Pascal's Wager Revisited

[datc]

People are born ignorant. That is not the same as stupid. Please educate yourself so you don't look stupid.

Very well, ignorant (and innocent). The need for wising up remains.

Because making yourself or another happy for eternity feels more valuable that for a finite number of years.

Boy, have you got that backwards. The limited number of years we have make every one of them more precious, not less. Helping someone in this world is a far better thing than you would ever be able to do in an eternal existence.

Any pleasure can be experienced only in the now, the present. To that extent, there is a parity between a mortal and immortal being. However, the now cannot be enjoyed in complete isolation from the other 3 time periods (past, future, and timelessness). Those three are felt with greater poignancy by an immortal being, because he not only apprehends all time but always will and with considerably greater clarity.

The fact that under no-afterlife, all are made equal in death seems to take the zest and energy out of the now, because one knows that his experiences will disappear like tears in the rain. He will forget all of his present (and now past) pleasures in death.

You may be thinking that what gives a temporal pleasure its taste is that it was fought, struggled for and bought at a heavy price. An inhabitant of heaven is a "passive consumer." But that need not be so. We know little about the heavenly life, and if struggle is the force that gives life meaning, it may exist in some form even in heaven, as well. I trust whoever's in charge of the afterlife to have arranged matters competently.