On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 10:28:54PM -0500, Rick Castello wrote: > > Unless God is a rationalist, and thinks all these faith-based religions > > are really dumb and silly, and only selects good skeptics for the > > afterlife. By choosing to believe without evidence you make yourself > > uninteresting in God's eyes. (A very bad thing.) > > This comment has value only in its feeble attempt at humor, > as a serious response would have taken into account the far > too numerous to cite examples in various works where God > obviously gives a damn about faith. But we're debating whether those works have any validity. And it was entirely serious. I can imagine running a big SimUniverse on a computer, and beings evolving in it, and making up stories about a Creator who'll punish them... and then I might only select the brightest and most interesting Sims for resurrection in SimUniverse 2.0. Quite frankly this is a perfectly realistic scenario to me, and one which is more sensible than "if you don't believe you'll go to Hell". The fact that various works disagree is no solid evidence whatsoever. The Wager doesn't change that. > You could *make up* lots of things... but is that useful? I can make up stuff. The Bible says stuff. Is it just made up stuff too, which more people believe in because of various historical and psychological reasons? Well, that's the debate. _If_ there's a God like the Christian God, with the additional property of accepting 'faith' based on self-interested, than the wager works. If God is just watching, and has never directly inspired a religious work, and is never believed in because people don't want a God who is vast, cool, and unsympathetic, then the bet can hold you back. -xx- Damien X-)