Talk:2947: Pascal's Wager Triangle

Apparently, if two people are writing a first draft at the same time, the wiki appends one to the other. Welp. GreatWyrmGold (talk) 02:29, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

If you add another one it puts it beside the second, and you have Pascal's explanation.172.70.85.102 08:33, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Some religions (such as my own) prohibit polytheism, so that's an added wrench in the works. --141.101.98.119 06:56, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

I think MOST religions are quite strict about the idea that you are supposed to CHOOSE single religion, preferably the one in question, and not trying to cover all bases by believing in multiple ones. Which is the answer to Pascal's Wager: choosing wrong God is likely to result in worse punishment than choosing none, so better NOT believe. -- Hkmaly (talk) 09:44, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Well, it might be considered a bad "memetic trait" to have "as well as believing in our thing, you can believe in anything else". (Much as a number of holy books include the instruction that you should not change anything when copying the book, and this would clearly be a "dominant meme" as soon as someone spontaneously thinks to add it to a previously mutable version of the text.) Although there's syncratic religions which are effectively a case of "horizontal meme transfer", philoso-evolutionarily.

But polythesitic pantheons aren't unusual within a (structurally singular) religion. The three branches of abriamic religion ("There is no god but Jehovah", "There is no god but God (sic)", there is no god but Allah", at least unless you start going into the prevalence of trinitarianism and "praying to individual saints") and I think Sikhism is rather good at "everything is but an aspect of the one..." (even when it comes to considering other religions' own ideas, and thus nominally folding ). But multi-deity (and zero-deity) religions/beliefs/etc are quite widespread, so an exclusivity of "my god" might be considered rare. (Though, numbers-wise, Christianity (in all its flavours) and Islam (ditto) add up to just over half of the world's population, perhaps being generous with 'habitual followers' rather than just the most devout. So it would be fairly accurate to say that most people are living under a (theoretically) quite strict monotheistic situation. Not that they all agree with each other quite what 'the singly god' is (even within themselves, ask a Protestent what they think about what a Catholic thinks, as the famous joke about this goes; and that's definitely not solely a Christian trait), although that's not what we're counting. 172.71.242.54 21:05, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

This reminds me of a novel (I think it was Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey) where in the distant future, all religions ended up merging into two - one where there is at most one god and one where there is at least one god. Shamino (talk) 14:15, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

A surprisingly large number of religions actually don't care if you additionally are a member of another religion. Happens all the time in eastern Asia.162.158.212.173 21:05, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

What if there is a God, but they don't want you to believe in them?172.70.86.35 11:48, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Or a God, but they have impostor syndrome? P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 12:34, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Or a God, and he just wants to screw over us all (not in the Yivo sense, mind you)? (Under this condition, all three outcomes are possible: he wants us to believe, he wants to hide, he couldn't care less) 198.41.242.174 08:05, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

How did the middle Cueball on line 3 not realize that both Gods he was being asked to believe in are the same God (since the ones on line 2 both got it from the same Cueball on line 1)? Is there also a game of Telephone going on? Barmar (talk) 14:29, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Tbf there's no clarification by the Line 2 guys that they're talking about the same God. It makes sense that he'd assume they're different. If two different religious people told you at the same time "My God is real" and you'd never really been exposed to religion or atheism, you would assume they were talking about two. Forgive me if I made any unfair assumptions here. P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 15:34, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

>>then there is minimal cost to drawing one anyway<< I argue that drawing a complete pascal's triangle will take infinite time and infinite resources. Which is slightly above "minimal cost" 108.162.221.61 05:34, 19 June 2024 (UTC)