The risk of non belief

[Juice]

Pascals Wager is based on Christian expectations of life after death and therefore is a sound argument as applied to Christians. Pascal made this distinction clear in his mathematical model. It also works in good and bad expectations.
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When everyone looks to better their own future then the future will be better for everyone.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis

Fight the illusion!

[JPhillips]

From a post I made earlier:

Religion and God are two different things. I believe in God but have my own view of who God is.

Anybody with genuine feelings for humanity and anyone who believes that God is truly all good and all powerful and merciful could not believe that God would ever forsake anyone or give up on any one soul. The concept of Free Will does not present a rational argument. How can anyone actually believe that a person born in other cultures of the world in which Christianity does not exist is actually free to choose Christ and therefore of their own choosing deserve to die and burn in hell? How can a reasonable human being think that a loving, merciful God allow anyone to suffer an eternity of pain for a lifetime of sin?

Even If I believed everything in the Bible were true, I would not be able to love or respect such a wrathful, vengeful God no matter how hard I tried. Believing something and accepting it as just and right are not the same things.

Simply stated, you cannot honestly believe something just because you are afraid not to. You cannot a God you can’t understand or respect out of fear.

However, if you did believe in a Creator, how would you imagine Him (Her) to be?

We come to know God by His works. If you want to see a miracle, just look at the universe in all its’ splendor, with all its’ complexities. Consider the existence of life and the conscious mind, and all the beautiful things in the world we are able to experience through our senses. We see His Goodness in the goodness of others; of the boundless joys and wonders in life. We should listen to teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the present day as well as from the past. It is important that we realize there is more to us and the universe than what we can see and measure. We need to attune ourselves to a deeper, spiritual awareness with God and the universe He created. We must learn to be more forgiving and tolerant of each other.

There is a reason for our existence. You just haven't found it yet.

[OTavern]

[Juice]

Good on you OT for the above post. This is exactly what is missing from the humanist mindset and that is a healthy respect for reverence, humility and piety.

I don't understand the ability of some to not see how meaningless life is without God. Instead of trying to interpret Gods intent or define God by the constraints by which reality can and cannot be defined I find myself comforted by the knowledge that God is purpose defined.
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When everyone looks to better their own future then the future will be better for everyone.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis

Fight the illusion!

[Belinda]

Really, Juice, this sweeping and unsubstantiated claim is not true of all Humanists;

[Juice]

Belinda-I apologize since I did not mean to insult, but I do believe my faith sacrosanct, and there is a level of logical simplicity and intuitiveness to Christianity even from a psycho-scientific perspective. (That probably needs explaining).

Moreover, I don't see that humanity can ever reach a point of completeness without God. The humility I speak of stems from that concept. There is no earthly understanding that can come close to the reality of God and I must humble myself before those limitations. There is no man that can have power over me since God has power over all.

I believe that humanity is running dangerously close to believing his own political and scientific propaganda as sacrosanct.
_________________
When everyone looks to better their own future then the future will be better for everyone.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
C. S. Lewis

Fight the illusion!

[whitetrshsoldier]

[setelement]

Kierkegaard came to a similar conclusion in his book Fear and Trembling. In it he assesses the situation when Abraham was instructed by God to kill his son that God had given him. The main idea behind Kierkegaard's argument was that if you do not believe in God that one's life will only have despair, and that the only true way to believe in God is to take a leap of faith.

In my opinion. The possibility of the non-existence of God is actually a much more comforting concept than the opposite. These argument say that you need to believe in God or you will burn in hell and, while alive, will live a life of despair. To me it is more comforting for everything to be finite in nature. This is because, if there is nothing eternal in the world (universe), then there is only what exists in your life. So the only thing that matters is you and there is only you. We would have to rely on ourselves to advance threw life and take care of the things that happen.

So the argument behind the fear of the existence of God and that the non-belief in it is of no comfort is actually a subjective thing. One day while I was traveling I ran into Mark Canhil (he is an author that writes books arguing in favor of the existence of God). He posed this very situation to me. I explained to him that if God were to exist and God gave man the choice of belief in God or not (Deuteronomy chapter 3) God also expected man to except the consequences of our decisions. So instead of man not having comfort when he does not believe in God is a weak argument, because will should always live with and accept the consequences of all our decisions.

[OTavern]

[setelement]

OTavern

For your questions:

1. What is meant by it? Is it the conception of what a final reality would be? If so then Yes it would be fair since all people no matter who they are or what they have done will have the same end. Also the finite nature of it would do more to show the preciousness of life and its fragility as well. The opposite view would make it to where you life would not be what is the most important thing. Instead it would be what you have done with your life in order to get some "bonus points" for the after life.

