The flaw in Pascal's wager
Religion and critical thinking don't mix
There are - or have been - hundreds, if not thousands, of different religions. They are mostly mutually exclusive, and almost every one of them claims to have the unique singular Truth and that all others are lies, misunderstandings, or misdirections by some evil counter-deity, and failing to observe this Truth will inevitably lead to an afterlife of suffering or torment.
Let's consider this as a vague probability hypothesis.
In the mid 1600s, Blaise Pascal, one of the earliest contributors to probability theory, proposed what has become known as Pascal's wager. Loosely, Pascal's conjecture was that that given the two possibilities "god exists" and "god does not exist" and the two human options of alife subserviant to religious strictures to conduct one's life as if god exists or instead leading a life ungoverned by religion, the safer option is to conduct one's life in the belief in god to safeguard the rewards of heaven and avoid the punishment of hell. On the face of it, sensible, and practical. The problem is Pascal was already a Catholic, and was limiting his scope to that frame of reference alone.
Now, in the light of the huge spectrum of all religions and schisms that exist or ever have, using Pascal's appeal to probability his conclusion is surely set on its head. If only one - or even a small sub-set - are true that means that the majority of religious believers must, de facto, be deluded. Seems unlikely, then, that any particular one of them is true. Choosing the "right" one is a small chance in countless.
It is rather more probable that it's all just a scam commonly repeated over the millennia since pre-history to create a cushy gravy train for an elite priesthood and a tool for the would-be elite to keep everyone else under the thumb and behaving according to the rules they set forth. It's a wonderful model. Officiants demanding benefits now for a price they will never be called upon to pay.
Religion, as a general concept, really is not compatible with critical thinking.
