Greta's Meme of the Day

"Believing in God is a safer bet" is a terrible reason to believe in God. If you believe because you fear being punished for not believing, it's like dating someone because they threaten to beat you up if you don't. Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across. ~ Greta Christina


Pascal's Wager is an argument I don't get very often. When I do it's very easy to refute although I've never used the one above. When I struggled with whether to believe in the Christian god or not this was a thought that crossed my mind frequently. Why would a loving god want to inflict eternal damnation on a person just because that person couldn't believe in him AND couldn't accept that his son was sacrificed for our unworthiness. I mean REALLY! Couldn't god come up with a better, more believable, and more worthy of a story that was timeless and gentle? According to the definition of god Christians use I'd say, "Yes. Yes he could have."


So the argument is the salvation story was written for the people of that time. Those people understood blood sacrifices and atonement. They was accustomed to sacrificing animals to their gods and the bloodier the better. So the writers of that part of the bible wrote to appease these primitive people. 


Over the years, hundreds of years mind you, we have changed to be kinder to each other, to know that slavery is wrong and that equal rights for women benefits all of us. Our morals have changed (imagine that!). This Christian god would have known that this was going to happen. In fact, why didn't he just make us that way in the first place. A lot of suffering and death would have been avoided. A lot.


OK, with this knowledge is it still a better bet to believe in god than not to believe? For me, once I got my head around this concept, there was no way I could convince myself to take the story seriously much less believe in it. Who's to say that the ancient Greek and Roman myths aren't true? They are just as unbelievable and were just as believed in their time as the Christian myth is in current times.


My answer is a resounding NO! This is not a good bet. For one thing there is no evidence and another thing is the story is just plain unbelievable on it's own merits. I'll stick with no belief in gods or goddesses until something better comes along.