2. Option A.

3. The finite nature of life nullifies the fear driven reaction of Pascal's Wager. Also if one is going to believe in God it should not simply be out of fear of going to hell, but instead out of the love and passion that a higher being could give somebody in their trek threw life. Fear of punishment should never be grounds for belief.

4. If God were to exist, then this speculation would make God out to be the little kid in the room screaming for attention and threatens you if you refuse.

5. No.

[OTavern]

[rationalist griggsy]

Poor Pascal, the brilliant mathematician who could not count beyond two with the Wager. is it Allah's or Yahweh-Yeshua- Holy Ghost's Hell or any other Hell? Besides, who would wager on a horse race when the one horse reason appears and the other horses make a no show? Like faith, the wager begs the question of God.
Pascal was such a poor thinker in philosophy of religion!
The Wager is the work of a scam artist!We skeptics look askance at such.
And no rational being would propose such a place, even if universalism were true!
I think that Yeshua meant Hell in the ugly manner he presents it, and that is one reason I contemn him!
Good will and blessings to all!
rationalist griggsy

[Simon says...]

Sorry but I've been asking about this whole "belief" thing for years and never been able to get my head round it, which means either I'm really, really stupid or there is something fundamentally flawd in monotheism. Why belief?

I have never heard a good answer! The whole point of a religion is to create a system of human thought which usually includes a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a higher power, deity or deities, or (note the lack of necessity here) ultimate truth. Belief is not necessary to find meaning or to spark human thought, so, is it not missing the point of religion in general to make it your most fundamental ideal? What happened to creativity and imagination? They are way better at finding meaning and expanding your thoughts.

Monotheim seems to revolve around the idea that you must "believe in god" or else your **** when you die, its that simple (some factions are more flexible than others but thats the general consensus). Now here is the question that nobody ever seemed to ask until the post modern period. Why? Its a perfectly reasonable question and not one that seems to have a reasonable answer? The principle is one of morality. What does holding a historical fact as true or false got to do with morality may I ask? I believe that the crusades did indeed take place, and I believe a lot of people where killed as a result, that is a historical fact that I hold as true. Does it make me any more or less ethical? Not really, how I react to that fact is an entirely different matter! Both sides, christian and muslim committed horrific crimes for hundreds of years in the names of their religions, which, understandably, makes me question those religions to some extent, making me think either hundreds of thousands of people where missing the point for hundreds of years, which sounds unlikely, or, there was, and is something fundamentally wrong about the teachings of those religions, which, judging by how religious tensions between christianity and islam are boiling today, seems way more plausible!

Another problem about belief I would ask is how? "To believe in god" is actually remarkably vauge. Most interpret it as "belief in the existence of such an entity", which, in itself is vauge because it is impossible to define god in any non controvertial way, in other words we have no idea what god is and so no idea what we are supposed to be believing in the first place! It doesn't even have to mean "belief in the existence of", it can mean belief in the moral principles of etc...and something doesn't need to exist to convey a moral principle or really to convey any idea at all, if it did then all fictional literautre would be a waste of time because, by dint of these events not being real, they therefore hold no significance, that is absurd.

So what exactly are we supposed to be believing here, nobody knows! So why are we wasting our time making pointless quesses, and demanding the impossible of everyone! We fundamentall cannot know whether or not god exists much less what the will of god is, and its pointless to demand that we "believe" that there is because 1) We have no idea what it is we are being asked to believe in and 2) what does that have to do with ethical subjects? Nothing!

[setelement]

[Simon says...]

You can spin it anyway you like but lets be honest, there is literally is no point in being theist other than to spare yourself damnation. If hell was never even mentioned in any of the scripture I guarantee you that little or no people would bother. Ask yourself honestly, if you had never even heard of hell, would you be a theist? If so, why? Is it to be compassionate? If so, what does believing a historically alleged fact have to do with compassion? Many don't believe that fact that yet still are compassionate.

Holistically there is little of no difference ethically between believers and non believers, the only difference is there reasons for doing it. Non believers often have their own reasons which can be anything from a utilitarianism to deontology or to virtue ethics etc, whereas believers act compassionately either because its what there god tells them to, in which case one must wonder, why? And are those ethics necessarily well thought out in the same way as the philosophical and often secular systems of ethics like utilitarianism and virtue ethics are, or, worse, they do it out the fear of what will happen if they don't, otherwise known as terrorism.