a choice that you conciously make. Similar to those other choices you make, for example, liking the taste of cauliflower, or repulsion at watching people die in disgusting ways.
Secondly, it assumes a false dichotomy. There is no a pair of choices, either God or no God. There are an infinite number of choices, given that God or Gods could be anything. For example, have you considered the following?
- A God that eternally tortures everyone after death.
- A God that sends everyone to a heaven equivalent.
- A God who sends only Atheists to heaven, and theists to hell.
- A God who damns everyone who doesn't perform in his worship ritual. The worship ritual is, by the way, hopping on one leg while simultaneously licking your elbow for fifteen minutes, facing saturn. For leniency, the ritual only has to be performed once per month.
- A God who has red hair, hates it, and damns only red haired people.
- A God who flips a coin to decide whether you go to heaven or hell.
- A God that just gets rid of your immortal soul.
- A God who beats up everyone that uses Pascal's Wager.
I'm going to leap to the possibly erroneous conclusion that you didn't think of worshipping any of those Gods. Pascal's Wager is moronic.
So Sturmur, are you going to believe in every single god ever existed, just in case?
I find it funny that you know of pascal's wager, but didn't know that it has been dealt with and thrown in the trash a brazillion times!
And then (seemingly) without reading the reason why the thread was locked, you make a new one and try to build a case for myrterdom.
You are just like all the other intulectually dishonest people that pass by here!
You are in error. There are at least 2 or 3 active topics regarding pascals wager at this moment. Creating another one does not contribute to the site, it merely spams it. If you have something to contribute to the discussion, doing so in an already active topic is preferable to creating a new one.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Maybe because we already refuted it dozens of times on here already? It's even in the FAQ thread fer crying out loud!
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
If this guy's first post was an introduction, he would have seen this in the general conversation introductions and humor area.