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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Interestingly, the base Pascal wager makes sense without any infinite suffering at all. Regardless, there are a variety of ways of handling it, especially if your concern is that Roko (a person) is just making up a basilisk.

It is just not sustainable as there is no way to distinguish between a religion that is made up by humans and one that is actually correct.

This seems to be your real objection, not the multiple religion concern. You think it's just impossible to actually assess anything involved, including probabilities. Presumably, that means it's also impossible for you to assess the probability that atheism is true.

Presumably, that means it's also impossible for you to assess the probability that atheism is true.

Well yes. But we can prove that many things are true which fly in the face of established religions. For example evolution goes against the Christian creation myth. The sun doesn't actually go to the underworld every night like the ancient Egyptians thought, the earth simply rotates away from it. As far as I can tell, you can repeat this for most religions.

So while I can't prove that atheism is true, I can find arguments that make established religions less likely to be true. If your religion makes claims that turn out to be demonstrably false, then that is fairly solid evidence against it. Even if that was not the case, Pascal's wager still doesn't work. It is not safer for me to subscribe to a religion than it is to be a nonbeliever, as not only are many religions mutually exclusive, several are much harsher to those religions they are directly opposed to than they are to people who simply don't believe.