A Pagan Response to Pascal's Wager (with blame to  

This is such a wonderful video. I came into this not knowing what Pascal's wager was and left with a greater understanding of the world and an even greater understanding of my own religion.

Hot Take: Pascal's Wager only works on people that don't understand what a protection racket is

A deity that punishes you with eternal damnation for not believing in it, it's not a deity worth of worship.

I think the "multiple Gods" objection is really just a particular version of the "you haven't actually told me how to guarantee entrance" objection. It's like a wager where you don't actually know if you've placed the bet or not!

Pascal's Wager always felt like it was both using the stick & the carrot to pursuade. The carrot being heaven, & the stick being damnation--both are eternal. But really, it's about fear & avoiding hell so you hedge your bets "just in case." So much of Christianity seemed fear based to me & they definitely used fear as a stick to demand obedience & compliance to authoritarian rules.

I had a boss who inappropriately tried to bully me "back to Christ" many years back. She stopped after my response of "Are you telling me your god doesn't know your heart? Because no matter what my words profess in my heart I will never believe in the god you are speaking of." It was a toxic and bad work environment but it did help me grow in my own comfort of faith. As an atheist friend and I once concluded after a discussion of the afterlife (existence or non) the suckiest thing is we won't know until we die. So for me that means this is my domain and it is up to me to make the world better by my presence she happens to feel the same. The afterlife is something one either will or will not get (I do believe in one but who knows that could be all in my head) so the only measure of a person's life is their actions during it. I don't need the fear of eternal doom to be a better person indeed during my youth when I only knew Christianity I at times felt the doom of hell was preferable to the living hell I was experiencing especially as I lay in bed for days immobilized by pain.

A Hindu man has died and was granted access to Nirvana. He is instructed to go to 4th door on the right, passing the doors to Valhalla, Elusium and one door that he is told, when passing by, he must be extremely quiet and stealthy. "Why?" asks the man. "That's Christian Heaven. And they think they're the only ones here."

These philosophy videos are so on point. I am really enjoying how you are able to weave Polytheistic and Heathen religion into a conversation where often times the only religious argument is between Western Christian belief and atheism. They really strengthen the path many of us are sometimes taking uneasy steps upon. Thank you for that. I actually struggle with the concept of an afterlife. Not because I fear boredom as I believe that the passage of time will work WAY differently in that situation, and not because I worry about oblivion as I am fine with that if there is no alternative. My weird concern is the personal connectivity of people in this life. That is to say, is one STUCK where they go even if it is not a place of punishment? My wife is Christian. Not a particularly devout one, but she is certainly not a Heathen. Does she have to go to Christian heaven with a bunch of angels that won't stop singing for 5 minutes about how awesome God is while I soak up some eternal summer in Hel since I'm pretty sure I won't make the line-cut list of Odin/Thor/Freyja etc? What about my Muslim and Hindu friends? Is the afterlife a series of Halls where there is a celestial water cooler where different faiths can hang out around and shoot the shit? As far as Pascal's wager goes, I have always viewed it as a cheap ploy that misses the point of what faith is about. Faith shouldn't be a mathematically leaning postulation where your options are: I wasted a little time, I wasted no time, this is Awesome, I'm burning for eternity. It sorta flies in the face of moving mountains with faith the size of a mustard seed and all that. You either believe the proclamations of Christianity or you don't. Giving me math homework isn't going to sway me, though.

Something that always rubbed me wrong about the Christian heaven was that I always felt like I had to barter my life on this world in order to gain access. I had to live a certain way, do certain things, even if at times it felt off or rubbed me the wrong way. I find it difficult to disagree with any of your points here. Polytheism seems to make the prospect of both life and death all the more beautiful to me. In life, I can make my own way and become a better person for it. As for death, maybe there is no longer any need to fear the unknown. Something like that anyway. Another great video Ocean!

IDK I feel that Pascal's wager is a fucking gaslighting tecnique to get more christian followers.

Many years ago I was dying & awaiting a heart transplant. I considered myself a Christian at the time and had a lot of people praying for me. Many said they "knew" I would be ok. God told them. I didn't know that. He declined to reassure me. My heart was getting worse daily and all I could hope for was a surgery that was a 50/50 shot I would even come out alive (back in the 1990s). The only way I could face death was, like Ciscero wrote, that should I die, I wouldn't know it. That was all the comfort I really had; my faith got me no where when facing my last months of life. (I guess you could say my deconversion story started there). (Obviously I was fortunate enough to get a transplant and to do well). Great video!

