A Fools Gambit

It has been a long time since I posted anything, and I would like to blame a hectic workload or long term lack of an internet connection, but it is much simpler, I have been too lazy to write anything of substance so I didn't write anything at all.
Today I am going to lay into Pascals Wager, which was originally put forward by Blaise Pascal who is famous for his contributions to areas of maths, science and theology. He did a lot of work on fluids and pressure with the standard unit of pressure used today being named after him and amongst his contributions to maths was Pascals Triangle, which is a nice demonstration of a few properties of numbers, noticeably Binomial Expansions, there is even a programming language named after the guy. But like many great minds of times gone by he had a bit of a weakness for religion, specifically Christianity which lead he to propose a theological argument known today as Pascals Wager.

The wager looks at 4 different scenarios and considers their costs, it goes something like this:
1) If there is a God and you believe you get to go to heaven (infinite reward)
2) If there is a God and you do not believe you go to hell (infinite punishment)
3) If there is no God and you believe you lose nothing (null)
4) If there is no God and you don't believe you gain nothing (null)
From this it is clear that under Pascals system if there is no God your belief or not makes no difference where as if God does exist and you believe you win big but if you do not believe you lose everything, so the obvious choice is to believe just in case.

So how could I possibly hope to argue with such watertight logic proposed by such a smartarse, maybe I am not as intelligent as he was, maybe I am, that has no real bearing on the situation since in either case everyone makes mistakes. So lets see what I can throw at it.

First, which god? The way Pascal puts forward the argument makes it seem to be a choice of either his God or no god, that simply is not the case, even within Christianity there are roughly 30 000 denominations, many of which claim some/all of the others are going to hell. Then there are the gods of all other religions around the world and their denominations, again for the most part mutually exclusive. The same can be said for the gods of extinct religions or those that will be invented in the future. But even there the number of possible gods does not stop, there are an infinite variety of god concepts that will never even be considered, what if one of them gets it right. But tearing apart the numbers benefit isn't all we can do by considering other gods. For any version that can be put forward with the believe or suffer clause there is a god almost identical who is satisfied with being a good person regardless of belief, will reward everyone, punish everyone, not bother with the afterlife at all or only reward those who spent the 2nd Tuesday of each month locked in a purple room with green spots standing on one leg, or any other criteria imaginable. Basicly the wager is only viable when given a small selection of gods (ideally just one) who all follow the believe or suffer scheme and neither of those criteria is even remotely achieved.
But that's not all, assuming an all knowing god who only rewards belief then the belief must be genuine, merely professing a belief just to be safe (the whole point of the wager) just wont cut it, the frauds will spend an eternity in torment just like the other unbelievers. Given that, the wager is essentially pointless since belief is not a conscious choice, it is a result of analysing the evidence that has been presented. Case in point, I rather like the idea of some sort of continuing consciousness after death, at least until a time of my choosing, but with no evidence at all to support such an idea I can not honestly claim belief in an afterlife no matter how much I like the idea.
I can currently think of one more point of contention to Pascals wager, the claimed non zero cost of believing, depending on the specific denomination belief can have any number of costs including but by no means limited to 10% of your income going to the church, any number of psychological and mental hangups about parts of human nature your specific denomination objects to, with sex, masturbation, contraceptives and the gays being rather popular candidates here. But maybe your denomination is a little more hardcore and encourages you to sell everything and use the money to spread the word or explode yourself to strike against the infidels. Mutilation of yourself or children also seems to be popular, probably just to make sure god can tell the holy and unholy apart once they get to the judgement stage.

On a personal note a god such as Pascals who rewards blind faith over a good life is a needy, self obsessed, narcissistic prick who I have little interest in spending any length of time with, given a choice of an infinate amount of time in a lake of fire or as the mindless sycophant to such a character I am not sure which would be the worse torture.

Census

Next year Britain is having another census, this will provide all the official population statistics used in policy decisions for at least the next decade, so it is rather important that the figures are representative of the population. As such a campaign has been started to encourage accurately answering one specific question which may seem insignificant but can have massive implications.

The problem here is people who have a cultural heritage of being Christian but do not attend church, do not believe in the biblical god and are in no way practising Christians, or those who have been baptised or grew up Christian but no longer believe have in the past answered the census question "What is your religion?" with Christian. This reduces the recorded percentage of non-believers and exaggerates the percentage of believers, leading to

More public spending on religious stuff including the last governments push to build loads of faith schools (a subject for another day)

Keeping bishops in the house of lords 'just because'

Continued ritual worship in schools

Laws on things such as equality still having privileges for the religious

amongst other things. The harm inflicted by each of these is fairly obvious so I wont bother attacking religion today that is not the point of this post.

