Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
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Here’s my thoughts on Pascal’s Wager. Pretty much the same as your’s. Just passing in on.
In Pascal’s wager it is generally assumed that the belief has to be genuine. Of course that makes great practical problems to try to use the wager, but things like being in (in Pascal’s case) christian environments and then just assume that that would increase the probability that you would eventually become a genuine christian believer, I think is what is often proposed. The fundamental problem with the wager is another: How could we know, or more importantly; even reasonably assume, that a genuine belief in any given particular belief would make a possible god or similar supernatural force more symphatetic toward us? As of today we have no signs whatever of the existence of any such supernatural being of force, and with this comes also that, should surprisingly enough it exist anyway, we do not know anything about its preferences. It could be that it treated belivers in some particular faith (christianity or whatever) better than other people, but it could just as well be that it treated people of that particular faith worse. Thus from our best knowledge of today there is no difference in the statistically expected benevolence from a hypothetically existing supernatural being or force towards believers or nonbelievers in any particular faith.