10:25 THANK YOU for expressing this: that unchanging eternity, for some, would be torture. Long story short, as a little kid, growing up Catholic, I developed deep existential anxiety about this very thing. I spent most of my life worried not about Hell at all, but the grim dichotomy between Eternity and Oblivion. I haven't heard anyone else even TALK about this idea before, much less understand it. Again, thank you, thank you.

As an atheist, I think you're super entertaining. Just stumbled on you via algorithm, and this was a really cool video. Good work, and please keep making this shit. Very edifying!

Wait! Infinite rewards also involves getting kittens? Well, I'm sold. Convert me!

that brief description of heaven as one of the halls of the land of the dead perfectly captures my personal thoughts on heaven as a concept. in short, an eldritch horror.

I always likened Pascal's Wager to choosing the right Holy Grail from Indiana Jones. "He chose.... poorly."

What do you think about the idea of reincarnation as opposed to an unending afterlife? Perhaps various afterlives are just temporary 'waiting rooms' for your soul to rest in while you wait for a suitable body to be reborn into.

There was always this thing on my mind about Pascal's wager: what if Christians worship the wrong god? If they do, they lose everything.

Been really enjoying these philosophy videos you've been making lately! :D

I was raised Lutheran and came up with my own version of Pascal's wager when I was a kid, and came to the conclusion that if God was all knowing, he would know that was the reason and it wouldn't matter anyway. That's part of what started my journey away from Christianity. I was actually petty surprised when I learned about it years later in my intro to philosophy class in college. And yeah, the only version of the many gods objection I'd heard before exploring polytheism (including from some bigger atheist RU-vid channels) was the multiple copies of heaven and hell which, as you said, isn't really applicable. Besides, even as a Christian, hell always seemed to be where all the fun people go. Heaven never really seemed like a reward to me.

the problem with the christian heaven/hell dichotomy, is that one is supposed to sincerely believe... if one's belief is motivated by sycophantic desire to be rewarded, or by cowardly fear of punishment, then neither are sincerely and god-centered held beliefs, but selfishly-held beliefs, something the bible routinely condemns (think "go in your closet, not the street corner, to pray" and "the fearful investor of the king's coinage")... yet it uses both the carrot and stick as implicit reasons why one should believe... but nowhere does it say how to unselfishly believe in a god in a way that i unselfishly believe in the existence of the phone in my hand.

What? Free kittens? Nobody told me there were free kittens!!!

hell is where the tea is confirmed

@12:22 Plato's Appology - Socrates has a similar view. Either the gods (the Greek ones in this case) exist, in which case Socrates will go about the standard Grecian afterlife, or they don't, in which case it will simple be an eternal dreamless sleep. I find it a strangly calming thought.

My latest spicy take, an ego centered god fosters ego centered followers. And wtf would I do in heaven for eternity? Float around pumping up that god's ego some more? And the more non-believers I step on, the bigger my cloud will be? Nah, I'd rather live an authentic life and follow my own moral compass. My moral compass doesn't lead me to harm others but my, now excised, "christian" ego wouldn't mind stepping on others to get a bigger cloud. Dropping the christian god beliefs made me free to be a better person. Thank you, Ocean for bringing thought and reasoning to the table ❤ I appreciate your views to discuss with others.

Love the philosophical Videos Ocean, especially the long ones. They always have me revisiting some thoughts in my head, or inspiring brand new ones.

I've seen a version of Pascal's Wager used for climate change (the categories being we do something, we do nothing, its real and caused by humans, its real and not caused by humans, and its not real) which has stuck with me for years. But the religious version doesn't hold quite as much water because of precisely what you mentioned: a truly all knowing god would know that people who believe purely to avoid hell are not true believers, which is a camp I fell into. Nothing about Christianity as a structure appealed to me. Not the indoor churches, not the lack of appreciation for the natural world, not the morality system. But I hovered around it for a long while (never actually being a proper Christian though) *because* of that fear. Which is just... not a way to live.

I've had a man approach me with Pascal's Wager. He absolutely thought it would convert me.

I look forward to Ocean’s puns almost as much as the videos themselves.

As a person who was raised Polytheist(Vedic Pantheon). I could never understand the "fear god" or the fear of hell part. It seemed ridiculous to me lol.

In other words Pascal's Wager rests on false dichotomies: those of a particular (usually Christian) God vs Nothing, and a particular Heaven vs particular Hell. I've started calling it Pascal's Roulette.

I learned something fun today. - If you travel to Japan, and use the word "Viking" there. They take it as you want to find an "all-you-can-eat buffet". That what they call it over there. - In the 1950's... '57 i think, the manager of the Imperial Hotel chain in Japan, went to a conference in Copenhagen and experienced the "Smorgasbord" there. And "all-you-can-eat buffet". He was so impressed by this, that he brought the concept with him back to Japan, and since then, where ever you go... If you use the word "Viking" there, you're looking for an "all-you-can-eat buffet". At least, that's how i understood the story. Correct me if i'm wrong, but yea... I got a good chuckle out of that, when i heard it...

