reasons for not agreeing with pascal's wager

Reason 1: In the case where God does not exist, there really is a clear advantage to not believing. In other words, the payoff is not zero. For one thing, if you go through life believing a lie, that is a bad thing in itself. Besides that, there is more to being a believer than just saying "Okay, I believe now" and getting on with your life. Serious believers spend a lot of their time in church, and contribute a lot of money as well. There's a reason why some towns have very affluent looking buildings for churches, and why large and elaborate cathedrals are possible: they're funded by folks who donate 1/10th of their income throughout their lives to tithing. This is surely quite a waste if the object of worship isn't real. That's to say nothing of the persecution of other groups that's been instigated in the name of God throughout the ages.

Reason 2: Even if you buy into Pascal's wager and decide you should believe, that doesn't give any basis for choosing which religion to believe in. Fundamentalists often use the wager to prove that you should be a Fundamentalist, but of course, Pascal was Catholic and was using it to prove you should be a Catholic! This just highlights the whole problem of which religion is the right one. Since many Fundamentalists believe that Catholics are going to go to hell, Pascal's not much better off than an unbeliever. We don't know if the Jews are correct, or perhaps the Muslims, or if reincarnation is right... or worse, if there's a perverse God who only lets atheists into heaven! It's not impossible. For all we know, maybe God exists but he doesn't care at all whether people believe in him.

Reason 3: If you can accept Pascal's wager as a realistic reason to believe, that leads you to a point where you have no choice but to believe just about everything on the same grounds. Maybe if you don't own a complete library of Seinfeld episodes, you'll go to hell! Why not? You don't know. Maybe you have to send $10 a week to the Atheist Community of Austin for life. Hey, what's a measly ten bucks if it will save you from eternal hellfire? Or maybe God really likes nude mud wrestling and he will punish those who do not partake of His gift.

Does all this sound utterly silly to you? Good! That's probably because you know that you should only believe things that have some sort of clear evidence favoring them. You don't believe just any old preposterous claim about UFO's, pyramid shaped get-rich-quick schemes, or magic pixies just because somebody tells you they're true and because there's a chance you might be wrong. You have a brain—use it!

Further reading: "Pascal's Sucker Bet" by "Reverend" Jim Huger

from http://bit.ly/k8ySY2

#christian 's took themselves to the mountain top. Science took the entire world to the moon. #atheist

#christian 's took themselves to the mountain top. Science took the entire world to the moon. #atheist

the #christian religion has never set anyone free, but it has set quite a large number on fire. #atheist

the #christian religion has never set anyone free, but it has set quite a large number on fire. #atheist on fire. #atheist

Otis Clay - That's How It Is (1967)

Eddie Hinton - Here I Am

Eddie Hinton - Sad Song

Christopher Hitchens Destroys Biblical miracle claims

Hitchens: why fight religion?

how do you embrace a male god

how do you embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages; and that persecution still goes on today, all over the world.

#atheists don't have any holidays set aside because every day for an #atheist is a holiday, free from religious bullshit.

#atheists don't have any holidays set aside because every day for an #atheist is a holiday, free from religious bullshit.

westboro baptist church

WATCH the WBC BBC docu online!

#atheist #christian

Theist to atheist: "Life has no meaning if death is the end... I might as well be DEAD!"
Atheist reply: "Death has no meaning because it's the end of life... so you might as well LIVE!"

christians don't have morality

christians don't have morality. Instead, they have obedience to authority and that's what they use as a substitute for genuine morality. It's been demonstrated repeatedly that it is a poor substitute.

Little Ron Johnson - I Keep Telling You

#atheist #christian #hitchens

Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the "meaning" of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."

"In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist." We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."

the likelihood of the second must be weighed against the likelihood of the first.

