i am going to disagree here. what he was offered was companionship and compassion in his suffering.
distraction from the pain, sure, but not distraction from reflection.
playing games like this does not prevent you from reflection. i haven't played elite dangerous yet, but other games like it. these games are not a mindless distraction. they can be, but they don't have to be. you play an intelligent being, and how you act in the game reflects on how you act as a person.
being confined to the hospital, the game allowed michael to break out of its confines and act as the human being that he is within a virtual world. doing that allows plenty of opportunity for reflection on your life. and i am sure he did his fair share of it.
in the end, death is not a punishment, but a release from suffering.
someone once said that handicapped people are a test for everyone else around them, how they react and treat them.
the elite dangerous community has passed that test, and hence michael was allowed to leave this earthly plane and ascend.
> "in the end, death is not a punishment, but a release from suffering."
That's a very big assumption, and one to be very careful about when making decisions about what choices to encourage others to make in their final days. In fact, it's a belief itself, yet you're treating it as if it's a fact and one we can safely live by and encourage others to live by. That's very serious.
it's not an assumption but an interpretation based on how life after death is described. and of course yes, it's a belief. sorry for not making that clear. without any belief, death is nothing, just end of life.
whether this belief is reasonable or not, you'll need to decide for yourself by researching relevant sources. i did not intend to encourage anyone to live by it, rather my intention is to console those who are grieved by the loss of a loved one.
Pascals wager is garbage, it underestimates the time, effort and thought cost if there is no god. What sort of reflections would otherwise be meaningful? All the regrets they have? It's a kid, he had cancer, what could he have done differently?
There's also the point that to play a cynical game with religious belief in order to maximise your outcome, would probably annoy most so-far posited gods a lot more than an honest skeptic.
edit - there would be much variation in approach however. The Greek gods would tend towards maximising poetic irony and unusual animal husbandry practices, whereas Jehova would probably just smite Pascal with boils.
Whatever anyone thinks of sdegutis's comment (and I didn't like it much either), what they actually wrote bears no resemblance to the "twisted and wicked thoughts" that you made up and put in their mouth.
From the HN guidelines:
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I understand your point but what I wrote is the strongest possible interpretation of his comment that is possible for an atheist like me.
That's exactly what he said for me. That the terminally ill child should avoid distractions that lessen his suffering just to have time to reflect on his short and troubled life because death might not be the end and there might be some consequences after that which is completely supernatural reason flying in the face of all available evidence.
You presume that by believing in a God you're not living life in the best way you can, but is there really an objective (non-religious) "best way" to live life? I would assume that for the average religious person, the way they live their life feels just about right (barring any intrinsic human shortcomings).
If following a religion has zero downsides in life, then it needs no justification. However, the act of trying to justify religion suggests it’s not inherently optimal.
So, the actual counter argument to Pascal’s wager is this. If there are some true god(s) that care they might have an actual objective scale, but as it’s unknowable any sacrifices for a specific religion are unwise.
In other words we don’t know if the objective scale is a specific belief, doing charitable works, sacrifices on a dark alter, or even maximizing the number of times we say purple on a given day. Further, without specific information you are equally likely to get the scale reversed as correct, possibly both suffering great long term harm as well as sacrifices in life. Thus, with the sum of all possible outcomes averaging to zero, the only net expected result is the sacrifice in life.
PS: I am positing this as a flaw in a logical argument, don’t take it out of that context.
If following a religion has zero downsides in life, then it needs no justification. However, the act of trying to justify religion suggests it’s not inherently optimal.
let me rephrase that:
If following civil laws has zero downsides in life, then they need no justification. However, the act of trying to justify certain laws suggests that they are not inherently optimal
life with zero downsides does not exist. we need to make some compromises if we want to live together as a society. be those civil laws or a religion is a matter of choice, but we can't opt out.
the need to justify religion does not invalidate religion any more than the need to justify laws invalidates those.
as a society we still need to decide which laws we want to implement.
and as an individual everyone needs to investigate for themselves which religion (if any) to follow.
That’s not really what I saying I should have added net downside.
Anyway, you don’t need to opt out of religion, that’s the default state. To use an obvious example, at birth people don’t have a codified view of what happens after death.
People can and often are biased based on their upbringing, but that in effect takes effort from an existing believer to communicate their beliefs directly or via artifacts like books. Without that, nothing forces you to form an option.
Basically, using whatever measurement system you choose their is the best possible outcome after cost benefit analysis.
Aka if religion Alpha offers the best possible tangible outcomes using whatever metrics you are bashing this choice on and it also offers the best possible unknowable outcomes then their is little reason to pick anything else. By tangible rewards/costs I mean things that could be theoretically verified like joy, physical fitness, social acceptance, positive legacy etc. and by intangible rewards/costs I mean what the gods / spirits / whatever think of you, what happens in the afterlife etc.
Essentially it’s only if you rank religions by tangible rewards and intangible rewards separately and end up with a different first place that the intangible rewards become an issue.
> and as an individual everyone needs to investigate for themselves which religion (if any) to follow
I disagree. Nobody needs to investigate any religions. There's no knowledge based reason to do that. You might want to join religion for the community but even then there rarely any investigation necessary. It's sufficient to just follow their practices.
if you just want to join a community, and don't actually care what the community stands for, sure.
but we are discussing pascal's wager.
if god exists, you want to do what god asks for. that requires that you investigate what god is really asking for. joining a random community and just following their practices will help you do that. you have to investigate and figure out whether these practices make any sense.
you may or may not find an answer. either way it's up to you to keep searching (maybe there is a better answer).
sure, you can take pascals wager on blind faith. but that would be a pure gamble. i prefer to make an educated guess. and that requires investigation.