Cicero's On Old Age is on my TBR list, thanks to the conversation we had earlier this week! The philosophy videos with the polytheist perspective have been so fun to watch. Definitely makes you think about some of these ideas in a different way.

You. I like you. This channel is exactly what I've been looking for for a while. Its now my buddy at work for a few weeks.

An eternity in a paradise that my loved ones were denied sounds like eternal torture. A cruel joke. Not even getting into the idea that the human mind needs stimuli and the potential maddening that experiencing eternity might cause.

I’m hoping the afterlife involves us solving Asimov’s last question, like a more positive Ragnarok. That’ll keep things interesting.

Heck most Christians don't even agree with what the afterlife is like. I grew up in a Lutheran church that believed that hell and satan, as mainstream christans believe, are just mistranslations and that they don't exist. (Fun fact there were even discussions on if heaven even existed as well. The general conclusion being probably, but not as we imagine it) Personally eternal anything sounds like hell to me. I stand by any deity worth worshipping will care more about if I was a good person then if I believed in them or not.

‘Isn’t gambling a sin? Seems like a bad foot to start off on.’

I’ve always seen the afterlife as a place of rest within our soul’s journey, we can relax, meet old friends, our ancestors, celebrate, make merry (as long as you didn’t piss off the gods enough to be yeeted into Tartarus) before we’re ready for our next journey, maybe another life, maybe as a spirit, idk

It gladdens me to think about walking with Thor and Freyja after my death and learning about their interests and interactions with other Gods. It’s interesting to think about how I’ll get to know them more and strengthen my relationship with them before I choose to take on another body, as Earth seems to be the place to be.

To me, the bit about halls, visiting family and friends is just the definition of heaven to me.

loved this. for a super interesting additional deepdive, the multiplicity and yet similarity of various pagan afterlives is fascinating. some of them almost sound like the same place, or places that can exist within a similar travelable domain

Virgin Monotheist: "you're good only if you believe in his omni-dude", "refuses to elaborate the existence of evil with his all loving omni-dude", "Heaven if you believe in his omni-dude, Hell if you don't", "spends hours every week boring himself to death with an army of others, mostly unknown, omni-dude believers". Chad Polytheist: "it's fine whatever you believe in", "Gods aren't perfect and they have their own agenda", "CYOA afterlives, no eternal damnation", "celebrations in nature with an handful of friends".

Great video! It's important to keep Pascal's Wager in context. Pascal wrote 200 pages in "Pensees" why Christianity is the one true religion; he wrote about Jesus, miracles, prophecies and morality. Then, the wager comes in for people that aren't completely convinced either way. Pascal compares Christian commitment to a coin toss; a 50/50 gamble. He says skeptics should attend Church. Pascal's Wager was meant to be a tie breaker for agnostics stuck between atheism and Christianity. In that context, I think the wager is solid.

the many gods argument thoroughly knocks down pascal's wager, polytheism wins, everybody's happy. BUT! the idea that "infinite reward" could ever be less desirable than "finite reward" is frankly baffling to me and sounds like an uncharitable misinterpretation of what "infinite reward" means. like... my impression is that christians define their heaven as like "whatever the best possible thing is" so if you can think of a negative trait like "stale, repetitive", their image of heaven wouldnt include that. am i like... not getting that that part was a joke? /g the better position, buried somewhere in there, is that "infinite reward" is like... not a coherent concept or something.

I agree that the concept of heaven being "unchanging eternal bliss" is fairly contrary to human nature. That being said, I think polytheism has a good framework (with its multiplicity of gods) to argue for afterlives that can grow to infinite perfections- essentially a neverending becoming that eternally satisfies the human need for change

I wouldn’t know personally but, I doubt boredom exist in either Hell or Heaven….. But, I never died and stayed in Heaven or Hell for eternity.

I appreciate this. Is a respectful video, and you get to the point.

Monotheist and Christian pastor: I completely agree with your analysis, especially the critiques of the reductive way that mere right belief leads to salvation that some Christians assert. Pastorally, Pascal’s Wager is rather useless as it doesn’t actually form one spiritually but merely gives them “fire insurance.”

Fascinating and intriguing!

This is a fantastic video. I've heard Pascal's Wager debunked or refuted always from an atheistic standpoint, so hearing one from a fellow pagan via a video I just happened to get recommended is very nifty. Comment for the algorithm and subbed

Took me way longer than I'd like to admit to get the pun with Pair of Dice in the beginning :D - great video!

as a Priest of C'thulu, I see that Pascal's Wager is a meaningless attempt to cope with things _far beyond_ what one can perceive or comprehend.

