This is such a wonderful video. I came into this not knowing what Pascal's wager was and left with a greater understanding of the world and an even greater understanding of my own religion.

Hot Take: Pascal's Wager only works on people that don't understand what a protection racket is

A Hindu man has died and was granted access to Nirvana. He is instructed to go to 4th door on the right, passing the doors to Valhalla, Elusium and one door that he is told, when passing by, he must be extremely quiet and stealthy. "Why?" asks the man. "That's Christian Heaven. And they think they're the only ones here."

A deity that punishes you with eternal damnation for not believing in it, it's not a deity worth of worship.

I think the "multiple Gods" objection is really just a particular version of the "you haven't actually told me how to guarantee entrance" objection. It's like a wager where you don't actually know if you've placed the bet or not!

Pascal's Wager always felt like it was both using the stick & the carrot to pursuade. The carrot being heaven, & the stick being damnation--both are eternal. But really, it's about fear & avoiding hell so you hedge your bets "just in case." So much of Christianity seemed fear based to me & they definitely used fear as a stick to demand obedience & compliance to authoritarian rules.

I had a boss who inappropriately tried to bully me "back to Christ" many years back. She stopped after my response of "Are you telling me your god doesn't know your heart? Because no matter what my words profess in my heart I will never believe in the god you are speaking of." It was a toxic and bad work environment but it did help me grow in my own comfort of faith. As an atheist friend and I once concluded after a discussion of the afterlife (existence or non) the suckiest thing is we won't know until we die. So for me that means this is my domain and it is up to me to make the world better by my presence she happens to feel the same. The afterlife is something one either will or will not get (I do believe in one but who knows that could be all in my head) so the only measure of a person's life is their actions during it. I don't need the fear of eternal doom to be a better person indeed during my youth when I only knew Christianity I at times felt the doom of hell was preferable to the living hell I was experiencing especially as I lay in bed for days immobilized by pain.

that brief description of heaven as one of the halls of the land of the dead perfectly captures my personal thoughts on heaven as a concept. in short, an eldritch horror.

As an atheist, I think you're super entertaining. Just stumbled on you via algorithm, and this was a really cool video. Good work, and please keep making this shit. Very edifying!

Something that always rubbed me wrong about the Christian heaven was that I always felt like I had to barter my life on this world in order to gain access. I had to live a certain way, do certain things, even if at times it felt off or rubbed me the wrong way. I find it difficult to disagree with any of your points here. Polytheism seems to make the prospect of both life and death all the more beautiful to me. In life, I can make my own way and become a better person for it. As for death, maybe there is no longer any need to fear the unknown. Something like that anyway. Another great video Ocean!

10:25 THANK YOU for expressing this: that unchanging eternity, for some, would be torture. Long story short, as a little kid, growing up Catholic, I developed deep existential anxiety about this very thing. I spent most of my life worried not about Hell at all, but the grim dichotomy between Eternity and Oblivion. I haven't heard anyone else even TALK about this idea before, much less understand it. Again, thank you, thank you.

Many years ago I was dying & awaiting a heart transplant. I considered myself a Christian at the time and had a lot of people praying for me. Many said they "knew" I would be ok. God told them. I didn't know that. He declined to reassure me. My heart was getting worse daily and all I could hope for was a surgery that was a 50/50 shot I would even come out alive (back in the 1990s). The only way I could face death was, like Ciscero wrote, that should I die, I wouldn't know it. That was all the comfort I really had; my faith got me no where when facing my last months of life. (I guess you could say my deconversion story started there). (Obviously I was fortunate enough to get a transplant and to do well). Great video!

@12:22 Plato's Appology - Socrates has a similar view. Either the gods (the Greek ones in this case) exist, in which case Socrates will go about the standard Grecian afterlife, or they don't, in which case it will simple be an eternal dreamless sleep. I find it a strangly calming thought.

Wait! Infinite rewards also involves getting kittens? Well, I'm sold. Convert me!

