That was your idea of a TLDR? Wow.
True dat. “If I fits in it, I sits in it.”
Nonsense. The cat is only in the box because Budget put it in there for his hypothetical (what a jerk !). Which means that the cat is honour- and duty-bound to hate this state of affairs with the fury of a thousand scorned wimmin, even if all it wanted out of life immediately prior to that point was to be inside the box.
Cats are lovably contrarian little pricks, is what I’m trying to say.
That’s pretty dumb. It’s trivial to think of an infinite amount of religions. Imagine a religion whose sole tenant is that the number one is the holiest number ever. Now imagine a religion whose sole tenant is that the number two is the holiest number ever. Now imagine a religion whose sole tenant is that the number three is the holiest number ever. Repeat (literally) ad infinitum.
(And if you retort that a sole tenant does not a religion make, then take Christianity and envision variants where the word “Trinity” has been replaced by the word “Unity,” and the word “Duality,” and the word “Quartality,” and keep going with made up pseudo-Latin words, and you’ve got infinite religions.)
BTW, I’m an atheist, but part of me hopes that Pascal got to the Pearly Gates and St. Peter told him, “Oh man, terrible bet. God will let anyone in – and I mean ANYONE – except Christians. He hates those sanctimonious pricks.”
Unless you’re operating according to some obscure Deities & Demigods rules about worshippers and divinity power score, I’m not sure what you’re on about. How would a god who didn’t want humans to believe in itself negate its existence?
It seems to me like a God who doesn’t want belief is relatively likely, actually. Any entity capable of creating this universe has some serious cognitive powers, and gave us some serious cognitive powers as well. If that entity wanted us to believe, it probably wouldn’t have gone to such trouble to obscure its existence. Instead, it probably is looking for humans who think critically and who refuse to accept anything on faith, and plans to Cut&Paste these critical thinkers to a new universe-sim once the current one is terminated, in some sort of iterative process to refine cognitive abilities.
In other words, God might be a snarky nerd looking for other snarky nerds.
Pascal’s Wager made a bit more sense when he wrote it. Back then, your options were Christian or atheist, at least for his audience.
Well, in practice, wouldn’t that take an infinite amount of time? Also an infinite number of people, since you can’t believe in more than one of those religions…
The word “infinite” really doesn’t have any useful meaning when applied to objects. There isn’t room in the cosmos to put them all! For these religions to “make sense,” someone would have to write those tenets (sp) down, and there isn’t room for an infinite number of holy books…
But, most certainly, there can be a functionally unlimited number of religions. Not mathematically infinite, but so big as to not make any difference. Absurdist author John T. Sladek wrote of taking the 2^23 possibilities of confirming or denying, independently, each of the 23 articles of faith in the Nicene Creed. That would make enough “religions” to supply one each for every man, woman, and child on earth and still leave a billion for future population growth!
(I’ve always been a “strong atheist” regarding any “infinite” God, as I consider the concept to be logically self-contradictory. I’m a “weak atheist” regarding “very powerful but not infinite” gods, such as “Q” from Star Trek, etc. I don’t think they exist, but I don’t know any reason that they absolutely can’t. But what does it even mean to say “God is infinitely powerful?” There aren’t any infinitely difficult tasks for this to be measured against!)
Trinopus
If your god made me this way, who are you to question it?
Your god is a dick with a stacked deck, and the rules are a fucked up mess designed for failure for most people. Your holy book is a mishmash of stories that conform to the mores of an ancient desert people; with many different authors written from a time before antibiotics, computers, democracy, and plumbing. The redemption of Christianity created by loading my misdeeds onto a scapegoat is bullshit.
Your god gives with one hand and takes with the other, for example the rules around sex set up by churches to create morality yet leaving unhappiness, abuse of others and damaged people. It’s like North Korea but you are never free, not even after death.
I may be an atheist but i am not a psychotic murderer, a rapist, drug dealer, embezzler, or thief. I try to be polite and to treat others as they want me to treat them.
I can’t think of a worse way to spend an afterlife than with Christians being Christian singing constantly and all playing harps badly, and no sex.
Sounds like heaven is run by the SDMB administration. 
The question is whether there are infinite possible religions, not whether people could think of them all. Technically, there are. The fact that nobody can think of all the infinite integers is no more a strike against the idea of infinite integers than this is a strike against the idea of infinite religions.
That’s very admirable, and I look forward to your polite discourse.
Ummm…
Someone too The Devil’s Advocate a bit too seriously.
That still doesn’t fix its fundamental flaw, that belief isn’t just a switch that can be flipped on and off. I can go around and say that I believe in God all I want, but it doesn’t change that deep down, I don’t truly believe. God in all his holy omnipotence would be able to tell the difference. I don’t know what it would take to convince me, but so far God definitely has not succeeded. So if I end up in hell, it’s really God’s fault.
Ergo, cats are gods. And, being cats, would turn Pascal’s wager upside down and sideways, so, if you accepted the wager, and did what cats told you to, would send you to:
(1) heaven
(2) hell
(3) somewhere else
just based on how they were feeling that day.
(In other words, Pascal’s wager does not allow for a capricious god – and all the evidence in so far, based on the closest to god-like beings we have, is that God, like cats, is capricious.)
No, hence “a bit more sense”, rather than “sense”.
Yeah, I hear where you don’t believe in dieties.
Not in a fair few Christians’ opinions. It’s just that those who choose to reject God don’t get to mar the joy of those who didn’t.
LHoD already covered this one, but I just think it’s funny that Pascal maybe got to Heaven and was told that since he made a bet that Christianity was right instead of the Holy Church of the 890324092830498203948092348!, he didn’t get to go into Heaven.
That’s a pretty neat calculation, even though I think it’d actually be 3^23 (Yes that article is true, no it’s false, and it doesn’t matter).
That’s an interesting point of view; I wonder if it’s true. I suppose an omnipotent being could break Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and know the exact position and momentum of a subatomic particle, but then the question becomes how we’d know that he knew these values exactly (one can’t be too careful concerning celestial con artists). Interesting, either way.
“Not believing in” does not equal “rejecting”. Did you reject Osiris, Zeus, and Flagaboo The Muddy One?
So he just erases your memory so you forget about friends and family that are burning in Hell.
LLOL (extra L for Literally) I essentially agree with **anya marie, **but your response really cracked me up.