Pascal's Idiocy, "Wrath's Wager"

“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... 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... But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is."

That is the crux of Pascal's Wager. Worship God just in case he exists in order to avoid his Wrath. What theists tend to forget when they toss Pascal's Wager into the equation as some sort of spiritual CYA is that to truly cover your ass you would have to worship all the gods that have ever existed, at the very least, the ones that ascribe some sort of punishment for non-worship. The problem is that worshipping one God angers another. In Islam, a sure path to hell is to believe in the divinity of Christ just as not believing in Christ as the son of God will condemn you to hell according to Christianity.

Deuteronomy 13:6-10 (New International Version, ©2010)
"6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, 7 gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), 8 do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. 9 You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. 10 Stone them to death..."

Deuteronomy 13:12-16 (New International Version, ©2010)

"12 If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in 13 that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), 14 then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, 15 you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely,[a] both its people and its livestock. 16 You are to gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the LORD your God. That town is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt..."

Passages like these fill the faithful with fear and trembling. What it should fill them with is disgust and outrage. Who would worship such a vain and spiteful god? Regardless, these passages and others like it from other religions, make the idea of Pascal's Wager moot. Worship anyone but the Christian God and you go to hell according to the bible. Worship Jesus and you go to hell according to Islam. But if you fail to worship all of these gods then you have not properly covered your ass.

Now lets complicate it a bit. According to the Aztecs, not keeping a steady flow of virgin blood trickling down the temple steps by ripping out the heart of a child as a sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli would cause the entire universe to end. But doing so would condemn you to hell according to Christianity. Exodus 22:20 "He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, shall be utterly destroyed."
What to do? What to do?

The Hawaiian fire goddess Pele' had a particularly nasty temper when not appeased with human sacrifices as did the Tahitian creator/god Ta'aroa and about a thousand other religions around the world throughout history. Trying to play it safe by worshipping any of them would put you in conflict with about a thousand other religions. So how do you cover your metaphysical ass there?

If you don't die on a battlefield or if you die with any of your limbs detached then you can't join Odin in Valhalla. I don't see any of the intellectual infants who think Pascal's Wager makes sense rushing off to war just in case Odin is the true god.

Also, as has been pointed out, you can't force yourself to believe what you suspect to be untrue. So, how then would Pascal's Wager work? If you are pretending to believe wouldn't God know that deep down you thought the whole thing was full of shit? Would he still let you into heaven knowing that you were faking it?

The whole thing is just silly and I feel kind of silly justifying it with a response, but yet I have. You know... just in case. What we ought to do is the same thing we do in every other instance where there is a profound lack of evidence, suspend belief. That is the only intelligent response.

The beauty of "I don't know and neither do you" is that it doesn't take money from your wallet and put it into some charlatan's collection plate. It doesn't cause you to hate other people because their lifestyle doesn't conform to laws written two thousand years ago by sheep-herders. It doesn't cause you to embarrass yourself, bowing and scraping before an illusion, throwing yourself about, possessed by mass delusion while being whipped into a fervor by a man in a two-thousand dollar suit that your tithings paid for. It doesn't impact your ability to reason and leave you pray to other spiritual scam artists like astrologers and tarot card readers. It doesn't cause you to spout nonsense like a man lived in the belly of a big fish or a 600-year-old man built an arc and filled it with two of every animal on earth. It doesn't have the potential side effect of making you a sexist, racist, homophobic, child-abusing, intolerant bigot. It doesn't make you some self-righteous asshole. You will never martyr yourself for atheism. You will never refuse life-saving medical treatment for you or your loved ones because of atheism. You will never pray when you should act because of atheism. You will never place your children in the care of pedophiles because of atheism. Given this, isn't the safer bet non-belief?