Why haven’t you read it, yet?

Why haven’t you read it, yet?

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I have
also
BASED PASCAL POSTER

I read one sometimes before bed, couldn't handle reading them all in order

Currently working through Pope's oevure but Pascal's next in my backlog.
>inb4 you're a fucking fag!
No!

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I have. it's very good. Gonna paste some of my favorite quotes.

>All great amusements are dangerous to the Christian life; but among all those which the world has invented there is none more to be feared than the theatre. So we depart from the theatre with our heart so filled with all the beauty and tenderness of love, the soul and the mind so persuaded of its innocence, that we are quite ready to receive its first impressions, or rather to seek an opportunity of awakening them in the heart of another, in order that we may receive the same pleasures and the same sacrifices which we have seen so well represented in the theatre.
(Cf. Plato

>Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don't speak.
(Cf. Epictetus, Wittgenstein)

> A maker of witticisms, a bad character.
(Cf. Pascal, Nietzsche)

>I always feel uncomfortable under such compliments as these: "I have given you a great deal of trouble," "I am afraid I am boring you," "I fear this is too long." We either carry our audience with us, or irritate them.

> One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life, and there is nothing better.
(Cf. everyone, but especially Goethe’s Maxim of “knowing yourself” not being as complicated as what we think, and we must do it. I’ll copy it if interested)

> The vanity of the sciences.--Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.

>Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.
(he also says, he who reads too quickly and he who reads too slowly are screwed)

Everything he says against Descartes and Montaigne, the latter especially because he’s one of my favorites.

> How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but that a fool does?[45] Because a cripple recognises that wewalk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger. Epictetus[46] asks still more strongly: "Why are we not angry if we are told that we have a headache, and why are we angry if we are told that we reason badly, or choose wrongly?" The reason is that we are quite certain that we have not a headache, or are not lame, but we are not so sure that we make a true choice. So having assurance only because we see with our whole sight, it puts us into suspense and surprise when another with his whole sight sees the opposite, and still more so when a thousand others deride our choice. For we must prefer our own lights to those of so many others, and that is bold and difficult. There is never this contradiction in the feelings towards a cripple. It is natural for the mind to believe, and for the will to love;[47] so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

>The most important affair in life is the choice of a calling; chance decides it.

More:

> When our passion leads us to do something, we forget our duty; for example, we like a book and read it, when we ought to be doing something else. Now, to remind ourselves of our duty, we must set ourselves a task we dislike; we then plead that we have something else to do, and by this means remember our duty.

>The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

>A man dwells at home with pleasure; but if he sees a woman who charms him, or if he enjoys himself in play for five or six days, he is miserable if he returns to his former way of living. Nothing is more common than that.

> I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home.

… Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.

>Fascinatio nugacitatis.[87]--That passion may not harm us, let us act as if we had only eight hours to live.

> We can only think of Plato and Aristotle in grand academic robes. They were honest men, like others, laughing with their friends, and when they diverted themselves with writing their Laws and the Politics, they did it as an amusement. That part of their life was the least philosophic and the least serious; the most philosophic was to live simply and quietly. If they wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors. They entered into their principles in order to make their madness as little harmful as possible.

> If we do not know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery, and injustice, we are indeed blind. And if, knowing this, we do not desire deliverance, what can we say of a man...? What, then, can we have but esteem for a religion which knows so well the defects of man, and desire for the truth of a religion which promises remedies so desirable?

What does Cf. Mean?

Seriously?

are you joking?

Yes
No

it's a substitute for "compare" or "see". It's so you can use the mentioned topics, authors, or works as references to the quote. use google!

>That passion may not harm us, let us act as if we had only eight hours to live.
I wish I could remember this and live with this mindset

>Goethe’s Maxim of “knowing yourself” not being as complicated as what we think, and we must do it. I’ll copy it if interested)
Please do.

