enemigo

And guess what? That position carries no more uncertainty than choosing to believe in God. You can not prove to any higher degree of certainty that believing in the Bible will result in escape from eternal torment while nonbelief won't.


You have not proven that. You just keep asserting it. Stop asserting that until you prove to me that it is impossible for nonbelief to result escape from eternal torment.


You are ignoring the possibility that choosing to believe could result in eternal torment when remaining skeptical would have resulted in escape. Unless you can prove with absolute certainty that such a situation is impossible, then belief carries the exact same level of uncertainty as nonbelief, and is therefore not inherently more beneficial.


It is not emotional at all. I am assuming no more risk of being wrong than you are. That is, unless you can prove with absolute certainty that there is not possible for there to be some god(s) that punishes belief and rewards skepticism. Skepticism very well could be the only way to escape eternal torment, and you have not shown that such a situation is more unlikely than belief in YHWH providing escape.


Unless it can be proven with absolute certainty that it is impossible that "some alternative to belief in God could provide an escape from eternal torment" then it must be considered a valid possibility, and thus by your own admission just now, there is a rational basis to not believe in God.


Nonsense. You just don't want to follow the logic to it's obvious conclusion, so you are aborting it prematurely. Why does the logic of choosing the most beneficial belief end there? If you want to convince me that it is sound logic that I must choose to believe that which is most beneficial, then that principle must be universally applicable. You must explain why I should choose to believe out of only self interest in one situation, and then ignore self-interest in favor of evidence in another.

You are just arbitrarily using your stated principles when they suit your desired outcome, and discarding them when they don't.


My analysis should take in other factors? HAhahahAhAhHAAHhAhAhAHAHHAhAHAhahaaaHA.

I've got an idea. Post a proper analysis, taking into account all factors. Please show your work.

Gawen

Not really. My argument is a good god will not make people do evil.

Notice in the above scriptures that god didn't just allow man to do evil, he condoned it and he ordered it.

Wayne Delia

I did read what he said. He said "But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is." In the case of a "loss" - i.e. that God exists, then there is NO "infinite gain" to offset the costs of belief, one of which you identified as tithing 10% of income. So, Pascal was wrong in saying that there was no loss, and you are wrong in representing what Pascal said about there being no loss.

I read it. He said "But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is." I understand that to mean that Pascal thought there was nothing lost in a mistaken belief that God existed, if in fact God does not exist.

So, your point must be that when Pascal says "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing," that he must have meant the exact opposite. Do you have a reading comprehension problem?

WMD

Wayne Delia

Here's what I'm saying. Please don't try to paraphrase it; <edit> It is not rational to grovel to any threat that has not been demonstrated to exist. There are an infinite number of such threats; if one grovelled to each one of them, one would be committed to an insane asylum. The schoolyard bully is significantly more of a threat than God, because he's right in the face of the little kids, demanding their lunch money. Doubt of his existence could be cleared up immediately with a painful punch or a roundhouse kick to the face of the doubter. On the other hand, you are grovelling to an alternative of a superstition which is entirely unsupported by evidence. There's nothing about hell that will conclusively demonstrate its existence.

It's objectionable in a way that you will have a lot of difficulty understanding, because your mind is already made up - even though you aren't actually a True Christian (according to the Biblical criteria you posted previously).

The schoolyard bully demands money from the smaller kids or else he'll beat the snot out of them. God, it is said, demands grovelling from His believers, or He'll condemn them to what is claimed to be an eternity of torment in hell. Those situations are analogous - extortion by terror. Few, if any, people will see the behavior of the schoolyard bully as virtuous or admirable; God's behavior is essentially the same. Yet you made the laughable assertion that the Bible says that God is 100% good. He's got to improve His moral behavior over that of a common schoolyard bully in order to even be considered any percent good, much less 100% good.

WMD

Wayne Delia

That's about as authoritative an answer of "No, he didn't" that you can expect to get.

