X-Message-Number: 26542
From: 
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 08:24:05 EDT
Subject: Pascal's wacky wager

David Pizer mentioned Pascal's Wager, and said it was not correct under  

present conditions. Actually, it was never correct. Not that it's important, but
just to lighten things up:
 
Briefly, Pascal said that if there is a God and you believe, you go to  

Heaven. If there is not a God and you believe, no harm done. If there is a God  
and 
you don't believe, you go to Hell. So you have nothing to lose and  
everything to gain by belief.
 
Aside from the obvious logical holes, we can turn this around:
 
If there is a compassionate God and you don't believe, he will be merciful  

anyway.  If He is not compassionate, He may throw you into Hell even if you  do
believe, or if you  believe in the wrong version, even though you have  

sacrificed your integrity by training yourself to believe in nonsense. Hence by
not believing you save your integrity and lose nothing.
 
Robert Ettinger


 Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"

[ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26542