I would say that reincarnation “solves the problem” of the infinite, unchanging afterlife. I have long seen the various divine realms as a kind of in between state - realms where one exists between lives until their spirit/soul/whatever is ready for their next life. There is opportunity to heal from whatever spiritual traumas one may have experienced before going on to a different life. If you’ll forgive the extreme nerdiness of this, I think it’s a fitting metaphor: it’s like when you stop playing one character in some RPG and make a new one. Different appearance, skills, backstory, class/profession, but still the same player.

I loved that Terry Pratchett's answer to Pascal's Wager was that the man arrived in Heaven to find a group of very angry gods surrounding him, before giving him a good kicking for playing silly buggers.

I always imagined that Pascal wrote his wager to convince himself and maybe help others come to the same conclusion as himself. Considering he was a mathematician he might have had a hard time believing in supernatural entities and had to somehow reconcile with that using logic.

Ironically, a Star Trek quote about Q helped me get over my fear of hell. Riker: What do we do now that he’s out there watching our every move? Picard: Exactly what we’d do if he weren’t. If we’re going to be damned let’s be damned for what we really are. If I’m doing my best as a person and he damns me anyway that’s not a god I would want to cower to.

What I was taught when I was a Christian was that Heaven would be an eternity of praising God. I walked away when I realized that eternally stroking a Deity's fragile ego was just as much torment as Hell.

This is a perspective on the wager that I haven't seen before. I like it. Your perspective on afterlives particularly resonated with me. I'm an atheist, I think there probably isn't an afterlife. But if there is, neat! I think some other approaches also score points against the wager. For instance, a little thought reveals that proposing infinite reward kind of breaks cost-benefit analysis. What if I claim to be God, and offer you a ticket to heaven in exchange for all of your posessions? By the same finite vs. infinite logic, rationality would require you to accept. This is obviously untenable, so I think we must exclude infinite rewards from this kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Omnipotent gods have no responsibilities, nobody can force them or punish them.

The biggest problem for me in the pascal's wager is that it assumes a 50/50 chance of God existing/not existing. If probability of God's existence is infinitesimally small then then the ultimate benefit in believing and ultimate loss in not believing can become finite depending on what kind of infinities we are talking about i.e. wagering on God's existence does not guarantee infinite gain versus finite loss and wagering on God's non-existence does not guarantee infinite loss versus finite gain.

As far as I'm concerned, a heaven for all christians and a hell for everyone else is just as likely as hell for all christians and heaven for everyone else. Following the wager then, they cancel each other out and christianity is just wasted effort.

Ocean, I so love your puns! I could just die. 👍🌊💙💙💙🌊🥰✌

William Lane Craig's comment about "people who believe in Odin or Zeus" can be chalked down to Christian supremacists being ignorant as per fuckin' usual.

(Wiccan Priest here) I can't imagine a paradise that is lacking. I disagree that we have to have negativity "to make life interesting." I can imagine a paradise where I could experience whatever weather I desired, not just an endless Summer, with boring people singing at me. I imagine a place where, along side my favourite music, movies, books, food, friends, family, pets, etc., there would always be new of these things/people/animals to experience. It could never be dull. I could pet dinosaurs, fly, breath under water, run at incredible speeds, etc., and never come to harm. I never believed in Hell when I sort of half-heartedly believed in Jesus, because I took his words to be a promise of an omnibenevolent god, in contrast to the petty, bitter, jealous one presented elsewhere throughout the bible. My answer to Pascal's Wager was that, if there is just the one true god, and that god knows everything, it would understand why non-believers felt that way, and would give them a chance at redemption at death. They would arrive "at the pearly gates," be told the actual facts, and asked if at that time they would like to reconsider. The people who wrote the bible clearly did so to maintain control of others, rather than use their imaginations to present the most palatable system of belief, so they created a petty beyatch deity, rather than a majestic Alfather, and Almother worthy of worship. They even booted Asherah, rather than allow for a duotheistic system to persist, for fear of syncretisation with other local Semitic religions, with which they had clear ties. Sadly for me, Polytheism hasn't solved the Problem of Evil, because my cosmology, based in science, points to an Ultimate Creator (NOT "god," nor A god) that blew itself up to allow life to exist wherever it does, unattended. I have become a Pagan Deist, with BAs in Religious Studies and Psychology, minors in Anthropology and Biology. I still consider Nature to be sacred, and practice extending harming none to everything around me, because that is the most logical course (to me).

