That is better known as Pascal’s Wager, which was decisively refuted. First of all, it is a false dilemma to post a choice between the Judeo-Christianity god and atheism when you have a large number of religions to choose from. Which leads to the question of “which religion do you choose?”
You can’t choose all of them, since some forbid you worshipping other gods.
That looks like circular argument to me. You have to believe god to believe god.
Nope, doesn’t work.
Well if you don’t beleive in something and that something slaps you in the face… you beleive in it. 
Yep the argument is circular… but not invalid when the “almighty” decides to show up… if he does and breaks the circle.
Overall its a theoretical question. I’m not talking about being happy as a theist or logical as an atheist… just whose position is worse when wrong. I would be interested in more beleivers saying why being an atheist would be worse if we were wrong.
I think theists have a better time. That is, if they are followers in organised religion.
I know friends (mostly females) who are rather literal interpreters of the Bible, and despite all the evidence provided against a straightforward intepretation of Genesis - eg evolution (note: evidence suggesting a valid case for evolution, not proof for evolution) and fossils, they are able to withstand these attacks with their faith, preferring (they know the arguments for and against) to believe that the Bible has got the facts correct. Obviously, they are not biologists or geologists wannabes.
But their self-assuredness has always surprised and stupefied me, because I find it difficult to reconcile such beliefs to the evidence.
The funny thing is that they probably are surprised and stupefied by my stance as well. 
I think the presence of a “correct” doctrine, and their acceptance of this doctrine, makes their life a lot easier than trying to find answers to “why are we here?” “how old is the universe” when the mind occasionally wanders into Philosophy-land. Existence has a sense of purpose, for them.
There’s no right answer for a simple reason: Infinite reward or punishment, if it exists, is arbitrary, because any finite number of anything compared to infinity is nothing. Literally, if you go to Hell or Heaven, it was for nothing (n = some finite number; n/infinity = 0). The decision to consign you to perdition or reward you with paradise for your life makes as much sense, quantitatively, as deciding the same over a coin toss.
So, really, you’ve got three choices:
In any instance, either your actions don’t matter, or there’s no permanent harm. There’s no point in worrying about it. Do whatever you feel like. That’s the only rational approach. Because, really, the alternative cannot be rationalized.
Just because there is a god doesn’t mean the Christians are right, you know.
Neither Fowles or the Original Poster made this a question of Judeo-Christianity.
You want to tick off Thor, or Zeus, or Mars. . .welcome my friend.
I’ll stick with He who can’t be named. . .and hedge my bet with a little Astarte.
This is what I was thinking of when I read the OP: What makes the OP believe that the Universe obeys logical laws? Perhaps the Universe is only approximately logical.
For hundreds of years Newtonian dynamics was viewed as a perfectly accurate, mathematical description of the Universe. Of course it turned out that it was only very accurate. I see no reason to believe that logical laws, which we have essentially made up, should describe Existence perfectly.
I deny the Aristotelian excluded middle! I embrace the tertium quid.
So I have no problem with both “There is a God” and “There is no God” both being wrong. Needless to say, this isn’t how I behave at work…
What does ‘approximately’ logical even mean?
The OP misses the central tenet of religious belief. Namely, god(s) don’t give a squat whether you believe or not. It’s the tithing, burnt offerings, silly hat wearing, laughable holiday observing, and showing up once a week to be berated into shelling over even more money that gets their attention.
So this notion that atheists are the ones out of the loop goes nowhere. If you’re a Baptist and mighty Woden is in charge of things, you’re not going to be on the good side of eternity. Hell, if you’re a Baptist and god is a devout Catholic you’re going to miss out on the sacrement of confession and get a few eons in purgatory if you’re lucky. However, if your’e an atheist soldier and Woden is in charge, you still have a good chance of heading off to Valhalla. There are an infinite set of possible gods, and an infinite set of appeasing behaviors. Furthermore, there will be an infinite number of theistic sets where everybody/nobody gets into paradise.
So, go do whatever you like. You have no way of knowing which, if any, theistic set is the case for our reality. You have no way of scheduling your life to fulfill the rules which pertain to it, except by random chance. You’re just as screwed as everyone else.
The wording of the wager is that it refers to only a singular deity. So it could not have referred to any non-monotheistic religions and beliefs. Furthermore, the idea of Heaven and hell is quite a Christian invention. In Classic Greek mythology, everybody goes to Hades after death. Mortal Man never gets to indulge in ethernal bliss, whatever that is.
It’s been a while, but I thought that once in Hades, each person was judged and either given a punishment to fit his/her crimes, or sent to the Elyssian Fields, which were a sort of paradise.
The problem is not monotheism or polytheism, but which singular deity actually exists. The assumption of the Wager is that the choice is only between worship of the Christian god or no god at all, which is precisely its weakness. I think a group of gods could be substituted for a single god without changing the argument of the Wager at all.
Very well-thought argument… Though I already thought that hell and heaven were necessarily disproportionnate as rewards/punishments, I never considered that as a result, one could state they were arbitrary or equivalent to a coin toss. I makes sense.
I’m not fully convinced by this way of reasonning which is new to me, though, and I would like other dopers to voice their opinion on this concept.
