Ok, I think I see now. But, I still say that having the option of different deities to choose from throws the logic off.
According to Pascal, choosing to believe does you no harm if there is no God, and will grant you Paradise if there is.
Where is the cost/benefit analysis between choosing a potentially wrong deity and just simply refusing to make a choice? Perhaps choosing the wrong pony will send you to Hell, whilst remaining agnostic will grant you a cozy berth in Limbo?
No the wager is more like placing all your chips on one number, If you guess right you gain everything, and if you guess wrong or don’t pick a number, you suffer for all eternity (assuming that’s the losing outcome). i.e. opting out of placing a bet is still a wager.
And that was sort of the core of the whole Pascal wager. You are making a bet whether you want or intend to or not. Sort of related to the “not deciding is still deciding” for any choices. Or not voting is still choice.
She wouldn’t be the first socially conscious singer to convert to Islam. That she seems to have been having trouble lately seems to give rise to the oh-so-tempting “religion is a mental illness” narrative that attracts a certain class of atheist like cheese does a cartoon mouse.
Excellent question! You’re positing a third option, which isn’t part of Pascal’s logic. But certainly just as valid as his 2 options.
Which is to say: I haven’t a clue and don’t want to speculate for fear of going even deeper down the rabbit hole!
“This is the natural conclusion of any intelligent theologian’s journey. All scripture study leads to Islam.”
Then I have good news for you about the Vedas.
Indeed!
The thing is, I kind of get the impulse to paint with that broad brush with regards to religion, because I felt how oppressive living in a place where religion has a strong sway over how life is lived. Much of my own problems in part stem from being unable to accept living how I was “supposed” to live based on religious doctrine of a particular kind.
But being a historian, I feel compelled to attend to those complexities that exist in real life rather than those that give us easy answers.
Religion may not be a mental illness, but recruitment of adults into cults is definitely something that often involves preying on people who are troubled. Christianity, for example, explicitly tells recruits they are all worthless sinners, born evil, who can only be truly loved and redeemed by one entity. Shuhada Davitt is someone with a literal history of mental illness. Definitely ripe for the picking when it comes to religious conversion of one kind or another.
There are all sorts of institutions that regularly “scam” people. I don’t think anyone “tricked” her into converting or forced her (which is a trope regularly leveled as Islam). It’s also important to note that religion can be employed in a liberatory fashion as well - the use of liberation theology in Latin America, numerous anti-colonial movements, the American civil rights movement, among other examples… The history of religion is a complicated one, and you can find all kinds of examples of it being used for oppression and for liberation. If she feels that she’s found something that helps her feel more at home in the world (especially given her very public struggles from way back), who are we to judge her?
Depends on the religion. In ancient Greece, for example, the gods did not care one whit whether you believed in them or not - all they cared about was whether you performed the ritual propitiations and observances. This is not at all uncommon among religions, but the Christian and Islamic faiths have come to dominate global mindspace to the point where everyone confuses their features with the features of religion in general (to the detriment of everyone concerned).
The ancient Norse gods didn’t even necessarily care if you performed their rituals. Odin would take you to Valhalla as long as you were sufficiently valiant, because he was just storing up troops for the end times.
She’s already judging other people, people who once believed as she did:
Anyone who doesn’t believe as she does isn’t intelligent and/or hasn’t made a “theologian’s journey”. She isn’t saying “this works for me” but rather “this is the only intelligent choice”.
I hope she’s as happy as she seems.
So, that makes it okay to just dismiss her as mentally ill woman being tricked into converting? Gotcha.
Yeah, me too. Her music is great and she deserves a bit of joy in this fucked up world that actively tries to grind us down.
Is it ok for her to judge all other people as not being intelligent enough to convert to Islam?
Ah Shuhada, you had a nice voice and your time in the sun but your insistence on believing there is a magic man in the sky isn’t something I care about. Your dismissal of everyone else who believes in the magic man in the sky but doesn’t believe the same way you do… well, that’s kinda sad and pathetic. It’s as if she has completely skipped all the good teachings that all the Abrahamic religions share and has gone straight for the dogma and hate. I wish her well in her journey but I also hope I don’t stumble across any more stories about it.
Do you think that’s what she’s doing? Because she seems to be talking about her theological journey, not all human beings ever. She specifically says a “theological journey.”
No one is telling you to convert to anything. You do you, always.
And it’s not like there aren’t plenty of atheists who insist that anyone who has some faith in a religion is a delusional idiot.
/me smugly plays the atheist card.
Yes. “Theological journey” merely explains why she didn’t come to her inescapable “conclusion of any intelligent theologian” earlier.
I may sometimes. You ruined your argument by adding a patently false universal claim. I don’t “always” tell people to convert to something. (I’d actually say it’s pretty rare that I suggest someone “convert”, but the precise frequency is irrelevant since all that matters in terms of proving your claim wrong is that I don’t do it “always”.)
There absolutely are. I’ve never said otherwise, and you are free to judge them. My comment was targeted at your insistence that we should not “judge” Shuhada Davitt. If she is judging other people’s religion and religious choices, as I’d say she clearly is with her claims about Islam, then how is it that we can not do likewise to her? You still haven’t addressed that.
My problem with Pascal’s wager is you might annoy a God or gods if you guess wrong.
My wager is this. If you’re at a party and you run into someone you kind of know but you can’t remember their name. Is it better to guess and get their name wrong, or to skate around the issue of using their name until some evidence appears that convinces you of the truth?
Calling someone Jehovah or Allah or Waheguru, but it turns out the creator’s name is Duc Cao Dai or Ahura Mazda or Gaia. Seems a little arrogant to presume we know anything so specific.
In the category of big fucking deal this is a lower case bfd.
