patrick.net

I can't remember that many people around here declaring their atheism. Any links?

Do I wish there was a god, sure. I'm pragmatic though. There's no evidence of a god existing. Humans take from each other and that's all religion is. I'm okay just being moral and a good person on my own without pissing away money to child diddlers.

The Catholic church could feed the word for decades and maybe a century by selling their assets. Certainly God would approve of that. They don't and won't. They hide from their past errors. To me that's not moral, so therefore I cannot be religious. Any religion. Not just picking on Catholics. They probably have done less evil than most other religions.

Reality is we're animals. Not a knock on anyone here, but you'd have to believe that dogs, cats and squirrels go to heaven as well. No one believes that happens if they're sane. You die and go to a dirt grave, get burned or rot somewhere. If there is an afterlife, I'll be accepted as I'm not a piece of shit human. So I don't really worry about it and I'm not forking over money to kid diddlers or terrorist if I were to be muslim.

I don’t know about the Pascal wager.
God is a concept invented by man, as is religion.

Pascal's Wager is just a preposterous as saying you wager your life by not getting the jab.

Waitup says

lot of atheists on this forum

When was that ... ever the case?

Some can believe in an ultimate source of the universe, but not label it as some old man with a bread, like the New Hampshire rock formation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_the_Mountain

Basically, this guy ...

I'm not an atheist, I am agnostic. I can't know if God exists. I can't know which of thousands of religions is more correct IF God exists. I can't know anything about God even if he exists.

If a follower of a particular religion thinks that his religion is correct while others are not, then he is self-centered and delusional. Who are members of the CORRECT religion, Eastern Orthodox? Catholic? Judaic? Muslim? Buddhist? Hinduist? Greco-Roman religion? Mithra followers? Zoroastrians? Mormons? Scientologists? Raelians? etc etc etc

About Pascal's wager, how many religious people stick to rules of their religion? Which religion should it be? Too many unknowns for a wager.

Waitup says

I've always wondered how an atheist resolves the dilemma presented by Pascal's wager

Pascal's wager is basically "you have nothing to risk!" - I think generally people recognize this is not true.

Consider the Christian religion in which Satan is said to be the "King of All Lies" - well, in the Bible - name the most evil thing that Satan has done? Give me chapter and verse. How do you know, that Satan isn't the God depicted in the Bible, and God is cast as Satan? How do you know the Bible isn't just one monumental lie CREATED by the King of Lies? God arranged to have his son tortured and murdered - the most powerful being in the universe, decided to have his son murdered. In the Bible, God killed every man, woman, child, fetus, kitten, and puppy in a great flood except for a handful of life forms. He tortured Job just to prove a point. Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt just for taking a glance back.

Now the most evil thing Satan did, as far as I know, was to tempt Jesus to turn against what might be an insane being.

You're mistaken if you think most atheists haven't thought quite a bit about the religion. Morality is a difficult question, but it seems to be possibly answered in evolutionary psychology to me. It's rather beautiful in that morality may be a basic force of nature and it's not just limited to people, but into animal subgroups as well, and it's iterative. It's improves over time. There is something that seems divine in the nature of reality. When you really really dig down into it, you end up with marvelous simple mechanisms that do incredibly complicated things. Game theory is intensely interesting - in game theory you can arrange a system that in which two people compete they end up BOTH being hurt, but when they cooperate, they are both advantaged. I suspect that generally cooperation benefits everybody we just don't understand how it does, so we don't understand why it's better for us to all cooperate.

I have often thought that Christians are stagnant at best, and at worst, are worshiping an entity (that may or may not exist) which is dreadfully immoral. Pascal's wager is a blind bet among thousands of bets of dead religions. Maybe the Roman's were right, and the One True Religion (TM) is the mythology that died out centuries ago. Maybe that's why the Roman Empire perished. Maybe we'll all meet up in Hades at some point at the River Styx.

I view Pascal's Wager as a threat. It's as meaningful to me as a Muslim or Hindu saying "agree with my religion or you'll regret it for eternity". IF there is a god, it may be somewhat knowable, but I doubt it's within our comprehension or any man's comprehension. Maybe an animal as an innate sense of it. We have thinking, logic, and sentience - and it fucks it all up.