(And there even could be a god who love people using rational thought and who will reward people not believing without proof… )
There’s another weakness which is that choosing to believe isn’t a no-cost choice (you might have to sacrifice hard-earned cattle to your deity or to spend time attending mass instead of having fun, for instance) . Hence, if you believe and there’s no god, you lost something (though it could be also a gain, if for instance if you just love attending mass and slaughtering cattle…or more ordinarily, if you’re happier believing in your god)
In practice, however, most polytheistic systems don’t subscribe to the assumptions that the Wager is based on.
Many of them are based on the notion that their particular pantheons are the gods of a particular people or place. (One can even see this in the Old Testament; see Psalms 137:4, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?”.) Travellers would often give offerings to the gods of the places they visited, on the principle that they were the relevant deities to appease. For cultures in which the god one is beholden to is the god heading one’s family (either as a sort of divine parent or cousin or a patron or what have you), the presumption is that other people are responsible to the gods of their families.
Add to that the tendency of many folks to syncretise pantheons (the Greek and Roman gods are a prime example of this) and nick gods that seem cool from their neighbours (the Egyptians, not exactly known for their generalised openness and sharing with their neighboursness for most of their history, swiped both Nubian and Canaanite gods, though arguably the Canaanite ones were in their imperial period). Some early Christian proselytisers were startled at how easy it was to “convert” locals to the worship of Jesus, and came back later and were horrified to find Jesus figures sitting with, say, Thor figures on local altars, and the locals completely perplexed. “Why’re you so upset? We said we’d follow your cool new god! See, we’re making offerings and everything!”
The Wager really depends on the presumption of a universal god that not only cares about belief but condemns unbelief with eternal torment. (It’s worth noting that many polytheistic paths are orthopraxic rather than orthodoxic – what matters is what you do, not what you believe. So the comment about the atheistic warrior earning Odin’s favor strikes me as being entirely correct.)
That is quite true. Hindus I know have a lot less trouble with Christianity than vice versa. Alexander the Great, who was very religious (believing that he was descended from the gods) had no trouble marrying a Persian Princess in the Persian tradition.
Yes, and that is exactly the critical factor. If we had a set of gods as bloodthirsty as Jehovah, which we don’t, the Wager would be just as applicable. I wonder if the Wager doesn’t arise from the concept of Hell, but rather Hell comes from the concept of the Wager, in a primitive form. If you were selling a religion of salvation to a bunch of pagans, wouldn’t it be nice to have an incentive to convert in the form of hell? It would be quite motivational for at least a subset of pagans, especially those who would think that the old gods wouldn’t mind.
The Santa thing isn’t really the intention of this thread, but now that you brought it up I feel I must comment:
I agree with you… Santa is not necessary to make kids happy.
I raised my kids with the usual Santa traditions, BUT I made sure that the biggest and best gifts had a tag that said “FROM Mom and Dad”.
Children should grow up appreciating what there parents did for them. I think it only helps their sense of values.
As for God and such:
I’m not preaching anything, but just try to imagine, that when you die, that there is just nothing. You’re not thinking, or dreaming… just nothing. You no longer exist. All your thoughts. Your whole essence stops. Pretty scarey when I think about it.
I believe earlier in the thread, someone mentioned the atheists being “smug” “namecallers” and was charged with digging up proof of such accusations. Well, this is it.
You can’t have a serious discussion about atheism vs. theism when you take opinions so horribly ignorant about what religion is about as this. It would be tantamount to a theist saying, “all atheists are horrible evil creatures who rape small children and steal, murder, and betray everyone around them in their own personal interests.” Of course, that is an asininely silly point of view, and so is the quoted post. Unfortunately, it is a position taken all too frequently by some atheists (though by no means all).
One problem that you have in a discussion like this is defining what “religion” is. It is not something so simple as a belief in a big guy in the sky, or as absurd as silly hat wearing.
You either believe, or don’t believe. In most religions, god still loves you. Many people find great comfort in having a god beside them, as a companion through good and bad times. Does this mean that god is an imaginary friend? In many ways, yes, but it is more than that. It is more like having an extra parent. You can view this parent as abusive, or as your best friend in the world, or you can disown them. It is up to you, really. For each person, god manifests itself in different ways.
Doing a blanket statement that all religion is bad because there have been some bad religious figures in history is absurd. You can not call all religion evil any more than you can call all atheism evil. The fact that someone believes in a god or not is secondary.
One of the benefits of religion, for me, is that it gives more of a kinship with fellow humans. God loves all people, and that means they are worthy of loving as well. It is something that binds us all together much more than assuming that we are randomly associated by chance. It leads me to respect life - all life - much more.
I don’t see what that has to do with silly hats.
Agnosticism is the only way to go! 
Seriously, though - when you think about it, agnosticism is really the only answer that makes sense. Atheists say No There Isn’t, theists say Yes There Is, agnostics say Nobody Really Knows For Sure One Way Or The Other.
Every organized religion from the dawn of mankind onward has been nothing but a giant scam, a con game intended to accumulate wealth and gain power. Given that, why would anyone want to believe what they claim as true? On the other hand, maybe there really is a Big Juju of some kind, so why would anyone claim that it is impossible for a god of any kind to exist?
I prefer to keep an open mind.