To be fair in original Christian texts it seems that hell wasnt like a firey pit but rather just a place outside of gods light. It wasnt a bad place upon it was re shaped into what we now popularly belive mainly to scare people. Learnt this from a co worker whos christian and rejects the bible as reading into it he finds its absolutely horribly wrong to the original texts.

You have a couple of good points, but as an atheist non existence sounds great. And the only thing that can be better that nothing is ending up as a bladesmith in Valhalla

I think Heaven, if real, is a bait and switch. In order to get in there, you have to revel in the idea of an innocent man being tortured to death so that you can escape a deserved punishment. It's a way for the afterlife to gather up all the sociopaths and keep them from bothering the rest of us.

The other problem with Pascal's Wager is that it assumes there's no major cost to believing in whatever brand of Christianity said apologist is marketing for. For a white cishet man, belonging to some patriarchal denomination where women are taught to always submit to their husband, it can seem like a pretty light burden, at least to authoritarian men who love the idea of having inferiors to dominate. Men who prefer having an equal partner they can trust to be honest with them wouldn't find this as appealing. For women in the same group, the burden and loss of opportunity is far higher, especially if this denomination abhors contraception. For members of the LGBT+ community the price is even higher, as they lose out on the opportunity to live as their authentic selves. In addition, monotheism doesn't eliminate the problem of picking the correct spiritual option, because there are an estimated 45,000 Christian denominations in the world, almost all of them insistent that *their* sect is the only truly correct one. Yes, many of them are willing to grudgingly concede that at least some of the members of other denominations might make it to Heaven, but it still makes choosing where to place your chip very nerve-wracking. Also, the Heaven described by some denominations seems scarcely better than eternal torment. Imagine spending 24/7 praising the name of an insecure jealous god without any breaks for meals or sleep... forever. Without end. If you think about it, it's literally hellish.

Eternal bliss and infinite happiness in the afterlife does indeed not sound appealing and very boring, the firs thing that came to mind was: that sounds like hell! But that would not be accurate either. I used to be quite convinced that when we die, there is nothing. Just eternal blackness. For many people that sounds horrifying but it would only be horrifying if you would be awake and conscious in that eternal blackness. I never saw it as walking or floating around in there. We wouldn't even notice it was black because we are no longer conscious. But the last couple of years I have been trying to be more open minded about it and now I am not so sure anymore if it would be the eternal blackness. Not that I got proof that it is something else but I love stories and it's not that I completely changed my belief about the afterlife but I do have some sort of hope that it is not just the eternal blackness. Like I said, I love stories. I love movies and TV series and I think it are the stories in whatever form that may be, is the way we help each other think about things, get relativize emotions, understanding things and people we do not understand yet. But also, stories are a way to document and preserve our culture and history. And it is a way how we can communicate with the future, even if we are no longer alive in that future. If we write a story for example, how short or stupid it may seem now, in 200, 300 years or maybe even longer those written stories are a glimpse in the heads of the ancestors of the future people. That short stupid story that is now could then be an important historical item that is important to stay connected with our ancestral and cultural heritage. It is the stories that inspire us, gives us hope, fears, joy. Some people don't like it when stories are being changed or get a different interpretation. I always thought this was a typical christian thing but since I have been diving more into the pagan stories in the last couple of years I noticed some pagans really don't appreciate it if it diverts to much from the original stories. Like with Marvel for example. I love Marvel. I don't see it as a slander or blasphemy for the original stories. But more like fan art, although they make a hell of a lot of money with their fan art. When I learned the TV series American Gods a few years ago I was immediatly hooked. It took a while before I started with the series, it was the word 'American' that caused a blockade for me. I thought it was just a fantasy series with a MAGA sauce over it or something but I couldn't have been more wrong about that. Now I have seen the complete series at least 5 times by now. And it was also American Gods that gave me a more open mind about the afterlife. In the series they say: If you believe there is nothing in the afterlife than it wil be nothing. If you believe there is something else then there will be something else. Kind of like self actualization or something. That fascinated me. What if we during our lives with our minds are kind of programming our afterlife? It sounds really weird but what if? Also there are all kinds of Norse gods (Odin, Tyr, Thor heeft een kleine rol, Yggdrasil, and the weapons forging dwarves, and other pagan figures, but also from other religions. Even jesus! and he is not what you expect😂or better said, they are not what you expect. No not transgender. Just a lot of different jesus. They say in the series: there is a lot of need for jesus so there are many jesus. But they do work in shifts though.... The series is not much like the original sagas and stories but I really really love the free interpretation of it and it is probably full of mistakes or things that are (wildly) incorrect, I don't know exactly but if you are a stickler for the original stories en sagas then probably better skip this one. And the VFX and CGI that is used is very good. In the Pilot you can see they had to find their way but in the rest of the season and series it is a very satisfying cinematic experience. And also good humor, at least that is my opinion, but it is not a comedy series of parody, it's just good balanced between humor and cinematic fantasy. Since that show I started to doubt my eternal blackness.. What if their is only an afterlife if we believe in one? That means I have a choice. Not a choice about eternal bliss I think but if I can choose between eternal blackness and a non-corporeal form of life in a different dimension or something, I would like to experience that other life. But until then we need to do it with this one first.

