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.
