I don’t believe in souls, the devil or hell, but I still wouldn’t be comfortable selling my soul.
What’s interesting is that if someone offered me money for the flying spaghetti monster to take me to pasta hell after my death, I’d take the deal. So, at some level, I must see the probability of the devil existing as greater than the FSM.
Or I’m less afraid of pasta hell.
The FSM’s heaven features stripper factories and beer volcanoes. The FSM’s hell is much the same, but the beer is flat and the strippers have STDs. Or so they say.
To the OP: No.
I don’t believe in a soul but in a reverse-Pascal’s Wager sort of way it would be stupid to sell it so cheaply and then discover it exists. And if it doesn’t, I’d feel bad about cheating the guy. Either way, the answer is still no.
No. Because as rational and intelligent as I (think I) am, there would always, always be the thought in the back of my mind, “What if he’s really the Devil?”
No, I do not believe in God or Satan, but I know my fucked-up brain.
Rule #1 of any financial transaction is to only agree to deals you completely understand and can determine that it makes sense. I have no idea what a soul is, if I have one, if it’s fungible, and what’s its value is. I’m not in a position to decide if this is a good or a bad deal. Therefore, no deal.
Yeaaaaaah … he says that. But he also says that he’s the Devil.
I have no reason to believe anything he’s saying. I don’t believe he’s the devil. And I therefore can’t trust his word on other things. Maybe he’ll stab me in the face as soon as I touch the money. I won’t take his word on this or anything else. Why should I?
The trouble with a deal like this is that agreeing to sell your soul is a mortal sin. Once you do that, the Devil gets your soul anyway, and doesn’t even need to give you the $75.
Didn’t somebody try to sell his soul on Ebay a while back?
Regardless of one’s beliefs, such a transation is, at best, unethical, and at worst, self-damning; I would not accept such a deal for any amount of money.
On a personal level, I do believe in the soul, more or less, but I also believe it is something that is non-transferable. That is, even if I wanted to sell it, I can’t. Not because of some idea of ownership, but by its very nature. Imagine your favorite color is blue and someone offered to pay you money if you would change your favorite color to orange. Sure, you could outwardly make it appear that way by saying it is, wearing orange clothes, buying an orange car, but your actual preference inside your mind is not something you can just change. I think the soul is similar.
Thus, it is unethical to sell it. Thus, asking me to sell it is ironically not all that different because it would basically be asking me how much my ethics are worth to me, which really isn’t all that different from the classical idea of selling one’s soul to the devil.
If the guy has such “deep pockets,” why settle for $75? I don’t have any qualms about selling something that doesn’t exist, but this guy apparently thinks it’s real. If so, he should be offering me a lot more.
This. If it were significantly more, I might consider doing it. But I’d like to think I’d actually try to get the poor guy some medical help instead of taking advantage of him.
I don’t believe in the devil, or that I have a soul, but I most certainly don’t believe in the notion of exchanging something that even represents great self value or worth, even if I believe it to be fiction, for money.
It strikes me as morally repugnant (for me) and I want nothing to do with it.
This is not, forgive my ironic use of the word, a damnation of anyone who would accept the deal. Instead it represents my personal need to live as good a life in the face of my atheistic beliefs so that in the end I know I was not coerced by any means into my attempt to live the best life I can.
So it’s a personal choice, that’s all.
As an aside I would believe the gentleman has issues, but unless he looks like he is going to immediately injure himself or others I would neither interfere with his plans nor support them, rather let him go on his merry way. You’re allowed to be crazy, I draw the line at dangerous.