Growing up Christian, I spent a lot of time considering what Heaven would/could be like. My church and family were not overly dogmatic, so there was a lot of diverse opinion there. My dad thinks we'll all be naked on a New Earth living lives similar to (if more utopian than) our current lives. My Christian school teacher thought we would have cosmic bodies capable of flying and walking through walls. My childhood dream of heaven was an endless library with access to an omnipotent Creator who could answer all my questions (or better yet, let me see the answers as they occurred in the world, like using Harry Potter-esque memories). It never sounded boring to me, so long as the Bibke was not taken literally as the end all be all. Even now, as someone moving away from christianity, it doesn't sound too bad. Only fundamentalist Heaven sounds truly awful.

The concept of hell in islam is explicitly described as gruesome never-ending torture, arguably much more graphic, detailed, and horrific than Christianity's version. It's scholarly consensus that all non believers go to infinite hell, believers who sinned still do go to hell, (depending on how much they've sinned, they'll stay until their souls are purified) until they eventually end up in heaven. I don't see how this is widely different than Christianity's way of getting to heaven, since belief in religious dogma is ultimately the key for salvation in both religions

I don't even understand why Pascal even made the Christian version of Heaven out to be a reward if you make the correct choice and believe in Christianity, because the only descriptions of heaven and activities therein are; there will be streets of gold, Crystal sea, there will be a mansion prepared for you, and there will be a marriage supper of the Lamb and one more thing I will get you in a minute. the big problem is, as for there being streets of gold and Crystal seas and a match prepared for you, it says nothing about enjoying these things for any period of time and the only humanly desirable activity would be the marriage supper of the Lamb which is to take place after the tribulation and Armageddon and all of the end times prophecies, but besides this, revelation asserts that you will be on your knees in front of God on the throne worshiping him forever along with the prophets, the priests, the Beast, chanting praise God all who is all who was and all whoever will be. what the f*** kind of reward is this honestly? this is supposed to be the reward granted to those who got extremely lucky throughout history and ended up believing the one out of thousands of theologies since Christianity's conception just before a person dies? that sounds like a hell in its own respect so it's like you are offered a painful version of hell, or a Eternal psychological hell in heaven if I were to consider Pascal's wager and pick Pascal's version of God to believe in. f*** that

Another problem is how can a god be considered just and moral when he is literally willing to punish a finite crime (or at least what a god percieves as a crime) with an infinite punishment?

I dismiss Pascal's wager simply because, in all fairness, I'd have to apply it to every single religion/deity on the market. I'd look at the Islamic god the same way I'd look at Christianity's god or the gods of any other religion. Just wagering on one god "might" get me into heaven but at that point the possibility of it being another god far outweighs the percentage of you hitting it correct the first time. Frankly, all religion is just hope of a world beyond: beyond our comprehension, beyond our physical form, beyond our own death. This "beyond" has NEVER been shown to exist. Never. So, I'll take the default position: until there is sufficient, verifiable, falsifiable evidence that god/gods exist, I owe it to myself to refrain from believing in any god. They might be out there, but I don't have to attribute to them anything until they want to stop hiding from view. And placing a wager won't help the concept be any truer.

Perhaps another way to frame this would be to treat the genuine Many Gods Objection which you present here (the possibility of many gods with many possible afterlives) as distinct from a Many Possible Monotheisms Objection: even if there is a "One True God™" it might not value credulous or coerced belief (such as "belief" aimed at scoring a reward or avoiding torture). A "God" might reward honesty over "wagering," and welcome atheists, pagans, etc. into "Heaven" who were honest in their beliefs/adopted beliefs based on their best understanding, while punishing or no-hereafter-ing people who "believed" for the wrong reasons, such as trying to get a reward/avoid punishment. A possible "God" might not even care if people "believe in" it or not. You and I get along just fine in our lives, even though the vast majority of people on Earth now and in the past don't believe in our existence (i.e., they have/had no idea that we do), feeling no urge to punish or reward others based on their belief in us. Surely a "God" would be at least that mature? A "God" could offer a pleasant hereafter based on many other things, from one's deeds in life, to levels of mystical attainment, or pretty much any criterion one could imagine. Since there is a potentially unlimited number of possible "Gods" of the "One, True" sort, each with its own potential hereafters or lack thereof and qualifications for entry, there is no way to calculate the odds of a winning Pascal's Wager. There is also nothing prohibiting a monotheistic "God" from offering a panoply of hereafters equivalent to the Hall of the Dead you propose. So, Pascal's Wager fails fractally, regardless of what the form "the Divine" (however defined, singular or plural) might take.