I've had a man approach me with Pascal's Wager. He absolutely thought it would convert me.

IDK I feel that Pascal's wager is a fucking gaslighting tecnique to get more christian followers.

I always likened Pascal's Wager to choosing the right Holy Grail from Indiana Jones. "He chose.... poorly."

I was raised Lutheran and came up with my own version of Pascal's wager when I was a kid, and came to the conclusion that if God was all knowing, he would know that was the reason and it wouldn't matter anyway. That's part of what started my journey away from Christianity. I was actually petty surprised when I learned about it years later in my intro to philosophy class in college. And yeah, the only version of the many gods objection I'd heard before exploring polytheism (including from some bigger atheist KZfaq channels) was the multiple copies of heaven and hell which, as you said, isn't really applicable. Besides, even as a Christian, hell always seemed to be where all the fun people go. Heaven never really seemed like a reward to me.

the problem with the christian heaven/hell dichotomy, is that one is supposed to sincerely believe... if one's belief is motivated by sycophantic desire to be rewarded, or by cowardly fear of punishment, then neither are sincerely and god-centered held beliefs, but selfishly-held beliefs, something the bible routinely condemns (think "go in your closet, not the street corner, to pray" and "the fearful investor of the king's coinage")... yet it uses both the carrot and stick as implicit reasons why one should believe... but nowhere does it say how to unselfishly believe in a god in a way that i unselfishly believe in the existence of the phone in my hand.

These philosophy videos are so on point. I am really enjoying how you are able to weave Polytheistic and Heathen religion into a conversation where often times the only religious argument is between Western Christian belief and atheism. They really strengthen the path many of us are sometimes taking uneasy steps upon. Thank you for that. I actually struggle with the concept of an afterlife. Not because I fear boredom as I believe that the passage of time will work WAY differently in that situation, and not because I worry about oblivion as I am fine with that if there is no alternative. My weird concern is the personal connectivity of people in this life. That is to say, is one STUCK where they go even if it is not a place of punishment? My wife is Christian. Not a particularly devout one, but she is certainly not a Heathen. Does she have to go to Christian heaven with a bunch of angels that won't stop singing for 5 minutes about how awesome God is while I soak up some eternal summer in Hel since I'm pretty sure I won't make the line-cut list of Odin/Thor/Freyja etc? What about my Muslim and Hindu friends? Is the afterlife a series of Halls where there is a celestial water cooler where different faiths can hang out around and shoot the shit? As far as Pascal's wager goes, I have always viewed it as a cheap ploy that misses the point of what faith is about. Faith shouldn't be a mathematically leaning postulation where your options are: I wasted a little time, I wasted no time, this is Awesome, I'm burning for eternity. It sorta flies in the face of moving mountains with faith the size of a mustard seed and all that. You either believe the proclamations of Christianity or you don't. Giving me math homework isn't going to sway me, though.

What do you think about the idea of reincarnation as opposed to an unending afterlife? Perhaps various afterlives are just temporary 'waiting rooms' for your soul to rest in while you wait for a suitable body to be reborn into.

There was always this thing on my mind about Pascal's wager: what if Christians worship the wrong god? If they do, they lose everything.

What? Free kittens? Nobody told me there were free kittens!!!

I look forward to Ocean’s puns almost as much as the videos themselves.

hell is where the tea is confirmed

I learned something fun today. - If you travel to Japan, and use the word "Viking" there. They take it as you want to find an "all-you-can-eat buffet". That what they call it over there. - In the 1950's... '57 i think, the manager of the Imperial Hotel chain in Japan, went to a conference in Copenhagen and experienced the "Smorgasbord" there. And "all-you-can-eat buffet". He was so impressed by this, that he brought the concept with him back to Japan, and since then, where ever you go... If you use the word "Viking" there, you're looking for an "all-you-can-eat buffet". At least, that's how i understood the story. Correct me if i'm wrong, but yea... I got a good chuckle out of that, when i heard it...

