RE: Pascal's Wager Revisited
April 10, 2015 at 7:11 pm
(This post was last modified: April 10, 2015 at 7:12 pm by Simon Moon.)
(April 10, 2015 at 6:45 pm)datc Wrote: "My" method is necessary but not sufficient, because as I pointed out earlier, for most people eternal life in their present spiritual state would naturally be miserable. They would ask to die. Their afterlife will naturally fail to be eternal. They might even hate others and try to harm them in paradise!
Thus, it is essential, for example, to learn at least not to hate others and not to commit violent crimes.
Even for a peaceful individual, the kingdom of God within him is highly personal. My ideal personality (in which I approve of everything I do, and fail to do nothing of which I approve in myself) will be very different from your own best self.
As C.S. Lewis points out: "Your soul has the curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions."
Let me give you a distinctively Christian understanding of this particular point. Please don't scream at me; this is an addendum; it's not essential and can be for the sake of argument ignored.
Human souls are naturally imperishable. It is simply not within God's power to let your immortal soul just disappear. As a result, you have no choice but to come to enjoy your eternal life (in the process making it indeed eternal). Failure is not an option. Your soul cannot die like your body; as a result, you must either live spiritually eternally or die spiritually. But spiritual death is indeed an unmitigated horror.
Now I happen to think that the Christian hell exists but in actual fact is empty; this is because no one upon being exposed to hell can fail to turn around. Hell is not a place a punishment but a disincentive that is so potent that it always works to deter self-destructionism of any kind. In short, you are forced to be happy. Or rather, you are forced by the threat of hell to become fit for or in Kant's words, "worthy of" true happiness.
There are no half-measures. There is not eternal existence that is boring or joyless or sort of barely satisfying. It's "you are fully in or fully out." You are either having a genuinely unambiguous marvelous time, or you are burning in hell. Again, there is no one actually in hell, because hell is a perfect deterrent.
It is pointless and a waste of time to complain or revolt about these spiritual laws, anymore that it is sensible to complain about laws of physics.
All I read here is a load of unsupported claims by you (and CS Lewis). Why should I believe any of them unless you are able to support them with evidence and valid/sound logic?
Quote:I have been arguing that it is precisely heeding Pascal's wager that is most prudent and is not at all credulous and gullible. An agnostic who chooses atheism may have credulously and gullibly listened to atheists like you.
I know what you've been arguing, you're just doing a bad job.
How is disbelieving unsupported assertions being gullible?
In fact, the very definition of gullibility is to believe unsupported assertions.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