This got me thinking about the creationist thought on complexity... everything is too complex for it to have happened randomly, well... I think it's too complex for just one super being to handle. Why is it that it MUST be ONE omnipotent God and not multiple, or none? I'll tell you, it's because they are blindly accepting their religion without sufficent critical thought to recognize they are on shaky ground at best.

Still SO happy I was raised by an atheist and an agnostic. I don't have any of the lingering effects of dogma crammed down my throat. I was free to explore any religion I wanted to explore. Humankind didn't have any religions until someone made them up. I love 'the wild mess that is the Trinity' comment. I didn't know anything about Pascal's wager. My take? - What a bunch of baloney. I have been labeled a pagan and a heathen by others (all Christians), as if I care what they think.

Since looking at more than Christianity for my spiritual information, I have seen some very interesting stuff about the afterlife. Effectively, everyone goes to heaven when they die. However it is a place where your thoughts manifest instantly. So if you believe there is not afterlife your thoughts generate a void where your soul sleeps (until it's bored and decides to come back.) Someone who believes in a totally different afterlife will cause what they expect to be there to appear. Note however, someone who is deeply troubled will create their own worst hell. A thief might initially create an urban setting in which people he knows are present. But over time, he might think "everything is good as long as the police don't come." And from that moment on his afterlife becomes running from the cops. If he was concerned about someone stealing from him, that too could play into what he sees. So for me, Pascal's wager is irrelevant. I know heaven exists, I know God exists, and I know that the actual dogma of a specific religion doesn't matter.

The median estimate for the number of religious groups existing on earth today is something like 4,200. (…before even mentioning the beliefs of previous ages which would, doubtless multiply that number. I don't actually know but the point stands easily enough without precision.) The religion with the most deities is usually said to be Hinduism, which has over 300 of them. If any one of them is actually the correct one, the probability of choosing it is something less than a small fraction of one percent. It seems to me that’s a pretty hopeless wager. It seems to me that anyone with a functioning brain would instantly conclude that the likelihood of making the “correct” choice is so close to zero as to be undeserving of consideration. Unlike typical lotteries and raffles (which also have ridiculous odds) it is quite impossible to know whether or not there even exists an actual prize to be won or, if there is, whether anyone has ever won it.

"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences." H. P. Lovecraft

I’ve often thought to myself that “if Wasn’t an atheist, I’d probably be a polytheist.” And this video has certainly only reinforced that for me. It is logically the “safer bet” keeping in trend with the video theme, and of course, also just cooler than boring “one god” religious views.

I've often thought about what kind of afterlife I'd like to have, if there was one, but since I obviously can't tell if there's an afterlife at all, I'll just work under the assumption this life is my only one and make the best of it. Which is why this roughly the sixth video on this channel I've binged over the past hours.

My wife and I believe that the afterlife has a sort of airport that can take you to whichever place you want to go. If it's heaven, or hel, or whatever else you want to visit. My opinion is that if someone in heaven is given eternal bliss and someone they care about is in hel, then why can't they be allowed that bliss to visit the other realm? It's not bliss is you can not go see ancestors that went somewhere you are not. So multiple realms for an afterlife and an airport to go from one to the other.

Personally I find Pascal's Wager an irrelevant argument to the whole discussion. I can see why it's popular, it makes for an effective scare tactic if you already believe your god of choice exists... But it doesnt actually say anything about what may or may not be true, which is frankly my main concern on this topic. It just gives you a hypothetical, and potentially infinite matrix of different mutually exclusive outcomes without any data on the likelihood of any of them, then tells you which one is the obvious right choice. On that note, Craig's argument that you could ignore a number of options when it comes to deities that are "too unlikely to exist" comes off as wildly arrogant to me, because the argument doesnt give any reasons as to why theyre any more or less likely than any of the others, and as an atheist myself, I dont think that sets them apart from any of the deities he probably thinks we should include, such as his own. Personally, I see no reason to be convinced of the existence of any deities as of yet, but even if one does exist, and an afterlife thats divided into a heaven and hell exists on top of that, then a deity that demands worship under threat of eternal punishment is not one worth worshipping anyway. So either a or more gods worth worshipping, as well as heaven and hell, exist, and I'll be fine, or they dont, and I'll still be better off than any of those gods, real or not.

