(This is a reply to a post on page 160 of (currently) 178... Feel free to ignore.)
I wonder, did Siquo's re-conversion involve probability quasi-science? e.g. even if there the chances of the bible being true are tiny, the punishment for being wrong in the case of atheism is nothing while the otherway around would equal eternal punishment.
Now, this is actually one of the arguments that turned me atheist... I react badly to extortion.
Personally, I react badly to Pascal's wager. He doesn't take into account the contrary wishes of alternate deities.
One might prescribe that you eat fish on a Friday. Which is reasonable enough. But another might
proscribe fish-eating on a Friday. Or fish eating at any time. Or any eating at all during daylight and/or night-time on certain Fridays/any Friday. So what do you do? Go all bulimic with your Fish Supper and hope that it satisfies them all? (Watch out for the God who hates you for wasting food!)
Pursuing the wishes of any particular deity in the interests of pleasing Him could get you in trouble with another one that
actually exists (and almost always causes you Earthly inconveniences, though you may take the view that this is the least of your worries when your eternal soul might be at stake). Whereas honestly pursuing a more generically non-theistically-inclined "be good to everyone else" course of living could easily be looked upon kindly by most versions of deities, except those who are really far too picky to be able to please at all (or explicitly require that you are actually
not good to everyone else), which makes it a low-odds crap shoot to start with and
maybe slightly better to aim at a random religion that you think you could fake complience with... But then faking complience is surely a doomed concept when dealing with your typical omniscient being...
The alternate POV is (I think) made in The Last Battle (C.S. Lewis, the chronoligically last in the Narnia series of books) that "Evil done for the sake of [Good God] Aslan is accepted by [the Evil God] and good deeds done in the name of [the Evil God] is accepted by Aslan", or words to that effect. But then you're dealing with a pantheon of gods (or at least a duotheistic pairing) and outside the realm of one all-powerful monotheistic deity or similar panentheistic entity.
Now, if I was actually able to change my own nature, I may be able to say that this is why I follow my own particular course within the hinterland of theism/atheism, gnosticism/agnosticism and devotion/apatheism. But then I also 'believe' that I am restrained by causality to be who I am, think what I think, do what I do, entirely based upon determinism, so that'd be a rather disingenuous argument to rely upon anyway... But (playing my part within this deterministic universe of mine) I'm also bound to explain this particular world-view to you all. Sorry, can't help it! It's the universe that made me do it!