WMD

Ubercat

At what point do you plan on demonstrating, via SOME kind of evidence, that eternal torment is a more likely fate than simple oblivion? (your wishful thinking does not count. It has not the least bit more weight than our "wishful thinking" that there be no hell.)

-Ubercat

Wayne Delia

Gawen's argument isn't even remotely close to that. In fact, nowhere did he mention anything about assuming God is good, and concluding that therefore men must act in a certain way. Rather, his point was that a God described as He is in the Old Testament could not possibly be "100% good" because a "100% good" God would never cause the evil, order the evil, or condone the evil in the sizeable list of Biblical offenses you swept under the carpet.

Ya think?

Which, I suppose, is as close as anyone can expect you to come to admitting you're wrong. Thus, God cannot be 100% good; in fact, the list of complaints you ran away from indicate God is 100% good in the sense that somebody like Hitler is 100% good.

Oh. Well, if that's the case, then the Bible is wrong. There is no room for evil behavior in someone claimed to be "100% good." In certain situations, God caused the evil, inflicting it without any influence on man. In other situations, many others in fact, the evil that happened was ordered by God.

anything you need it to become, because you're not very good at correctly paraphrasing other people's arguments.

That's as wrong as a turtle fucking a rock. The actual argument is that a God who behaves like the one described in the Bible verses you swept under the carpet can't be 100% good. That conflicts with your presupposition that God already is 100% good, so you have to reword the argument to fit your agenda.

WMD

JPD

This is about as insubstantial as it gets.

Just classic! And as we can't tell the difference between a God who isn't there and one who is refusing to "save" we must conclude all-powerfulness in the absence of any evidence? Do you think that we just rolled off the back of a lorry together with an assortment of jellied fruits?

Yes...the REAL situation....are you in some way better qualified to recognise it than us?

Yes - put the centre of the argument to one side for a moment. It just seems to be getting in the way.

Well what a conundrum. On the one hand we have no evidence and on the other we have none either. Its just too confusing!

So the choice is a vanishingly small point based on no evidence at all or making no selection which has the same odds of having a positive outcome. What sort of twit God would allow mankind to determine its eternal fate on that basis?

JamesBannon

Now we see the Calvinist position but you still haven't responded to the charge that in Christian orthodoxy generally, and in Calvinism and Lutheranism in particular, one cannot choose the come to God and that this utterly defeats the wager. The only way the wager makes sense is in the context of Arminianism - a heretical position. BTW: I'm sure Pascal was well aware of this.

You also have not responded to the charge that the Bible is no more sensible than the stories of, say, Homer or the Aboriginal Dreamtime. When are we going to see some evidence that we should take the bible any more seriously than we do its competitors?

Wayne Delia

One would suppose that was the case, and as a result, God is responsible for the immoral actions described above, and at considerable length by Gawen.

It would seem to be irrelevant and pointless, if God is 100% good, people shouldn't have to ask God to please be good. As well, you're wandering off the garden path again, completely avoiding the specific complaints against your God whom you presume to be "100% good."

They shouldn't have to worry about that, because a "100% good" God would never consider the solution of destroying anyone, and an omnipotent God would not be provoked by mere humans. It's all just a "Look what you made Me do" alibi for God not being responsible for his actions. A similar argument could be made in defense of a rapist on trial, by insinuating that if the victim really cared about not getting raped, she wouldn't have dressed so provocatively (no matter how she was actually dressed).

Poison the well much? If God is 100% good, then the child has nothing to fear from this God, and the father would have no need to warn the child to behave a certain way to avoid a threat of eternal torment from the "100% good" God.

It is rational to determine if "eternal torment" is a viable threat. Turns out there's no evidence to support that, so it gets shitcanned as an option worthy of concern.

Including whether the threat is legitimate? If that's the case, then it's not worth getting all worked up about.

It would be irrational, assuming the threat of eternal torment is demonstrated. Since your threat isn't, it would be rational to reject the idea that it is a viable threat.

The fact that there is no evidence to support that threat as actually existing.

WMD