Well, he can’t have that, clearly. People have so much influence on this planet that if god was limited to teaching lessons via natural disaster…well, he’d pretty much have to be putting large numbers of people through unnecessary pointless hell in order to teach one person a lesson, wouldn’t he? Your typical natural disaster doesn’t seem to be a pinpoint instrument.
Maybe that iswhy peoplewant to believe, it makes them important. God does all this crazy plaugue, disaster, condeming pagan babies to death stuff, but it is OK 'cause it’s all part of a plan to teach ME a lesson.
Knowledge is not gained by the continual argumentative debating of your viewpoint to another. Knowledge is gained by listening to others opinions and then processing that internally.
You can’t hear if you’re still talking.
Assuming you’re talking about a 10% tithe (implied by the name), you’d actually have 11.111…% more in your pocket than them. They’d have 10% less than you.
So tell us-what have you learned so far?
Really?
As for the OP, I can’t quite wrap my brain around this: someone sitting down (or standing up, I guess) and saying to himself, “Is it better to believe in god than to not believe in god?” As if you could create belief like that!
I never did believe in god, so I never had to decide. For those who do have to “decide”, I suspect it is a more gradual process than a mere decision, I believe it becomes a “process” wherein you realize how you “feel” and the “feeling” becomes a belief. Although, is a lack of belief in god the same as a “belief”? Not to me. It’s the absence of a belief and nothing else. No gap to fill.
Suddenly, a light comes on.
You didn’t come here to converse with us, did you? You came here to lecture to us! To “enlighten” us, so to speak. This is the reason you haven’t really addressed what others have contributed to this thread, right?
I’ve actually heard Pascal’s wager many, many times before. It was as erroneous the first time I heard it as when you restated it again a few days ago.
You’ve also not demonstrated in the slightest that you’ve heard any of the many people who politely took the time to respond to you. Why is it that you are not hearing? Can you show us in any way that you’ve even understood what others have said? You were, after all, on a self-proclaimed Kung Fu-like quest.
Not accidental in the sense of almost inevitable given enough times and the right ingredients. I definitely didn’t mean intelligently created, though it did sound that way. :smack:
Hmm… Pascal’s Wager is reasonably logical for the panentheist.
Also, not all religions preach that everyone but their adherants are damned. For example, Islam teaches that you are judged by your own prophet. So Jews and Christians aren’t held to Muslim standards, and yet can be considered righteous by Moses and Jesus, respectively.
It is internally logical for those who who are already convinced that their god, and only their god, exists. It’s not a valid wager if you get to peek at the cards, y’know.
Yes, but I meant externally logical.
My point is, people get hung up on Pascal’s Wager working for those are convinced they are members of “the one true faith”- but for a panentheist, there is no one true faith, thus Pascal’s Wager can be applied to both the individual self and the world at large without crippling its logic.
I don’t get too worked up about atheism. Nor do most of the many atheists I know. Because theism is simply one of countless irrational beliefs that we reject. To the extent that theism is unnecessary and irrelevant to our daily lives, I have heard many folk use the term nontheism.
Many of the atheists I know prefer to define themselves by what they “believe” and consider important, rather than one of the many things they consider irrational, unnecessary and irrelevant. Many of them (and I) would describe themselves as secular humanists or similar terms. I have heard folks describe humanism as a philosophy for people who love life, and that resonates with me.
To me, many religions seem to essentially devalue our current existence, in the hopes of some hypothetical afterlife. So that strikes me as a bit of an advantage for the atheist/humanist. He gets to more fully enjoy and appreciate the one life that we have a pretty good reason to believe actually exists, instead of primarily viewing our current life as something to be tolerated on the way towards earning possible entry into a possible future existence.
If I were the OP’s god, I’d consider him an idiot for believing in me, based on the “benefits.”
Straight to hell.