So if you go to church week in week out. If you think indoctrination into the Christian faith is a good use of public money in this economic climate. If you believe the bible is literally true and that a morally perfect being can justify inflicting an infinite punishment on everyone who was a good person without accepting that beings existence. Feel free to tick the box for Christian, the goal here is an accurate census, not one biassed in my favour.(aint intellectual integrity a bitch)

However if you were baptised but lost your faith, if you were raised Christian but saw through the bullshit, if you do not attend church weekly and you acknowledge the Bible is a book of bronze age myths or if you have just never been convinced by preachers claims, please tick no religion. Or at the very least deist if you believe in some sort of non personal god. (I will be defining all the different types of belief systems in an upcoming post that just needs tidying up)

If you are still not sure where you stand then it probably isn't with the Christians, but the link up top has a few glowing neon links to pages that can help you decide.

Militant? atheism

The phrase militant atheist is often used to describe atheists like Richard Dawkins who are well known for actively and publicly speaking out against religion, no violence, no threats, not even emotional manipulation just cold hard reasoning and facts.

If however I use the phrase militant Muslim, the first thing most people thing of is the jihadi lunatics in Al Quida and the taliban, that is a huge difference in behaviours yet both are described by the same word.

One more common example, militant Christian, this reminds me of all the dicking about between Catholics and Protostants in Ireland, the Crusades and those such as the Dove Outreach Centre and Westboro Baptist church who while they don't go round murdering people are still bigoted hateful lunatics.

Now for something you probably haven't heard before militant Buddhist, what springs to mind?

Probably a far eastern guy with a bald head and orange robes, but here is the important part. Is he peacefully talking about how great Buddhism is, fanatically preaching how all the non Buddhists will suffer and deserve it or brandishing an AK-47.

Just my thoughts on how the term militant atheist seems to be yet another approach to tar atheists with the same brush as the worst religion has to offer, despite the fact no atheist has ever done anything evil to promote atheism. Although I must admit there have been atheists who were real dicks for other reasons.

Lay off the Muslims you bigots

I am going to cover two related topics in todays post.

1) The "Ground Zero Mosque"
Can they, yes. Should they, there is no reasonable argument against it.
Listen to some people and you will get the impression Osama Bin Laden is planning to personally build a Mosque on ground zero as some sort of monument to extremist stupidity, this is shear bullshit of a purer quality than found on cattle farms.
Firstly it is not at ground zero, it is two blocks away and neither site can be seen from the other.
Second the term Mosque is more than a little over inflammatory, a Muslim prayer facility is included, but so are a variety of secular facilities such as a swimming pool and a childrens play area. However there will be other religious facilities in the community centre, namely prayer areas for Jews and Christians, suddenly the building is a little less confrontational isnt it.
Thirdly America has a couple of points in its constitution about separation of church and state and rights to religious freedoms, so even if it was a Mosque denying it would require denying ALL religious buildings regardless of faith.
If they wanted (and owned the land) Muslims could build a statue of Bin Laden taking a dump on ground zero itself, it would be in very bad taste and create a backlash against all Muslims not just the crackpot extremists but there would be no legal reason to prevent it.


2)Burn the Koran day
Can they, yes. Should they, probably not but their call.
As far as I know this was actually cancelled, but I wrote most of this a couple of days ago so its still getting posted.
Much as religious freedoms in the constitution allow the rather offensive and extreme example I gave above they also protect the right of a 30 strong church in backwater Florida to burn other peoples holy books, so if they want to noone can stop them. That being said burning ANY book is incredibly tasteless, a symbol of destroying that which you disagree with, intolerance and censorship of ideas. All books have some value at least in terms of literature or history. But there is more to it than that, Muslims see the Koran in much the same way Christians see the Bible so everyone understands that all this will achieve is pissing off a bunch of Muslims. The fanatics will become more fanatic and a few borderline moderates may slip into fanaticism. All that the fundies are managing on both sides is spreading the illusion that all Muslims/Westerners are bigoted hate filled oxygen thieves hell bent on eradicating the opposite side. This is far from true and the majority of people on both sides are far more open minded and reasonable than the other side gives them credit for, despite the medias efforts to get a good story by making the other guy look evil.

The latest on these issues.