> sure, you can take pascals wager on blind faith. but that would be a pure gamble.
It's always a pure gamble since there is no knowledge about which god is more real.
> i prefer to make an educated guess. and that requires investigation.
Your guess will not be anymore educated regardless of how much you investigate. Because the only way to investigate claim of some god's existence is to ask people who can't know either.
No matter how smart you are, garbage in, garbage out.
We promote and justify all kinds of actions and attitudes that are not immediately beneficial, like eating properly and exercising. For the religious person, a virtuous life is in itself a reward.
That’s orthogonal to Pascal’s wager. Various religions all have tangible costs and rewards. Pascal’s wager is essentially trying to decide how valuable the rewards after death offered by each religion are when you can’t verify if they exist.
My point is the availability heuristic makes biases people to overestimate how likely each religion is to be true. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic) The set of all possible religions would first need to be limited before that specific line of thinking becomes relevant. Which essentially means the argument is meaningless as you must first assume a religion is likely before it would tell you to follow it.
I am not sure why a religion making sense would have any relationship with it being correct. Physics for example involves some very non intuitive things that are verifiable.
Suggesting you can intuit the non verifiable parts of existence seems like hubris in that context.
intuition is not needed. if the point of religion is to solve social problems, take a look and check if the religion in question does solve social problems.
does prayer or meditation make you feel better?
do the laws proposed help you interact better with others?
all these things can be verified.
you need to look at what each religion claims, and what the outcome in that religious community is.
religion is supposed to help with self improvement and help people live together, build a community. what else is there? if religion does not achieve that, then what's the point?
humanity should continuously improve our society. globally.
we progress scientifically, and we should (and do) progress socially. the latter is the purpose of religion. every religion, when introduced, has induced social progress. if a religion is no longer serving that function, then it's time to move on.
i suppose pascals wager suggests to blindly pick any religion over not picking one. right, that makes no sense. how would you know if you picked the right one.
the only way to solve this is to investigate all religions and decide which one is the most likely (if any) and then go with that (or none at all)
The best way to live your life is highly subjective and personal. By allowing people to instruct you on how to live your life based not on knowledge but on centuries old guesses almost inevitably prevents you from having best possible life regardless of what it might mean for you.
Relying on old guesses instead of knowledge gives you objectively worse results in any kind of activity. It's not a stretch to assume it also has the same effect on your life as a whole.
indeed, that's why it is necessary to check whether what they say still makes any sense. independent investigation (and not letting others tell you) is the only way to find out.
> indeed, that's why it is necessary to check whether what they say still makes any sense.
The never did make any sense. It's just that now we can use knowledge to point out many specific places that we know are wrong.
> independent investigation (and not letting others tell you) is the only way to find out.
You definitely should let others tell you about the world we are living in. But those others should be the ones that posess knowledge. And since science is the only way to get actual knowledge about reality then you should probably stick to what science says and ignore everything else.
If you want to investigate religions be my guest. Just start with atheism. It will save you a lot of time and a lot of mistakes.
You definitely should let others tell you about the world we are living in
oh sure, but every individual still needs to judge for themselves what they learn.
science doesn't help us solve our social problems. and as far as i can tell, neither does atheism. none of the mainstream religions are capable of that either, but the answer is out there.
i'll leave it at that because i don't want to promote a particular belief here. that's a topic for another time and place.
I am of the opinion that Pascal's wager is mostly wrong because it's a false dilemma. For each diety/religion R that you're considering, simply construct a diety that will punish you for believing in R and reward you otherwise. Alternatively, construct dieties that reward you for atheism. The point is that it's not a 2x2 matrix of (Atheism, Theism) x (God is real, God is not real).
It's not "wrong" its literally a foil to respond to logical reasoning of religious belief(and establish rational approaches generally ended in madness.)
Pascal was trying to show other ways to christian faith, and how absurd dealing with infinities of uncertainties were.
The wager has had many criticisms over the years, but I would say misunderstanding it as a logical and faithful argument for the existence of god is the most prominent one.
that assumes that those twisted and wicket thoughts are actually the right interpretation of the word of god.
i'd be just as skeptical as you are. but that doesn't invalidate the idea. there are other interpretations that make a lot more sense and are actually helpful.
Or, in case there isn't anything "after this life", you could be wasting your last days in unnecessary solitude, facing the fear and pain all alone in the name of tormenting yourself about past and, by that moment, completely irrelevant things. In the end, it's a very personal choice, so why not let everyone choose it for themselves
When I focus intensely on something right before sleep impacts, I've noticed that I seem to simply pause, emotionally. When I wake up the next morning, the emotions from the night before are immediately present again. If I was in a fight, or studying intensely, or playing 12 straight hours of factorio, I wake up continuing where I left off.
If there is anything after this life, I want to wake up to it on a positive note having spent my last hours happy.
Without medication I suffer from around 31 migraines in 31 days. Opioids wouldn’t hardly touch the pain. They’d just make it so I didn’t care I was in so much pain. Distraction is sometimes the only way to get pas pain. Further, I’ve been able to seemingly forget about the pain when laying with friends. That’s absolutely what we should all be doing for each other - meaningful, supportive connections for one another.
I'm not sure how you got "constant distraction" from this. What I saw was an enormous amount of love and support offered to this boy in his final moments.
