He criticizes the wager but knows nothing of its context

This.

The wager is idiotic but Pascal is seriously blaised. He's full of quotable passages.

>first page
Wrong

The point is anyone can claim to receive revelations from a cave. It is not so easy to fulfill dozens of prophecies and perform miracles in front of crowds

I have the Penguin Classics edition and it's on the first page with actual text from Pascal (technically it's page 3 but there's a blank page and a title page before that).

Also

>Muhammad didn't perform miracles

I think you switched cause and consequences.
I think the reason mainstream atheists didn't consider the context at all is that people before that used and abused pascal's wager as proponent of theism don't consider the pascal's context at all.
It's no different than Ship of Theseus. It is called Pascal's Wager, but it was not already related to Pascal. context is something that no one cared about in the first place.

You can’t dually rely on the expected utility of wagers (which he does) while also claiming that the expected utility of believing in god is infinite (which he does). It makes the whole system fall apart, and defeats the purpose of a wager in the first place. Literally Philo 101 understandings tell you this.

>You can’t dually rely on the expected utility of wagers (which he does) while also claiming that the expected utility of believing in god is infinite (which he does)
Not an argument

>believing in god is infinite (which he does)
citation needed

There’s nothing to argue, it’s self evident. What could you wager against infinity besides infinity? What is infinite pleasure, and how does Pascal understand this to be what the Christian god gives (since, by his own admission, you can’t prove his existence anymore than you can disprove it)? There is no answer to these questions, it was a faulty argument from the start.

The benefit of Heaven can be likened to an infinite benefit as it trumps all earthly benefits in an immeasurable way. “Infinite” is really just an aesthetic way of saying the joy of heaven is so much greater than not going to heaven. How else do you think Pascal should have phrased his words?

>”But here there is an infinite happy life to be won, one chance of winning against a finite number of chances of losing, and what you’re staking is finite.”
Source: LITERALLY the work being discussed. Fucking midwits cant even be arsed to read.

I think using an argument that relies on quantification to function for supporting the worship of a being (who by Pascals own admission is impossible to truly understand) is bad form. He shouldn’t have made the argument to begin with.

If it weren’t for the defense of Christianity, and there were no way to reasonably tell what God’s nature is, then yes, it would be somewhat absurd to believe in infinite benefits. However, there are still finite benefits in this life (see Misery of Man without God), and Christianity tells us all we need to know about God’s nature

Fair enough, but Pascal certainly didn’t articulate this feeling well. His argument is presented in such a way that the infinite pleasure given by god to believers is obvious.

Yeah, though the defense of Christianity is presented after the wager, it’s important to always keep that context in mind. Remember, the book was organized from fragments and wasn’t really organized by Pascal as is.

In that sense, it’s hard to consider the argument at all without the proper context. It’s lamentable that we can’t truly know what Pascal meant, but I still think it’s important to understand the argument as it stands in the work presented.

One of his main justifications for choosing Christianity is fulfilment of prophecies and performance of miracles by Jesus
Which is retarded because the evidence for those things is composed entirely of Christian texts written decades and centuries after Jesus’s death
>it happened because I said it happened
Absolute retard logic

The OT prophecies weren’t written after Jesus

>"The Psalms sung throughout the world. Who bears witness to Mahomet? Himself."
Was Pascal a literal retard?

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No but the account of him fulfilling them was
I wasn’t supposing that the prophecies were written to fit Jesus, I was supposing that the accounts of Jesus were written to fit the prophecies

Here's a better wager. If you don't have a child then your children have a 0% chance of going to hell, so don't have children. Not even an antinatalist, just pointing out the absurdity of viewing life in terms of wagers.

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Have you even read the Gospels? One of the recurring themes is that Christ is contrary to the Jews' interpretations of prophecy, i.e. he's fulfilling it, but not in the way they understood that it would happen.

There’s nothing absurd about the wager you’ve proposed

God is glorified in the punishment of the wicked in Hell, and the chief end of man is to glorify God. Your wager is invalid.

I didn't know the majority of India was Muslim! The more you know!

The map is off but even if you assumed only half of that coloured area was muslim you could hardly say only Muhammad himself testified to the Quran

Not in the way they understood because he "fulfilled" them contrary to the literal interpretation. So, in other words, he did not fulfill any kind of prophecies at all so the NT writers were forced to allegorize the prophecies in order to convincingly portray Jesus as the Messiah.

So was he written in order to fit the prophecies () or did he fail to fulfill the prophecies and thus the prophecies were turned into allegory ()? You're making two contradictory claims.

So which prophecies did he accidentally fulfill and which were faked? Or was it all made up?

How about this. Fuck God, he's a huge dick and doesn't align in any way with the Platonic conception, which really seems the most reasonable.

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I'm not that guy My point is the latter one.

I agree; however, Islam is just a few decades behind Christianity in terms of degeneration. Some of the most powerful Muslim countries are liberalizing fairly rapidly such as Turkey, for example. Iran was on that path for awhile. Most of North Africa, especially the whiter parts, are fairly liberal. It seems that only the countries populated by mostly Arabs are hanging in there, but for how long? The truly I wonder who'll sing Mahomet. It's going to take huge reactionary and anti-Westernizing efforts to keep things up. Anyways, I support any reactionary efforts on the part of Muslims. I hope Pascal doesn't turn out right in the end.

