Perhaps the most pernicious religious belief. It’s the initial assumption from which all the rest of religious belief flows.

The attitude assumes the outcome of the quest to learn and wonder. “No matter what, the answer is going to be God”. I see no need to presume an end-game, it’s the journey that’s important. It’s OK to say “I don’t know”. Beliefs are rest-stops along the way, they shouldn’t be used as permanent residences for the mind. All knowledge is inadequate, but religious belief, for many of us, is more than inadequate. It’s unnecessary. It attempts to nail down and codify the human propensity to wonder and inquire, to ask and not be satisfied with the answer. If you think you already know something so absolutely that you prefer to ignore and even disparage any information you encounter that challenges those beliefs and if you’ve already reached an unassailable conclusion in advance of hearing all the evidence then you have followed the wrong path and have encountered a dead-end, an intellectual infinite loop. Your knowledge cannot grow as it has nowhere to go. The limitations of belief create a boundary layer, a point beyond which faith cannot go.
I contend that anyone who proposes that they already know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the end of the journey of knowledge is; anyone who claims a special knowledge of the final answer without having asked all the questions; anyone who contends that they have completed the journey, that they’ve travelled clear to the end of knowledge and have come back to let a few of us in on the secret; are liars. They aren’t lying to me, I don’t believe them. They’re lying to themselves. They’ve convinced themselves that they possess all the answers, that there’s nothing know beyond this or that god. They’ve put their intellect on hold, they’ve created an answer that excuses them from asking any questions that are difficult or outside the bounds of faith.

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One frequent, and flawed, argument Christians often employ in an attempt to make faith sound reasonable is Pascal’s Wager.

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is….
…”God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.
Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”
Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.

I seriously doubt the majority of those who try to use this argument to counter atheism have ever read Pascal’s Pensées since they rarely if ever quote him properly not do they seem aware of the larger philosophical argument he was making.

It also presumes that faith can be engaged and disengaged at will and still be rewarded by god as genuine faith. Faith assumed simply as a choice and not embraced passionately, “with all your heart and mind”, is not acceptable to the majority of Christian religions. “I might as well believe” is not considered a true conversion and does not earn redemption according to most denominations, if not all. So in that context the faith that results from Pascal’s Wager would not be accepted by most Christians as “true faith” and would be a waste of time and effort.

For fun, the next time a Christian tries to pass Pascal’s Wager off as a credible argument for belief in god, respond with Richard Dawkin’s version of the wager…

Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc.”

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And why should that be important? If his greatest desire was that every person would meet him, why should it matter how that happened. Whether you came to believe in him philosophically or needed direct evidence, it shouldn’t matter. All that should be important is that you got there. So evidently having faith is more important than knowing god himself.

Who says faith trumps skepticism? When and by whom was it decided that the gods could only be believed in, not required to be here among us in the flesh? Why should it be unreasonable to ask any god for a sign, an unmistakably unnatural sign, in order to believe…if belief is the ultimate goal for humans?

Theists complain that we just don’t know their god [insert reason here]. That’s the whole point. We don’t know your god, or their god, or those gods over there. You know why? For a vast variety of reasons. Ask any atheist why they don’t believe. No two answers will be the same. Theism doesn’t have a single “fail” point. It has millions. As many as there are people who don’t know your god.

Theists, here’s a free tip: Many atheists are offended by your attempts to discredit atheism by attacking evolution (as if that were some sort of condition upon which our disbelief relied) without bothering to learn anything about the topic. It’s insulting to expect us to defend misstatements and misrepresentations. I understand the reason few theists know anything about evolution. When you sit down and look at “evolution” you find it’s not a single branch of study. It’s a part of biology, geology, cosmology and I’m sure a few “ologies” I”ve forgotten. It’s a massive range of sciences that contribute to evolutionary science. It’s so much easier to only have a single textbook, to only be responsible for skimming it.

Quit trying to make it seems as if your religion is scientifically sound, logical, practical or any other similar justification. It’s not.

Go back to the old ways. Religions should be mystical, mysterious. Humans love a good mystery. By trying to make your religion practical, you kill off the mystery and replace it with poorly understood misinformation. When religion was a mystery, it was much more compelling. It was also harder to counter. It’s hard to oppose what’s done in secret.

Now, both the major religions around here, Christianity and Islam, have stripped the mystery away and exposed the seedy underbelly of religion. We see the inability of a religious belief to make any substantial difference in the lives of its followers, except in the most extreme cases. Religious differences are still fueling wars, being honored as excuses for murder and abuse, still failing to provide the improvement they claim among their own number.

You need to get the mystery back.

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a rather obvious indication that even the leader of the Catholic church doesn’t really believe “God’s will be done…”? Shouldn’t he be trusting his god to protect him, or accept god’s will if god’s will dictates he be assaulted?

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