(February 4, 2016 at 9:20 am)athrock Wrote: And yet, when Christians point out the examples of St. Francis or Mother Teresa or countless MILLIONS of priests, monks and nuns who have done EXACTLY as you claim EVERYONE should do by selling all they have, giving to the poor and following him, your response is not to say, "Wow. Some of these Christians are serious about following Jesus...maybe I should look into His teachings more closely."
Instead, you look at those who fail to follow your interpretation of scripture as justification for continuing to do what you were never going to stop doing anyway.
Do you not see the flaw in your reasoning?
It's easy to mock those who struggle to live up to the high ideals of Christianity and then go your merry way.
It's not so easy to admit that there are some Christians who do accept the challenge of the faith, embrace it and live it to a high degree by giving to the poor, caring for the sick, sheltering the homeless and so forth.
You're missing the point.
None of us particularly care about the "high ideals" of Christianity. Not only are they without basis, but they're unsustainable. If we all go around quitting our jobs to minister, living off of fruit on the edges of farms... there'd be no farmers.
The point is that Pascal's Wager is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. One of them, focused on this thread, is that the Christian expects their mathematical analysis of the possibility of infinite consequences for an action to convince the skeptic, yet they ignore the exact same line of reasoning when levied against them.
The point isn't to get all Christians to become proselytizing hobos; it's to get them to realize that anyone can come up with any "possible claim" and then say that the "logical" conclusion is to assume the claim is true. The infinite number of possible infinity-claims renders the outcome any such analysis to be completely indeterminant... which is exactly what you'd expect from a nonfalsifiable claim.