A miracle is a disturbance or interruption in the expected and established course of things. This could involve anything from the sun rising in the west to an animal suddenly bursting into the recitation of verse. Very well, then, free will also involves decision. If you seem to witness such a thing, there are two possibilities. The first is that the laws of nature have been suspended (in your favor). The second is that you are under a misapprehension, or suffering from a delusion. Thus the likelihood of the second must be weighed against the likelihood of the first. If you only hear a report of the miracle from a second or third party, the odds must be adjusted accordingly before you can decide to credit a witness who claims to have seen something that you did not see. And if you are separated from the "sighting" by many generations, and have no independent corroboration, the odds must be adjusted still more drastically.

according to the New Testament, the thing could be done in an almost commonplace way. Jesus managed it twice in other people's cases, by raising both Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus, and nobody seems to have thought it worthwhile to interview either survivor to ask about their extraordinary experiences. Nor does anyone seem to have kept a record of whether or not, or how, these two individuals "died" again. If they stayed immortal, then they joined the ancient company of the "Wandering Jew," who was condemned by early Christianity to keep walking forever after he met Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, this misery being inflicted upon a mere bystander in order to fulfill the otherwise unfulfilled prophecy that Jesus would come again in the lifetime of at least one person who had seen him the first time around. On the same day that Jesus met that luckless vagrant, he was himself put to death with revolting cruelty, at which time, according to the Gospel of Matthew 27:52-53, "the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many." This seems incoherent, since the corpses apparently rose both at the time of the death on the cross and of the Resurrection, but it is narrated in the same matter-of-fact way as the earthquake, the rending of the veil of the temple (two other events that did not attract the attention of any historian), and the reverent comments of the Roman centurion.

This supposed frequency of resurrection can only undermine the uniqueness of the one by which mankind purchased forgiveness of sins. And there is no cult or religion before or since, from Osiris to vampirism to voodoo, that does not rely on some innate belief in the "undead." To this day, Christians disagree as to whether the day of judgment will give you back the old wreck of a body that has already died on you, or will reequip you in some other form. For now, and on a review even of the claims made by the faithful, one can say that resurrection would not prove the truth of the dead man's doctrine, nor his paternity, nor the probability of still another return in fleshly or recognizable form. Yet again, also, too much is being "proved." The action of a man who volunteers to die for his fellow creatures is universally regarded as noble. The extra claim not to have "really" died makes the whole sacrifice tricky and meretricious. (Thus, those who say "Christ died for my sins," when he did not really "die" at all, are making a statement that is false in its own terms.) Having no reliable or consistent witnesses, in anything like the time period needed to certify such an extraordinary claim, we are finally entitled to say that we have a right, if not an obligation, to respect ourselves enough to disbelieve the whole thing. That is, unless or until superior evidence is presented, which it has not been. And exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.

why talk about god/christians if we dont believe in god...

there are easily and quickly 2 reasons we talk about god...though we don’t believe in god, we certainly believe in christians. They’re everywhere, it seems. And while most of them are harmless, a number of them are annoying… or worse. Much worse. They bomb abortion clinics. They do their best to hinder the advancement of science and the arts. They elect candidates based not on their competency, but on whether “he prays” (and says so more often than his opponent). They try to interfere — and get laws to do it — in the sexual lives of consenting adults. They ban stem cell research and contraceptives, thus condemning millions around the world to disease and suffering, because of books written by primitive desert nomads thousands of years ago. So, yes, christians are a problem.

and

Wouldn’t you try to help someone descending into alcoholism? Wouldn’t you care if you saw someone destroying their lives because of booze? Well, in a way, religion is like alcoholism. It attacks the mind, the power of reasoning, it makes people believe in absurd things. It destroys lives – both of the alcoholic / believer, and often those of their family, too. So it’s natural that some of us care — even about strangers. We don’t think we’ll ever “unconvert” fundamentalists; by definition, they’ve long stopped thinking about their belief critically — indeed, they believe that doing so would be a sin. But some people may be at a “crossroads”, so to speak. They may believe simply because they’ve never thought about it; everyone around them believes unquestioningly, and they’ve never even heard of an alternative. So maybe an atheist can make a difference.

"Values are a certain kind of fact, Just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish will change the way we talk about morality,"

he argued.
However, Harris quickly rejected the notion that religion would offer the answers to moral questions. Instead, he argued for a scientific approach to achieving a universal morality, one that conceptualizes human well-being as something that can be quantified and maximized in any number of equally successful ways -- much like health and nutrition.

He criticized the tendency to regard moral questions as matters of opinion rather than as questions that have scientifically verifiable right and wrong answers. "How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise, or moral talent, or moral genius, even?" he asked. "How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count?"

"Just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish will change the way we talk about morality," he said.