Pascal's Wager, or What Are The Odds?

Blaise Pascal

I was involved in a discussion on Facebook a couple of days ago in which someone said this:

I support gay rights and gun control, but I'm still a Christian. If Christians are wrong then when we die nothing happens, but meanwhile we'll have lived a good, morally guided  life and have been good people. But if atheists are wrong they will go to hell. 

I didn't put it in quotes because I can't find the exact conversation, but those are the salient points. Most of you will recognize this as Pascal's Wager, with a rider.

Here's the problem: If you support gay rights and gun control and the Tea-Party-type fundamentalists are right (and therefore you are wrong,) then you aren't living a good life and will probably go to hell with me. See? There are more than two choices. Swap Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Catholic, Baptist and whatever else you can think of for either side of the argument. Mix and match. It's fun and educational.

So that's one of the most common objections to the wager, and there are counter objections and debates that that have been bandied about for the last 103 years over it. Now I may not be an expert, but I do know something about probability theory and I can assure you that the wager is a losing one - especially when one considers what coin is being wagered. Betting on God is not without cost and the house always wins. But it isn't really the wager I'm bothered by.

Ir's the rider.

 ... meanwhile we'll have lived a good, morally guided  life and have been good people. 

This phrase, this highly insulting, despicable, judgmental, asinine fucking phrase on one side of the wager equation means that rational atheists like myself aren't  "living good, morally guided" lives or, indeed,  being "good people." Because we don't believe in God. It's far too commonly expressed.

Allow me to retort:

I am perfectly capable of determining right from wrong without being told what it is in some ancient self-contradictory and often misinterpreted tome whose rules were significantly predated by other even more ancient tomes, and act on those decisions independently of fear of divine eternal retribution or hope of an eternal reward from some imaginary but still admittedly jealous, vengeful bogeyman invented to explain whatever primitive man couldn't readily understand and to control the masses when it seemed they might get out of control.

In fact, I'd venture that the moral decisions I make are more likely to be correct when based on rational thought with the resources of millennia of accumulated knowledge and observation of immediate circumstances than those based on cherry picked interpretations of translations of texts that generalized rules behavior  for uneducated, illiterate mobs of pre-civilized man.

For example, I realize that while the choice between being a vegan and an omnivore may be a moral one, the choice between eating chicken and pork can be safely obliterated just by cooking the pork enough to eliminate the possibility of trichinosis.

It's not up to me to tell anyone not to hold their honest religious beliefs (thank god.) Make your own wagers, live your own life. But live yours. Not mine. I know religious people who are wonderful folks, leading "good and morally driven" lives. But they don't have a monopoly on it, and they certainly don't all fall into that category.