You are on thin ice.
Please answer questions with the information requested.
You need to tone down the preaching or face account suspension.
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Feel free to find out for yourself. There’s lots of reading material here if you’re actually curious.
The world consists of lots of things besides authoritarian Christianity. Also though it may astound you, not all believers who come here are fundamentalists or even Christians. Lately it’s fashionable for some believers to think they can “prove” god’s existence via modal logic. We have the occasional Muslim who thinks the Koran agrees with science. It’s a big world out there – “there’s more than is dream’t of in your philosophy” as Shakespeare put it.
Do you converse with this Jesus construct? In what language? Do you have a mental image of this voice in your head? Please describe it if you do.
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I guess you either didn’t see my last post on the first Bibles of Constantine or you purposely ignored what I wrote. Anyways, I’m done here. Knowing you, you’ll probably have something preachy to say.
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Pascal’s wager again, again the argument fails for a variety of reasons.
- In order to accept the premise any belief mitigates or reduces risk, the risk would need to be demonstrated as real.
- The premise that all the hypothetical risk rests with not believing in any deity is demonstrably absurd, as humans have imagine countless deities and countless versions of some of them.
Wrong again, much of religious ideology is filled with objectively pernicious beliefs, and doctrine and dogma, this is an absurd oversimplification.
Also your title implies atheism is a contrary claim to theism, it is not. Disbelieving a claim, which is what atheism is defined as, is not the same as holding a contrary belief.
This not only assumes any risk exists, without demonstrating any evidence at all, but it also assumes all the risk is mitigated by one version of countless versions of a religious belief in a deity among countless deities, mitigates that imagined risk.
Are you seeing the flaw in Pascal’s argument yet?
The same claim other theists make about the deity they imagine to be real, without any objective evidence, your anecdotal unevidenced assertion is not different to any of the countless ones made for deities, you choose believe are not real, and yes yours is a belief, whereas mine is just disbelief.
I wasn’t made, I was born, and humans as a species weren’t made they evolved as one species of great apes, that’s an objective fact supported by overwhelming scientific evidence.
That’s just a vapid platitude, you need to stop preaching and offer something approaching a sound argument, and it would still need to be supported by something approaching objective evidence.
Don’t violate the rules about proselytising and you should be ok.
That’s just a bare unevidenced claim?
…and another one?
No it absolutely is not that simple, you’ll be tacking to word fact onto the ends of your claims soon, in capital letters.
Actually you brough it up in your OP, did you think you invented this flawed argument?
You can’t do that with bare assumptions, unsupported by any objective evidence.
You have yet to demonstrate there is nay loss, or gain? And this is Pascal’s wager, and the flaw in it remains the same.
It’s your claim a deity exists, no one has to disprove that claim, or offer any alternative. In the complete absence of any supporting remotely objective evidence, disbelief is entirely justified.
I don’t care what a book says, nor do you, else why don’t you believe the Talmud or the Koran? Again the claims are irrelevant, offering some objective evidence is the only reason I’d invest credulity in any claim.
Anther bare unevidenced claim, it goes in the bin with all the rest.
You absolutely are.
More unevidenced assertions?
Then your opinion is demonstrably wrong. This is also starting to look like trolling.
Anything beyond a bare claim would be a start?
Another bare unevidenced claim, in any other context you would laugh at someone who insisted something was true then asked you evidence it yourself.
Again this is demonstrably wrong, since this method produces countless religions and countless deities.
It is both preaching and proselytising.
If you mean this thread then yes I agree, you’ve offered absolutely nothing new here at all, just rehashed Pascal’s wager, I have already addressed why this fails.
No it really doesn’t, and I have explained why.
Bare claim. And no one knows who wrote the canonical gospels, the earliest copies are decades after the events they purport to describe, and the names were assigned arbitrarily by early church leaders centuries later, their claims for a deity are all unevidenced 2nd hand (at best) hearsay from an epoch of extreme credulity ignorance and superstition.
That a bare claim, and if you have scientific evidence then present it, but first please explain why atheism rises sharply among scientists and is almost universal among elite scientific groups? As that suggest your claim is nonsense.
That’s not a fact, it is an unevidenced subjective religious belief.
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lol Pascal’s Wager reminds me of someone who only goes with the winning side. It doesn’t seem to be a sincere belief. More like believing out of fear, which some Christians frown on. It’s like, more of a “if god is real and I do this wager thing, he won’t torture me in hell for eternity” kinda stance.
Yes and this is IMO one of the most neglected critiques of PW. It basically urges you to hedge your bets, to at least pretend to believe in God – as if a tri-omni God wouldn’t see right through that and put you in a place in hell where the burners are turned up extra hot.
Or if an adherent sees this not as pretense so much as just choosing to believe then they aren’t talking about actual belief anyway. You don’t choose your beliefs, they choose you. You can’t make yourself believe anything as you can’t control the experiences you have and the observations you make. You can knowingly subscribe to unsubstantiated claims and tribally identify with others who do so but if you think that’s honest, real belief, you don’t understand the concept to begin with.
