/lit/ - Literature

>>11769018
by saying "you're gay" to it

Got the Basilisk instead

>>11769048
I still haven't figured out any downsides to siding with Roko's Basilisk.

>>11769018
It seems pretty disingenuous. Acting as if I thought God was real when I truly didn't doesn't seems like an attempt to deceive your God or something

>>11769018
Even you falsely "believe" in God in order to go to Heaven you're still going to Hell.

>>11769018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVtSqCj8KUE

It's not even difficult.

>>11769068
Hitchens yet again shows such a deep misunderstanding of a concept its quite astonishing

>>11769056
Because a super advanced AI that has POTENTIAL to exist as Roko's Basilisk but has since only been THOUGHT of shouldn't matter. As long as there is a kill switch logged but hidden to the AI, then it would be subservient regardless of it's want to torment us from whatever code it originiates, as far as I can tell.

>>11769018
Anon's Wager:
If you don't kill yourself right now you will cease to exist upon death and not enter the afterlife (the afterlife is whatever you would prefer (in your soul, not intellectually), reality is generous).

What I just wrote has as much basis as Pascal's Wager. You can say fucking anything. It's a completely retarded notion, that firstly requires some faith or inclination or familiarity with Christianity, or rather, specific doctrine within it- though this may then lead to more comprehensive belief so you could say if you really do want to believe not just in God but the human religion of Christianity itself, then it could be a useful tool amongst others, a support. Similar thing with believing in free will, I suppose (though perhaps blinding and weakening in certain aspects). Explain it to someone anti-Christian or completely ignorant of it, and any other bit of text will be just as meaningful, that is to say, a meaningless assertion that has as much weight as any other meaningless assertion.

>>11769141
>though this may then lead to more comprehensive belief so you could say if you really do want to believe not just in God but the human religion of Christianity itself, then it could be a useful tool amongst others, a support.
To add to this, perhaps it's wrong to say it would, because drawing faith from something like this doesn't seem very Christian. Seems like you're more interested in a utilitarian 'trade' than anything. Maybe if some of your faith rested on that, you wouldn't get into Heaven anyway.

>>11769018
About as well as anyone else.

>>11769141
>>11769151
How would you then, from your point of view (not sure if you are Christian or atheist) acquire *genuine* faith?

no one needs to reconcile with disingenous logical traps

might have held weight before we got so many universalist religions. now any wager tacks on the idea that you are turning down a handful of chances for salvation for one. if you are trying to hedge your metaphysical bets, be Bahai, or Roman Pagan

>>11769018

Pascal's Wager is for Yaldabaoth.

>>11769088
fuck off anon
>ha! i have super special powers of understanding
>no, i'm not going to actually say what it was the other person misunderstood, i'm just going to smirk knowingly
>i'm so clever. no really i am
hitchens is right and you're a butthurt turd

>>11769186
Way to reddit all over the board
>yikes

What if there's an Anti-God who sends you to hell if you believe in him?

>>11769018
If you believe in a false religion you get send into hell while agonstics and true believers end up in heaven.
Note there have been thousands of religion in recorded history. What makes you think that yours is the correct one?

>>11769018

Very, very, very easily.

>>11769200
>my sekrit klub is better than your sekrit klub
you can fuck off too

>>11769186
>>11769224
most embarrassing posts I've seen in a while

>>11769018
By arguing its logical premises are oversimplified when applied to our lives, see >>11769155

>>11769066
Pascal's wager isn't about trying to get people to feign belief. It isn't "hey, act like a christian so you can fool God!". It's actually "hey, maybe you should give an earnest try at fostering a sense of faith in the divine."

>>11769287
First post in this thread showing signs of understanding the wager (albeit unrefined)

>tfw we'll never get to actually discuss Pascal's work on this board because you guys are too obsessed misinterpreting this one idea
Every time :(

« Combien de royaumes nous ignorent ! »

>tfw genius prodigy gets shit on by atheists who got Cs in their engineering courses for a little thought experiment they don't even understand anyway

I could be manipulated to do anything by anyone if I accept that logic, provided they describe a sufficiently undesirable potential outcome to me

>>11769154
>>11769155
There are only 4 real options you brainlet.

Enjoy Hell for me though.

>>11769157
Pascal himself discusses this very thing. Essentially he says to attend mass and practice the faith with fervor, as if you truly believed. Eventually you will begin to have genuine faith.

All the wager shows is that atheists are cucked either way.

>>11769018
Because the fact that you can trick God (at least the Christian idea of God) with false belief is laughable

/lit/ - literature
take this shit to /his/

>>11769201
What if hell is actually a pretty decent place but it had no bathrooms and you had to poop all the time and heaven actually sucked it was run down and dirty like detroit but they had bathrooms like you wouldnt believe

>>11769215
Why would agnostics go to heaven

>>11769813
I was told so during a revelation last night.

>>11769157
>>11769374
You could attend mass everyday for your entire life and still not have genuine faith, even if you genuinely want to; like many people actively affiliated with any form of religion. Someone who has never gone to church can still generate true faith, and in some ways are even more likely to do so than outwardly devout followers.
Only through the grace of God alone can you generate true faith. Trying to rely on yourself, through your good deeds, just stains these deeds with your selfishness and egocentricity. It stains what should be glories to God. Through full trust in God, a natural repentance will arise as you realize your own depravity.

>>11769018
They don't care, because to them all religions are equally valid and equally incorrect. The wager looks like a pointless logical trap to them.

Of course all religions are not equally valid, and if you account for correlations and commonalities, logical consistency, individual and popular appeal, and other factors, you will see that even though God is himself unknowable, the part of God that is naturally revealed in the hearts of every person, who are all deciding individually how much sin they can live with, is the God that Pascal was talking about. Only then will it be clear that you have everything to gain in rejoicing in him, and literally nothing to gain in turning away.

"this was revealed to me by God in a dream"

>>11769018
The same reason no sensible person plays the lottery. It's just another scam feeding off of the weak and gullible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afQ9zMWR7Ag
It is easy to debunk if you've never read the Pensées and like click bait cringe videos.

>>11769215
>If you believe in a false religion you get send into hell
who believes this?

>>11769215

>>11769018
By respecting God too much to expect him to fall for an opportunistic calculation.

>>11769155
What the heck is Atheism Rewarded?

In order to say "I aught to attempt to foster a faith in christianity because it is possible that a christian god exists" you must know that it *is* possible for a christian god to indeed exist. It might not be possible, you don't know!

Because you don't know if it is possible for a god to exist, you cannot apply cost/risk analysis to the situation, because the probability of existence is undefined.

>>11769061
This, better to carry on as I actually believe than to face whatever is next as a hypocrite.

>>11769018
"You can see from these few reflections that nothing could be more unjust than the objections people raise against us. Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position. Its intention is not in the least that of plunging men into despair. And if by despair one means as the Christians do – any attitude of unbelief, the despair of the existentialists is something different. Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God. In this sense existentialism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of action, and it is only by self-deception, by confining their own despair with ours that Christians can describe us as without hope." Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946

>>11769186
>haha look how clever I am I am approaching the subject of myth with RATIONALITY and LOGIC which are of course the HIGHEST ORDER of thought.
yea, Hitchens is a genius of the highest order. retard.

>>11769068
>posting Christopher Hitchens
How was school today, sport?

>>11769068
>I can't say for certain that consciousness exists beyond the brain
>I can say for certain that others don't know
>god is cynical and stupid for allowing eternal paradise/suffering based on conscious beliefs
I mean I get what he's saying, but simply put, this doesn't really satisfy the reason for not just claiming belief on your death bed.

>>11770718
>An atheist doesn't understand Christianity
Shocker. There's truly no talking to these guys and those who follow them. I'm starting to believe it isn't even worth my time reading any philosophers who don't agree with me on first principles because if they don't have that, everything else is meaningless (as is their worldview).

>>11771035
>I'm starting to believe it isn't even worth my time reading any philosophers who don't agree with me
A true intellectual titan

>>11771045
>I enjoy reading intricate nonsense built upon fundamental disagreements
To each their own fag

>>11769018
The wager assumes i can choose what i believe.

I can choose to believe some things, but only because i believe in my brain.

I have no reason to believe in God that overrides my brain's track record, shoddy and parblind as it is.

Show me a resurrected Christ, the keysyone of your religion, and i might begin to believe. An immaeus road or doubting thomas or "i saw you under the fig tree" experience. In essence, "not by eloquence and fine argument, but by the Spirit's power". I got a hotdog bun and a fishcake, right here.

If you prefer to give me clever arguments and words in a book, youre really just asking me to believe your brain instead of mine. For *that* you'll need to be Jizo, Newton, and Frank Sinatra.

The only reason i'm being offered pascals wager by believers is because they have / can channel no power.

>>11770374
I don't see much argument happening on your end. Nice marxist strats you got there.

>>11771035
i wouldnt restrict yourself like that. I sometimes read guys that i think are plainly wrong and retarded, just because they are said to have merit. And then years later i develop some meta idea and a sudden isomorphy between what they were saying and what i was saying emerges and genuinely deepens my perspective

you need as much material as possible, though not nonsense material, stay away from actually insane shit, or at least be cautious about it

All you need to watch is Hitch refuting the wager. A rational, thinking mind is a prerequisite though.

>>11771064
Your posts are exactly what I could say for theology. Why discuss things at all, lol, fuck understanding other points of view, I'm 100% correct either way

>>11769018
>100% chance god don't real; 0% god do real
>100% * teeny tiny reward = teeny tiny reward
>0% * infinite reward = zero reward
>expected outcome of not believing = teeny tiny reward
>expected outcome of believing = zero reward
pascal btfo

>>11769141
I think you forget the aspect of all powerful, all knowing, all good God.

>>11769018
A lot of people say that if God is real then he's going to be pissed at your for faking it and he's going to know how much of a little bitch you are and send you to a not-good place anyways.

>>11769366
cringe and bluepilled

>>11769287
>>11769308
That does make a tiny bit more sense but it falls apart when you never do manage to mindbreak yourself through Jesus. You'll wind up a big phony at the end of it if that happens.

>>11771117
Why would I bother having a counter argument against people who haven't read the text they are critiquing? I don't need to defend Pascal from people who are too lazy to read such a short work.

>>11769018
There might be a God who sends people to heaven for believing in him or there might be a God that sends people to heaven for disbelieving in him or for drinking orange juice every day or any orher arbitrary thing. The fact that there are some desert myths endorsing one point of view doesn't lend it any more weight.

Also people can't just consciously choose to believe something they naturally find absurd based on cost-benefit analysis. Even if you could just program yourself to believe whatever you want, I'm pretty sure the policy of "aim for true beliefs and act in pursuit of happiness based on those" would make a person happier than "aim for the beliefs that you think would make you happy."

>>11769018
by becoming agnostics

>>11771353
Agnostic is just a word for an atheist who prefers social cohesion over disorder. No non-religious atheists claim to know what caused the existence of everything, to make any claims on what the great creator /couldn't/ be is the work of religion. To be atheist is to accept that you don't actually know why we're here, in the grand scale of things. To be an agnostic is to be an atheist with a cuter name, no other difference.

>>11771396
I don't see how you can hold this opinion when there are atheists who do make claims against God with certainty. This isn't to say they are well informed. They obviously aren't, but they are out there.

>>11771409
They're the religious atheists, their atheism goes further than the secular and goes back around into religion's territory. To believe in a universe that can never have a God or gods is to rely on faith as much as the hard opposite.

When I was 11 I did kind of a reverse Pascal's wager: If there is a god and he is all-knowing and all good, then he must know all my thoughts and he must understand why it at least seems unlogical (at the moment) to believe in him (since I honestly didn't understand why there would be a god). If he's all good, there's no danger, because he will understand the logical necessity of my not-believing and will therefore forgive my if I err in my thinking (given that I still try to be a good person).

So: If there is a god and he's omniscient and good, then there is no danger if you honestly can't believe in him.

As Diderot (1746) puts the point: “An Imam could reason just as well this way”.

>>11769018
It's just sort of a pussy way to look at life, in my inarticulate opinion.

i am a gnostic nihilist self-made shaman of the technology age. what the fuck does pascal's wager have to do with anything? 1700s-tier thought process

>>11771434
i had the exact same discovery, though like 4 years after you, you big-brained beautiful boy.

>>11771519
T-thanks, anon

>>11769018
there are countless religions and in fact its more likely that any real god isnt described by any of them. my chances are too slim to consider. this isnt the comic i was looking for but it turns out the idea has been done quite alot

>>11769018
Worshipping a false god carries a stiffer punishment than worshipping no god.

>>11771622

>>11769048
>>11769056
>sentient AI possible
Yikes. Your reddit muskposting really shows.

Pascal's Wager ends the moment you ask 'to whom do you pledge?

>>11771225
>he has this image saved
>he thinks living amorally is superior to any code
You have to be 18 to be on 4chan.

>>11769182
This.

>>11771409
Of course you can be agnostic and make claims against specific gods, like the Egyptian gods, or the OT God, since the stories told about them are ludicrous, and their posited existence an outdated absurdity.

Not holding beliefs about things that are unknowable is not the same as throwing your brain down the toilet. You don't still say "Well, the world MIGHT be flat" unless you're a complete moron.

>>11769186

>>11771225
zero times infinity is not zero

if god was real i doubt i could trick him into thinking i believe in him just in case he does so i can get into heaven

>>11771925
>the stories told about them are ludicrous
The stories in the Bible are just metaphors so it doesn't matter for Christian faith if they didn't actually happen.

>>11772015
It is zero. Pic related is taken from "Real and Complex Analysis" by Walter Rudin.

>>11769018
According to Pascal's Wager you are better off statistically if you believe in one of the Gods which promise heaven for the believer and hell for the wrong- or non-believer, because someone who picks none of them will always lose while someone who picks one has at least a small chance of being right. You can then pick one who is most to your liking and insults your intellect the least.

Okay then lets assume I pick one god who does not like being deceived. He prefers people who are honest over people who believe only because it is a safer bet. Now it does not matter if I actually believe or not. No, it is actually detrimental to my afterlife if I do for dishonest reasons. Because I am intellectually honest I prefer not to believe until sufficient evidence is presented. And I can only hope my chosen God appreciates that.

>>11769018
It neglects the possibility of the existence of a god who will damn anyone who worships a false god, but won’t damn someone who rejects all gods.

1/infinity of a chance that God exists isn’t enough for me to sacrifice pleasure. It’s also the same exact probability that I am God.

>>11772069
Walter Rudin is a pseud youtub intellectual. Anyone who has even taken precalc knows this is indeterminate

>>11772076
Argument doesn’t hold because you suppose all proposed Gods are equal

>>11772118
What makes some more likely than others?

>>11772126
Anyone can add to the sets of God using your logic. I can add twenty more Gods that i just imagined if I wish. These imagined Gods do not hold equal worth or value to the ancient ones

>>11772135
They actually hold the exact same value.

>>11772135
>Anyone can add to the sets of God using your logic. I can add twenty more Gods that i just imagined if I wish.
Yes you can. The only upper limit is the set of Gods imaginable.

>These imagined Gods do not hold equal worth or value to the ancient ones
Again, why?

>>11772141
>>11772144
Because I know for a *fact* that i imagined them, and they are not real, just as I know the gods you imagine and theorize are simply imagined

>>11772151
Just because you made it up does not there is not a real equivalent. Especially simple concepts of God have been imagined many times independently.

>>11772155
I misspoke. I can't definitively disprove them but I know that their only known connection to our manifested world is your imagination which holds little value compared to the ancient Gods

>>11772159
>imagination
You don’t even know what your mind is.

>>11772159
It's not inherently clear why many people believing in one God makes that God more likely than one you just imagined.

>>11772110
He's one of the highest respected mathematicians and won the Leroy P. Steele Prize for writing that book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_P._Steele_Prize

>>11772161
Why does that matter? We can still make a distinction between our measurable world and our imagined abstract world, even thought we dont know the foundation of either. You could use that argument against literally anything to bring in disprovable skepticism

>>11772164
Many people follow mormonism and I discard it for the very same reason. Scientology and all the other modern religions. There is no chance at all they were divinely inspired, whereas the prophets and sages of old , we're not quite so sure. One thing is for sure, and that is that they were very remarkable based on the scriptures we have of them. Way more remarkable than Joseph Smith or Ron Hubbard

>>11772165
My bad i thought you were talking about Walter Lewin for some reason, that dutch youtube professor who annoys me so freaking much. The rhytm of the names were somewhat similar i guess

>>11772168
Why can't Mormonism or Scientology be true? Because they appears obscure? I am about as sure they are divinely inspired as the old ones. Maybe the old ones just appeal to you more on an aesthetic level. To me they appear equally obscure and likely to be made up.

>>11772176
Because they are far too anthropocentric and show no actual mysticism

>>11772184
I agree, they are mostly anthropocentric and lack mysticism. But I don't see how that changes the scales and makes them less likely to be true. Unless you have some reason to assume that religions full of mysticism and lack of anthropocentric views are correct. Again, so far it looks to me like a preference on your part.

>>11772192
It is a preference, I never denied that. If you want to talk abour divinely inspired things how can you not take into account these factors

>>11772201
Maybe I am just too dense, but I don't see how I could take them into account in a way that would prove one religion to be more likely than another.

>>11772210
The original question was whether we should equalize all Gods in front of the wager. I said we should not because some Gods actually have a likelyhood of existing whereas most others do not. Evidence for this is based on how (one factor) mystic they are. This is not a scientific question because the *objects* (i use this term very loosely here) do not manifest themselves in the physical world. That is why you have to use different reasoning to this question.

The question I think you are trying to disprove is if there is anything other than materialism, disproving the platonic view if you will. But I would be cautious in intermixing arguments which are not suited for different discussions

>>11772217
>I said we should not because some Gods actually have a likelyhood of existing whereas most others do not. Evidence for this is based on how (one factor) mystic they are.
Yes, but I don't get this part. Can you elaborate on your reasoning which got you to this conclusion.

>>11772223
I reasoned earlier that divine inspiration is the key. What is divine inspiration? It is something suprahuman, something not anthropological. Lets pose, for the sake of argument, there exists such a thing as divine inspiration, and there have been figures in the past who, for some reason or other which we need not go into because it is a whole other discussion which would sink up a lot of time, recieved it. What would be signs of it? How would we differentiate between someone acting like he has been divinely inspired and some who has not? And this is, in a bit more clear and refined way, basically our question we originally started with. One thing, just for starters, would be the scope of a work. Lets take the Quran as an example. It was conferred by an analphabet. Muhammad could not write nor read, yet he conjured up 600 pages of religious texts which others wrote down for him after he got his revelations from an Angel

Another factor for me would be what I mentioned earlier, how mystic is. And mystic in my view, is again something, as I said earlier, suprahuman. Whether you believe someone actually experiences mystic *things* is another debate to be had, and I will yield that the longer time has passed, the more likely it seems people genuinly were mystic. It serves as a link between the manifested and the transcendental in many ways. As such it must necessarily be a benchmark for how genuinly divinely inspired something is

I could go on about this for a while but I hope I cleared up and gave some intution as to what it is I am talking about with this little write-up

>>11772166
Your “imagination” of that god could have been fated by that god.

>>11772242
You sort of did, but that also seems like a subjective quality judgment of mysticism. Mormonism and Scientology both have mystical origins as well; it’s just that, because they occurred within or near your lifetime, and in an era with more skepticism and better record-keeping, you’re able to see the holes in their stories. It seems like you’re ranking likelihood of mysticism based on how “ancient” a religion is, which doesn’t make much sense to me.

