(February 21, 2015 at 10:02 am)Riketto Wrote: The problem is if there is more than one life.Ahh, Pascal's Wager: the idea that I should waste my life chasing "things" I cannot experience until after I die, on the highly-improbable chance that I selected the right "thing."
Frankly, it seems to me that the person who follows one particular god or religion or spiritual path might be taking the bigger gamble. After all, it's only a relatively small set of gods that will punish you in the afterlife. It makes much more sense that a god who hides from us would be much more open and fair in the afterlife and would offer us a pretty decent bargain. So the odds are in favor of my getting the best of both worlds: I get to follow my own path in this one, and I get to follow my own path in the afterlife. But you run a much higher risk of spending eternity wishing you hadn't wasted your time chasing metaphysical bunnies down spiritual rabbit holes.
I'll still invite you over for tea and card games, though!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould