this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Pascal's Wager was (edit: not) intended to be taken seriously, but it sort of took on a life of its own.
Yes, and Gnosticism is definitely cool; just saying reading the source texts is a pretty miserable experience. Better to Monster Manualize it, boil it down to critters and cosmology without the lard of worship.
And, yes, there were a lot of people attracted to world-as-torture-device, but it's interesting that can invalidate a philosophy when the countervailing philosophy of God Loves Us attracts a greater amount of disordered thinking.... This is an artifact of exactly what we're talking about--the need for people to avoid acknowledging existentially destabilizing realities. Check out The Last Messiah for more on that.
Back to Catholicism: it's a religion. All religions have psychological and social value, lest they would not exist. There's not any real point to rate and compare religions, because I believe they are simply the result of society and not its determiners.
Really? Maybe that's how I got my misconception of it. My favorite thing about this thread is I'm getting a lot of stuff to reexamine, so this ones moving to the top of the list.
Dude, that would be so sick! I really love Monster Manuals! One of the Gnostic thought people I talked to recently actually showed me a video that was showcasing the different deities in a similar way, but as Tumblr art characters. Very entertaining.
I hadn't considered that angle for our discussion here but that's true. The biggest damage any Faith-based theology is doing to incentivising people to decouple from tangible reality. I won't ever defend that, I just don't know of a way it's possible for anyone to widely convince people to stop doing it.
I'll consider that last part. That seems like an idea I'll have to examine for a bit. Thank you for engaging and for all the recommendations, Schipelblorp ๐ Always a pleasure
Did you read in the intended "not" into "Pascal's wager was intended to be taken seriously." ? Because I think it was an idle thought experiment that got taken up by Christians.
I have spent more time reading monster manuals than I ever have playing... it's mythological crack.
If you want more, the person that's pushed forward my thinking most recently is Britt Hartley of No Nonsense Spirituality on YouTube. She cheekily refers to herself as "your atheist spiritual director", but there's a lot of wisdom there. I think you'll appreciate her attempts to separate the baby from the bathwater, as you have with Catholicism here.
Ooh you know I actually didn't, I was just assuming he was being serious considering the non-secular time he existed in. But I didn't exactly think he was talking about the results being literal eternal suffering or paradise either. In my misconception I had thought he was proposing to live as a functional faith practitioner and just reap the tangible benefits of that when you're alive. So thanks for prompting me to actually look at it.
You already know I love youtube. I'll get to that first before the books but probably not before the further Wikipedia articles I got recommended in this thread. Is it cool if I message you any thoughts she stirs up? I definitely appreciate people who can identify pro-social and useful facets of problematic ideologies.
Sure! Love to hear your thoughts.
She's like a third-wave atheist, recognizing that hating women and muslims isn't a coherent philosophy to build a life around, that there's more to the human project than being technically correct actually.