On Tue, 3 Dec 2002, Damien Sullivan wrote: >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.) Note that this is mentioned in the page about Pascal's Wager - it's called the "Professor's God" argument. >> 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. > >_If_ there's a God like the Christian God, with the additional >property of accepting 'faith' based on self-interested, than the >wager works. That's another thing about religion. Not only do they ask you to accept that the Universe has a creator (not entirely impossible, if unprovable and unproven), but that this entity has a *huge* number of additional attributes, some of which are conflicting, if not downright contradictory (like being supposedly sane and benevolent AND YET will torture humans forever (and ever) after they die based on whether or not they believed in him while they were still alive (EVEN THOUGH he provides no proof of his existence)). Religions don't just posit God, they posit that some official books are true, and more specifically, a certain *interpretation* of those books is true. And suggesting that the interpretation is wrong is "heresy" and that the whole thing is nonsense is "blasphemy". Like an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good entity (or even just mostly-powerful, mostly-knowing, mostly-good) is going to *care* what we believe about him? *That's* the silliest thing humans have ever dreamed up out of nowhere. And of course, there always the possibility that God's just yanking all of our chains. Why not? This is amusing, given our current/recent discussion(s): http://grimbles.keenspace.com/d/20020930.html