Open to explore possibility

[R00tKiT]

Right, because, in addition to this being a world where an almighty djinn will punish everyone who laughs at your ineptitude...it's also a world where your own silly comments aren't posted on a board for anyone to read.

That's just a true proposition.  You tell me, any way to honestly dismiss it?

You could've just answered my question instead of this gibberish. Do you think a true proposition like "a triangle has three sides" can be "dismissed honestly"? It's a yes or no question.

If one dismisses  belief in God dishonestly and/or without carefully assessing it, then they are in this case really exposed to an infinite loss.

In my case, belief in gods -- any gods -- has been a non-starter my whole life.  It just doesn't feel real to me, so much so that I can't even pretend to believe.  This is what honesty looks like in my life, and this is a facet of belief versus non-belief that you should seriously consider.

Since when we're supposed to accept beliefs based on feelings ? I don't think any sane person spent their entire life without considering the possibility of a higher power, at least once. Even denying an assertion already entails thinking about this assertion, that is, atheists(most of them?) forcibly thought a lot about the god question.

I don't deny that one can be honest and still not believe in any god. What we're discussing here is how one is supposed to evaluate the truth of a traditional religion. My argument was, not evaluating a religion at all is better than evaluating it dishonestly.

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I thought that Christianity implied a unique god.... just one with 3 "sides", to help with distinguishing the roles. As I see it, one is the creator side, another is the human relations side and the other is the inner human side. You may only consider the creator side to be a god, but Christians will claim that god is so much more.

That's not what trinity says. There are literally three gods (Father, Son, HS), but they are still one god as whole. So you cannot replace "gods" with "sides". The three sides of a triangle are sides, not triangles.

If Islam is so based on texts, then it is falsified by itself, as all texts are man made, thus man biased... and, as such, all they can be is a representation of the people who wrote them.

That's not really true. If a deity communicates with people, it should use some means intelligible to them, therefore texts are a possibility.

But all that they wrote may have zero bearing on reality.
How can we ascertain if the writings of old times are grounded on reality?... I'd go with Science as that which discovers and explains reality to us. Thus far, there is no god in this reality, leading me to conclude that, very likely, the gods that mankind has worshipped in the past have all been products of human imagination, including Islam and Christianity.

First of all, the existence of God and the truth of particular religion are two different things. Secondly, even if all religions are a product of human imagination, it still doesn't mean there is no god. I think that the right approach is to evaluate the existence of God separately of any religion, that is, consider traditional arguments in favor of its existence. And only afterwards, based on whether you reach a personal or a non-personal god, evaluate the content of traditional belief systems, that give more thickness to what we're supposed to do to follow god's path.

Pascal's wager (and anything similar) is just a way to get people to fake it till they make it. A well known psychological fault in human brains. Given that it requires exploiting a shortcoming in human psyche, I don't think it would ever have been god approved. It would be priesthood approved, though, which is telling...

I don't think religious people generally defend Pascal's wager. Only the idea of the risk of infinite loss is interesting.

Why would a god value belief? If a god is interested in having people accept it as part of reality, wouldn't it be an obvious part of reality?
The priesthood, however, would indeed value belief by their congregations... If your livelihood depends on something that can't be shown to be real, only blind belief, faith, or whatever you wish to call it can avail them. Charisma and gullibility are well known to exist within humanity, so I attribute this factor a far greater chance of being aligned with reality than of any god existing and wishing humans to simply believe it exists.

Wager for wager, odds are there is no god at all, just people convincing people that there is.

It all comes down to what you think about the arguments that are generally presented in favor of God's existence. It's true that people can be gullible and might believe in things for irrational reasons. But what should be kept in mind is that people can, too, hold true beliefs for irrational reasons, and may only look for better reasons or arguments in an a posteriori fashion. You cannot dismiss such beliefs just because some people held them irrationally.