(April 10, 2015 at 1:56 pm)Stimbo Wrote: What's practical about wasting your life kissing up to a model of a god that someone told you is real, just to stock up brownie points for a cushier afterlife that you cannot possibly know is even going to be a thing? That way madness lies.
No kissing up to anyone is entailed; only, during this life, becoming the sort of person who will enjoy eternal life to the fullest.
Why aren't you asking the interesting questions? For example:
1. On this story, namely the inference from the ubiquity of temporal struggle and improvement to eternal improvement, why won't non-human animals qualify for heaven? Don't they struggle all their lives, too?
In the words of Thomas Aquinas,
Quote:Moreover, we may take a sign of [the incorruptibility of the human soul] from the fact that everything naturally aspires to existence after its own manner. Now in things that have knowledge, desire ensues upon knowledge.
The senses, indeed, do not know existence, except under the conditions of "here" and "now," whereas the intellect apprehends existence absolutely, and for all time; so that everything that has an intellect naturally desires always to exist.
But a natural desire cannot be in vain. Therefore, every intellectual substance is incorruptible.
2. Just as there is a "many gods" problem for the original Pascal's wager, there is a "many afterlives" problem for this version of it. How do I know that the afterlife, assuming it exists, will be pleasant and not hellish at all?
The argument proposes the idea that temporal improvement is such a fundamental feature of human life as be part of human nature; and human nature must be at the very least preserved (and perhaps to an extent also transcended) after death, or else the next life is in no sense a continuation of this one.
