Pascal's Wager and the Selfishness of a "Good God"

[mediamogul]

Sorry guys, need to go on a bit of a tangent here...

One of my few close friends is a "born-again" Christian. Which many of you know to be by far the most pressing types of theists. They cannot help themselves from spreading their new found faith even if, me for example, tells him, "No. I'd rather not discuss this." Yet he keeps the attempts at conversion coming. He used what is commonly known as Pascals Wager on me. Which goes a little bit something like this:

Wouldn't you rather be wrong about God existing and done all of his work and be a good person, than to not done any of his good work and be wrong?

First of all, that argument is used on children to scare them. Not an intellectually sound 18 year old person. I don't want to claim myself as a genius, but I am very aware of the world around me. I tell him often that I am a good person. I try to live life with morals and to treat others as I wish to be treated. He replies with, "God is selfish. If you do any of those good deeds without saying you are doing them for Him, then they don't count." That blew me away. How could someone succumb to such idiocracy? It made me very upset to hear that no matter what, if somehow all of this very easily disputed ridiculous religion is true, that someone who believes the world is 10000 years old and everything else the bible says, will get into heaven over someone who lived a very moral and decent life, but didn't believe in the bible.

God gave us free will. So we have the freedom to not believe his word. Even though he has no word.

In the beginning man created god. Many men and women just choose to believe the opposite.

This is a variation on Pascal's Wager.

Blaise Pascal was himself not a Christian and believed that the benefits of believing in god far outweighed the benefits of not believing in god. Pascal was an agnostic and thought god's existence was unprovable. His argument in a word, was that someone should choose to believe in god because it significantly enriches one's life despite the fact that it cannot be "known" only "believed".

Christian version (the "what if you're wrong" argument) states if you believe in god, they always mean their god, and you are wrong then you have wasted nothing and gained the comfort and structure of living a religious life. On the other hand, if you don't believe in god and you are wrong you end up going to hell and missing out on the "wonders" of Christianity.

There are two big problems with this argument:

1) Try to force yourself to believe something that you simply know is untrue for the sole purpose of comforting yourself. I would love to believe in Santa but it's simply not a logical belief. Same with god.

2) Christians always assume that their religion is the only and obvious choice. What if you are wrong about Zeus, Odin, Ahura Mazda, Allah, Kali, etc... By believing one religion you necessarily have the potential to be wrong about every other religion and end up in one of their hells. Plus believing just to cover one's own ass is horrifically disingenuine and certainly an all-knowing god would know whether you were believing just to stay out of hell.