Pascal's Wager

[Pete]

Pascal's Wager (God is a safe bet)
"If you believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you have lost nothing--but if you don't believe in God and turn out to be incorrect, you will go to hell. Therefore it is foolish to be an atheist."

I don't believe that anyone has said that you'd be foolish to be an atheist. I believe the idea is that it means that you're better off choosing to believe in God than not.

As for your objections - Each of those are seperate issues and address which religion one chooses to follow. Pascal's wager is about the decision to believe in God and that in general you're better off believing than not. For example; suppose you choose to be an atheist and God doesn't exist. Then you've lost nothing. Now suppose that you are an atheist and there was a God. Then you're sunk. Now suppose that you choose to believe but you chose the wrong God. You may be better off since God might give you brownie points for at least making an effort to find Him and do what's right. Pascal's wager assumes that you'll be better off choosing to believe in God than not believing God since if you chose to believe in God but chose the wrong one then at least you have the backup plan of hoping that God will be forgiving. Had you chose to not believe and there is a God then you don't have that backup plan.

And as far as all the religions go; Basically Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion. Most other religeous people are either Christian, Jewish or Muslims. Each of those are based on the same God so if you chose one of them you have the ten commandments to follow and you have the right God to follow.

Another flaw in the argument is that it is based on the assumption that the two possibilities are equally likely--or at least, that they are of comparable likelihood. If, in fact, the possibility of there being a God is close to zero, the argument becomes much less persuasive.

Probability is only meaningful when there are a large number of instances of an outcome. Its not like you can keep dying in different realities (ones with God and ones without God) and testing to see which ones had a God. Its like getting cancer. Oncologists will tell you that the stats are meaningless to the individual because there are only two possibilities - you will live or you will die. Of course that doesn't prevent the patients from want to know the stats. That's just being human.

The worst thing about being an atheist is that you can never say Ha! I told you so!