The idea you can mitigate risk without evidencing any risk exists is risible of course, no less risible than the idea that risk can be mitigated by picking, without any objective evidence, one version of one deity from countless deities and religions humans have imagined to be real.
And all our new friend managed to add was, it was true because he knows it to be so, and says so, again this is risible.
right, they tell us how wise, smart, or fair their deity is; then recommend we try to trick the deity. 
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Pascal’s Wager gives me the idea that it treats Christianity like it’s a form of gambling and that Heaven is the jack pot. It almost makes me feel like they don’t realize that this method is insulting to their religion.
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I have come to think that PW appeals to them because they vaguely understand that Pascal was some sort of Smart Person that had some sort of philosophical argument that might give them some ammo against people who put any sort of premium on intellect. But they can’t be bothered to understand it themselves, or give it any sort of sniff test. ALL they care about is that it urges people to follow their god, however disingenuously. If it does that, it’s automatically a Good Thing.
Not just that, but a few people of the xtian faith have said things to me like “it doesn’t hurt to believe in something” and one person told me who was Bhuddist, that maybe I should try their religion. I’m not sure if they were being genuine about that or if they were just poking fun.
Yeah the famous wager assumes:
- There is no cost to believing
- The payout if you are right about god is infinite
- The payout if wrong is not infinite
- There is a non-zero chance that god is real
- That an all knowing creature isn’t going to see though this ruse
If you believe all those, the wager is a sure thing!
What the f#@k are you doing on this website!!? If you’re a Christian, I would like to suggest that you find a Christian website and carry on with other believers! You’re wasting your time trying to sell atheists and other non- believers on something we’ve abandoned years and even decades ago for lack of evidence. You need to grow up and develop some intelligence. You’re wasting your time and your life. You can’t sell any of us with your snake oil medicine show. GET REAL!!
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To this point as a former fundamentalist I can itemize a lot of costs.
- Lots of my valuable time attending services – in our sect, three per week, two on Sunday & one on Wednesday were expected to virtue-signal that you were a “serious” believer. Plus other social activities – youth group, “pot lucks”, alternative-to-Halloween events, etc.
- Our sect enforced the tithe, so there goes ten percent of your income, and again if you’re a “serious” believer, we’re talking gross income.
- No freedom of thought and structural blindness to a whole range of the big beautiful world. Knock on effects such as the pool of potential spouses is confined to the church. “Just marry a good Christian man/woman and everything will be fine”. Yeah right, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
- Constantly having to “defend” ghastly public behavior of church leaders as some sort of weird aberration when it was clearly very common. Even if we didn’t “see” their sexual predation there were televangelists relieving little old ladies of their life savings, or fleecing the congregation so they could buy a luxury jet or mansion.
- Having to “defend” other indefensible things like young earth creationism with zero evidence at your disposal.
- Having no idea what evidence even IS. Or often, what belief actually is. Weird definitions of “righeousness” that include morally repulsive ideation like identifying and excluding various Hated Others in direct contradiction to what Jesus actually taught.
- Having to experience the same “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as anyone else while claiming that you are living the Victorious Christian Life™. Having your soul wither and die a little every time you do so.
- Minor one here from my high school days back in pre-history, but not getting most cultural references and in-jokes and being considered the clueless rube that you are.
That’s a short list just off the top of my head.
Of course they will say the above is all nothing compared to the infinite penalty of burning and choking and screaming forever in hell while the righteous and their god sit smugly and indifferently in heaven, secure in the knowledge that you “had it coming”. But all the things listed are real things in actual life and the other is just asserted strictly for the fear value to try to get you to suborn your life to a bereft and hypocritical worldview.
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oh hey, this is the classic pascal’s wager. It always fails when you consider how many religions claim to be the truth and the horrifying consequences of not following said truth. You might as well just piss off another “god” for believing in your christ.
I can talk about how Pascal assumes a binary choice (Christian God vs. No God), and the fact there are thousands of religions, each with its own, often mutually exclusive, requirements for salvation but that would just needlessly lengthen my replies.
I mean come on, I hear muslims claim god and yawheh aren’t real and only allah exists. what’s their so-called evidence? their fuckin book talking about magic.
I might as well just say everyone’s soul here is damned for not worshipping ME as a god
I wonder if OP just gave up and left. I was having a lot of fun with this one and I feel like he just ghosted. Anyone think he’ll be back or was he likely doing a drive by sermon?
He might be temporarily indisposed or might have left in a huff or anything in between.
He seemed to almost want to be ejected from the room, he mentioned that would probably happen. Almost as if it happened to him before. Some of these guys get off on being “persecuted” for Jesus.
Pascal’s wager, look it up.
It’s a dog shit arguement.