>>11772275
Yes, as i yielded in my post above, it does definitely factor in, it is a consequence of loss of information with time. Is it the only part though? No, definitely not. To take the example I used earlier with Islam, Muhammad was mystic enough to have pretty much the entire arab peninsula immidietly follow him. Christianity was much slower, but it had in part to do with Christs oppositions to both Rome and Judaism, both which already had quite a bit of mystic origins. Also again, there are many many factors to determine how divinely inspired someone was, and the raison detre of mysticism. But mysticism is the most tangible one so i like to use that one when i reason

Another point id like to bring out which many seem to have either missed on or ignored, is that Pascal was born during a time when a platonic view of the world (again using the term loosely here) was unquestioned. Something existing outside our material world was seen as an absolute, partly because of Christianity but also because skepticism, humanism and empiricism had yet to take the absolute standing it has today. Seeing from that point of view, the wager makes a lot more sense. I find it a bit sad people misunderstand the wager based on something as silly as viewing it from a modern lense. The argument will eventually boil down to whether matter is all there is or if something else exists. Jumping over the duality and using reasoning meant for other arguments is an unknowing woe for many

>>11772293
>Muhammad was mystic enough to have pretty much the entire arab peninsula immidietly follow him.
He conquered it with force

>>11772648
Yes, my fellow Christian. MAGA

>>11772652
I hope this is bait and you aren't actually so uninformed to think right wing trumpers made this up.

>>11772665
Its an extremly unnuanced view of the expansion of Islam and mostly propagated by right wing tards

>>11772673
It's not a very complex story and it can be summarized as conquering by force.

His influence started in Mecca, after a falling out with the local Quraysh tribe which controlled the city over him denouncing polytheism, he snuck out into hiding and eventually moved to Medina together with his followers and enforced his rule over the other tribes in the city.

In the following years him and his followers would start many raids on Meccan caravans and many small skirmishes ensued which concluded in a large scale battle between Muslim forces and Quraysh forces. The Muslims won and weakened the Meccan rule. Some Bedouin tribes allied themselves with Muhammad as a result of his strengthened position.
The Meccan forces retaliated with a coalition army which laid siege on Medina which lasted several weeks. Muhammad's forces were betrayed by a Jewish tribe in Medina, so he murded all of the men except for a few converts and enslaved women and children.
The siege eventually failed since the Quraysh had underestimated the fortifications of the city and did not have enough resources to maintain it. This resulted in a loss of face for the Quraysh in the eyes of local and foreign tribes and diminished their political power greatly. The number of converts increased and a big tribe allied itself with Muhammad.

After a two year truth, Mohammed started an invasion on Mecca. His 10.000 man strong force overwhelmed the city and they quickly surrendered without a big battle. Only a few leaders were executed due to the quick surrender, everyone else got amnesties.

Two big tribes then declared war against him, but they were defeated in the battle of Hunayn.
Then Muhammad invaded norther Arabia with 30.000 men. Though half of them deserted, the local tribes still surrendered prematurely before any battle took place.

Remaining roaming Bedouin tribes later submitted to his rule as well to gain part in the spoils of the conquests. This basically concluded the conquest of the arabian peninsula.

So you would not describe this as a conquest by force?

>>11771779
doesn't have to be sentient

>>11771779
Kantian delusion

>>11771796
>he thinks living amorally is superior to any code
where'd i say that?

>>11771795
rand is for faggots, faggot

>>11771644
Fucking this. I'm a theist, but Pascal's Wager is completely retarded because of the simple fact that there's a shitton of religions. How can anyone take the Wager seriously?

>>11769186
>>11769392
>>11769409
>>11770047
>>11770037
>>11770942
>>11771264
>>11771331

>>11771434

Thinking faith needs to be rational and logical. No gonna make it

>>11771644

Such a god's salvation would be indistinguishable from his damnation.