If there’s a heaven, there’s also a hell

and?

Wait are you such an asshole you're actually saying you would have kids just to see that they end up in hell for being unable to pass through the narrow gate? You're a maniac who ought to be sterilized.

If people should be rewarded for their goodness, then people should be punished for their wickedness. People seem to be fine with the first but not the latter. It wouldn’t make sense for all humans to go to the same place.

No but it would make sense for humans to not suffer the indignity of existence in the first place.

I'm saying that even if they go to Hell, which would be their own fault mind you, God uses it for good, therefore such a wager is invalid.

>indignity of existence

I'm fuming right now, just reading this.

Why would that make sense? I suppose you think nothing should exist, stripping God of his omnipotence and actualization

Actually it says God takes no pleasure in the punishment of the wicked. That means its better for such people to not exist at all than to go to hell. and what, do you think its easy to get to heaven? Because Pastor Anderson told you so lol. You're screwed, pal. Just liking Mozart is enough to get you in the hotseat.

>Actually it says God takes no pleasure in the punishment of the wicked
Source?

>I suppose you think nothing should exist, stripping God of his omnipotence and actualization

Not only do I think nothing is a great deontological standard, I think nothing is ultimately what does exist. If there is some God with a personality reigning over this plane of reality, he's tending an ant-farm.

>Not only do I think nothing is a great deontological standard, I think nothing is ultimately what does exist.
That’s nice, but do you have a reason for those claims?

Not any less than you have for yours.

Who said he takes pleasure in it? I said that he is glorified.

God is Truth. Truth is fulfilled through understanding, which is accomplished through existence and its complexity, its opposites, its meanings, etc. Nothingness is an insult to Truth.

>Nothingness is an insult to Truth

No, a surly dude who wants obsequious perpetual worship is an insult to truth. At least nothing has a mathematical elegance to it.

What better to be worshipped than Truth? What better to be perceived?

Indeed. Your truth is wrong though. I mean what kind of idiot can only conceive of one God? There's probably an uncountable number of deified entities apprehending some reality or another. Who could look around at their surroundings and think "yep this is the extent of everything".

The Bible says there are demons and angels and higher powers. What are you talking about? But at the very top, there is only One

Yeah, sorry its not a guy. Its not something that gets angry, encourages cannibalism for his enemies, and craves continual praise. That's just some sort of cosmic despot, emotional manipulation notwithstanding.

Do you have to write like that? I can hardly understand what you’re trying to say

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where does the Bible talk about these lesser powers creating their own universes and then asserting themselves as ultimate truth to their more sapient inhabitants?

im convinced its just one autistic user making all these posts and threads about pascal

and another autistic user with a Rick and Morty conception of cosmology.

>he affirms, knowing nothing about me
nice projection there bro

Pensées by Pascal was indexed by the Church, stop reading it.

The “Church” has been known to be errant at times. Not a valid authority

based

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wait, why the fuck are you pretending to be me? He's obviously talking about my posts like this >hurr durr sci-fi did it so its wrong

huh? who the fuck are you? fuck off

You fuck off, fucker.

No faggot, I'm criticizing the fact that you fags never show a single empirical or scientific evidence of God, therefore this book is nothing but pure speculative fiction, and because of that I don't care, and not a single cringe and bluepilled Rick and Morty wearing fedoras and browsing reddit reply to this is going to change this fact, believe whatever you want idgaf, just know your place, stop thinking this proves something or has any kind of validity, that's all.

Hehe penises

This is still going on. You anons have like 4 threads slinging shit back and forth between each other. come on now.

>no empiricism therefore ain't real
autistic and philosophically incoherent
one might as well deny the existence of beauty or moral truth

The wager is moronic regardless of context. You can't polish a wish-fulfillment turd.

you also don't know how to read that map apparently

>t. hasn’t read Pensées

It doesn't matter, user. Stop deluding yourself. Pascal was a fucking moron, and he's not worth debating.

Jesus Christ it's been fucking hours since you people have been speaking on this, give it a rest. If Pascal couldn't convince people of his point do you think you will?

>t. hasn’t read Pensées

>if Pascal couldn’t convince people of his point...
It depends entirely on whether or not they’ve actually read Pascal

No, it mostly depends if they were raised Christian (and ideally Catholic) before age 10. Otherwise all Pascal's shit about objective morality and sin and greatness and abjectness stands revealed for what it is: the desperate apologia of a crippled mind, trying to figure out how to convince his libertine friends to reform. Look, I enjoy Lewis and Chesterton and Aquinas and the other christian apologetics at times, but their arguments are pure bullshit built on sand. You can't argue necessity just by asserting its existence, and you can't base arguments about reality on evidence derived only from a book or personal revelation. Anselm's ontological proof confuses the limits of our brains with reality, as if there was the slightest necessary relationship between those two things, and it just gets worse from there.

I agree as well, was just criticizing what Pascal said kek

Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and a few other Muslim countries are still deeply religious so hopefully we won't become Europe anytime soon. MBS said soon the Middle East will be Europe though.

Ok, God is an anthropocentric idea just as morality or beauty, concepts inside our heads, all of them, so? What now? Do you want a cookie or somethig?

You mentioned "muh Rick and Morty" in your post but I want you to know this post is exactly something the characters in that show would say.
Screw off and go masturbate to porn or something.