>And if we turn to that significant utterance, Know thyself, we must not explain it in an ascetic sense. It is in nowise the self knowledge of our modern
hypochondrists, humorists, and self tormentors. It simply means: pay some attention to yourself; take note of yourself; so that you may know how you come to stand towards those like you and towards the world.
his involves no psychological torture; every capable man knows and feels what it means. It is a piece of good advice which every one will find of the greatest advantage in practice

And a few more from the art section of the book.

>The saying that no one who is unacquainted with or a stranger to geometry should enter the philosopher’s school, does not mean that a man must become a mathematician to attain the wisdom of the world.
(Cf. Schopenhauer on math being less than perception.)

>That is the reason why the Bible will never lose its power; because, as long as the world lasts, no one can stand up and say: I grasp it as a whole and understand all the parts of it. But we say humbly: as a whole it is worthy of
respect, and in all its parts it is applicable.

>If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.

>Shakespeare’s Henry IV. If everything were lost that has ever been preserved to us of this kind of writing, the arts of poetry and rhetoric could be completely restored out of this one play.

>Shakespeare’s finest dramas are wanting here and there in facility: they are something more than they should be, and for that very reason indicate the great poet.

>Shakespeare is dangerous reading for budding talents: he compels them to
reproduce him, and they fancy they are producing themselves.

I have
>what ought I to do? i see only darkness everywhere. shall i believe i am nothing? shall I believe I am god?

There's no limit to the amount of supernatural people you can conjure up so the probability of your betting on the right one is zero (one divided by ever increasing number approaches zero). After we've established that the expected value for all bets on the supernatural become zero (any payoff times zero equals zero). Atheism's expected value is also zero and thus it doesn't matter what you bet on, but as an atheist all other things equal you at least have a 50/50 shot at being correct (the probability of p and not-p is 1, p being some supernatural option being the case and atheism being the denial of supernaturalism).

What are you rambling about? Are you arguing against Penseés?

About why the Wager is not sound so any reason to read Pensees is out the window.

So you think Pascal should have explained why Christianity is the one true religion, giving some sort of reason(s) why one should be a Christian?

I think people shouldn't waste time trying to argue one bronze age myth is superior and veridical unlike all the others.

So you don’t even admit the possibility that is one is superior? Since there are infinite religions, they are automatically equally probable to you? That seems like an excuse for your disbelief more than anything else

Since God is omnipotent and by definition cannot fail (the probability of any observation O is 1 given that God wants O to be the case) there cannot be probability raising evidence for its existence since there can be no possible evidence against (E is evidence for H iff not-E is evidence for not-H). Any possible argument against God's existence can be explained away by invoking His Mysterious Ways and will be.

Why are you changing the subject from comparing religions to God’s existence? God cannot be proven or disproven. Pascal admits this

Point is, any set of religious claims which doesn't rule out possible observations (this includes all religions I personally know of) cannot be argued to be more or less probable than the others so all are equally probable. You can compare ethical claims if you like, but ethics boils down to opinion so there's no superiority to be found there.

God appears before you, and says that one of two religions is true: Christianity, or the religion that I just made that up, that says you have to eat and drink my human waste to get into heaven. What do you do?

I don't understand the question. Ask why his creation is such a shitshow?

You argue that religions can’t be more or less probable. So if you KNEW that either Christianity or my poop-eating religion were true, what would you do? Flip a coin?

there is no such thing as radically choosing religion, as religion purely bases on metaphysics, so it must be "felt" instead of being chose by odds

The whole point of probabilistic reasoning is that we don't know, so I don't see the value in entertaining an asinine contrafactual that stacks the deck in your favor.
This is an approach I can actually respect, even if not epistemically.

>stacks the deck in your favor.
How so? Aren’t all religions equally probable as you say? Even if one religion sounds easily made-up and arbitrary and the other is extremely difficult to fake, they’re both equally probable, right?

>Penisées
kek

Confer, or "compare to this author"
Not everybody is in academia.

>I can't appreciate the beautiful writing and profound thoughts of one of history's most intelligent men because he had different metaphysics from me
Is atheism a mental illness?

atheists believe in no metaphysics, dummy

Haha lol yeah