An interesting bit to chew on!! The whole of this is something I am going to take and ponder... As a " polytheist ", I appreciate the idea,being presented, there are several things that gave me pause... I will go n meditate for a bit..n come back with my discussion on this piece!! 👍🐺🧙‍♂️🦊👍!!

Shit I didn’t know there was any polytheistic action in youtube. I consider myself a pagan witch, not polytheistic mind you but happy to see pagans.

I always felt the wager is rendered entirely ineffective for encouraging belief in the Christian God due to the fact that Christianity is not singular. There are plenty of denominations of Christianity that formerly or presently claim only their way ensures heaven/saves you from damnation. Add to that any other faith where disbelief equals damnation and the wager becomes meaningless because the odds of you betting right on the right version of the wager are reduced drastically. It’s funny how some Christian thinkers will present their faith as a broad church of equal denominations when sectarianism and the ‘no salvation outside of the Church’ mindset is much more characteristic of the religion’s history.

pascals wager seems to have a very simplistic view of afterlife. What if your meant to be happy to be here at all. I worship the universe and see no reason why it should consider me "special" or to be rewarded. Have faith in yourself and make your own enjoyment.

Great video. Have always leaned toward you manifest the afterlife you subscribe to theory over most. Like all things, it has to be a spectrum.

Perhaps the afterlife is different for everyone if your atheist nothing hapoens if your christian heaven or hel if your polytheist it depends on what gods you believe in. I may be polytheist but the afterlife im still pretty agnostic on.

Id rather be fighting and feasting for eternity in Vallhalla than floating mindlessly on a cloud in heaven. Honestly Hel's domane seems infanately better than ignorant bliss.

pascal's wager fails because it is not the binary choice pascal assumes it is. and also because it is intellectually dishonest.

I looked up Pascal's Wager when I saw the title of the video and realized that, to some degree, I had a similar philosophy. I figure, if my faith is misplaced then I have nothing to lose, so I wont abandon it without good reason. Am I going to say believing what I believe in is the only rational way to live? No, only that I think faith has merit. However, now I wonder if my faith was/is genuine. I feel it was growing up, but now I'm not quite certain.

9:24 Isn’t there sometimes four heaven hell purgatory and limbo?

I'd like to see you and Paulogia do a discussion about the existence of gods.

Random thoughts: what if Christianity’s heaven and hell is just two different perspectives of the same place?

I normally wouldn't write a huge annoying comment like this but as a student of philosophy at university at the moment who has read and studied Pascal (as well as the Cicero later mentioned here) on this, I thought I would clarify some things. I would really recommend actually reading the original Pascal on this matter which can be found in Pensées ("Thoughts"). Which is, bare in mind, itself posthumously published notes. This argument is often mischaracterised (particularly by some less than honest Christians) and a number of the arguments that are constructed against this mischaracterised argument were already responded to and acknowledged in the original text by Pascal. Like the argument that either God will see through your false belief or that you cannot simply choose to have a genuine belief. I can't for instance just suddenly wake up and force myself to believe that I am a tree for instance, likewise for a belief in God. These two arguments amount to the same thing and are not a problem for Pascal who basically recommends that non-believers who want to believe go to church and partake in their local religious ceremonies and social affairs and that with time if they keep practicing this, they will genuinely believe. A "fake it till you make it" if you like. This does have some potential problems too but they aren't the massive glaring issue found in the previous two counter arguments. Additionally part of the wager is supposed to come from the immediate benefits of just being able to participate in a community with a shared interest like this for whatever that's worth The many gods objection is I think a fair objection from a dyed in the wool Atheist, who was frankly not the subject of the wager in the first place and wasn't even really a type of person that you could reasonably find during Pascal's time. Pascal directs his wager towards someone of his time and community who are unsure whether they want to, or even can convince themselves to, believe in God or not. Which is exactly why it's not presented as a proof of God's existence like other arguments of this type. To those open to the existence of a vast variety of different gods or afterlives it's the wrong format for talking about this conflict as the video points out. As for Cicero he's not the only one who held this view of the afterlife, it was actually a fairly common view during his time at least based on the academic texts that have survived. He likely got it either from the Early/Mid Stoics who held a very similar view, or Epicurus who was particularly committed to it. Both of these similarly have their roots in a number of arguments presented by Plato through the character of Socrates in his dialogues (and possibly also the historical Socrates).

My fear of hell turned into fear of not existing. I used to be afraid of going to hell daily as my religion was pretty much built on fear of hell. I don't really have a problem with not existing anymore than any normal person's ego would cause. But I have this gap in my daily life where worry and fear used to be so my mind just filled in the gaps I guess.

Thank you for your wonderful pun(s), I haven't facepalmed that hard in a while. Good pun is good.