My latest spicy take, an ego centered god fosters ego centered followers. And wtf would I do in heaven for eternity? Float around pumping up that god's ego some more? And the more non-believers I step on, the bigger my cloud will be? Nah, I'd rather live an authentic life and follow my own moral compass. My moral compass doesn't lead me to harm others but my, now excised, "christian" ego wouldn't mind stepping on others to get a bigger cloud. Dropping the christian god beliefs made me free to be a better person. Thank you, Ocean for bringing thought and reasoning to the table ❤ I appreciate your views to discuss with others.

Been really enjoying these philosophy videos you've been making lately! :D

I've seen a version of Pascal's Wager used for climate change (the categories being we do something, we do nothing, its real and caused by humans, its real and not caused by humans, and its not real) which has stuck with me for years. But the religious version doesn't hold quite as much water because of precisely what you mentioned: a truly all knowing god would know that people who believe purely to avoid hell are not true believers, which is a camp I fell into. Nothing about Christianity as a structure appealed to me. Not the indoor churches, not the lack of appreciation for the natural world, not the morality system. But I hovered around it for a long while (never actually being a proper Christian though) *because* of that fear. Which is just... not a way to live.

Cicero's On Old Age is on my TBR list, thanks to the conversation we had earlier this week! The philosophy videos with the polytheist perspective have been so fun to watch. Definitely makes you think about some of these ideas in a different way.

as a Priest of C'thulu, I see that Pascal's Wager is a meaningless attempt to cope with things _far beyond_ what one can perceive or comprehend.

loved this. for a super interesting additional deepdive, the multiplicity and yet similarity of various pagan afterlives is fascinating. some of them almost sound like the same place, or places that can exist within a similar travelable domain

As a person who was raised Polytheist(Vedic Pantheon). I could never understand the "fear god" or the fear of hell part. It seemed ridiculous to me lol.

I’ve always seen the afterlife as a place of rest within our soul’s journey, we can relax, meet old friends, our ancestors, celebrate, make merry (as long as you didn’t piss off the gods enough to be yeeted into Tartarus) before we’re ready for our next journey, maybe another life, maybe as a spirit, idk

Love the philosophical Videos Ocean, especially the long ones. They always have me revisiting some thoughts in my head, or inspiring brand new ones.

Interesting side note the Pope recently said hell does not exist

I agree that the concept of heaven being "unchanging eternal bliss" is fairly contrary to human nature. That being said, I think polytheism has a good framework (with its multiplicity of gods) to argue for afterlives that can grow to infinite perfections- essentially a neverending becoming that eternally satisfies the human need for change

‘Isn’t gambling a sin? Seems like a bad foot to start off on.’

I have found your and Wind in the World Tree’s takes on the afterlife to be interesting, but I hadn’t really thought about applying them to Pascal’s Wager. Fascinating video as always.

That was fascinating. Thank you

I’m hoping the afterlife involves us solving Asimov’s last question, like a more positive Ragnarok. That’ll keep things interesting.

Glad you're back, the philosophy videos are the ones I like best

I've often thought about what kind of afterlife I'd like to have, if there was one, but since I obviously can't tell if there's an afterlife at all, I'll just work under the assumption this life is my only one and make the best of it. Which is why this roughly the sixth video on this channel I've binged over the past hours.

Monotheist and Christian pastor: I completely agree with your analysis, especially the critiques of the reductive way that mere right belief leads to salvation that some Christians assert. Pastorally, Pascal’s Wager is rather useless as it doesn’t actually form one spiritually but merely gives them “fire insurance.”

Took me way longer than I'd like to admit to get the pun with Pair of Dice in the beginning :D - great video!

Missed the premiere but this was an amazing video!!

Thank you for your wonderful pun(s), I haven't facepalmed that hard in a while. Good pun is good.

love the info, your vids are always good info, and heck (at the end)yeah love that album too, dude :] last track is epic af

Heck most Christians don't even agree with what the afterlife is like. I grew up in a Lutheran church that believed that hell and satan, as mainstream christans believe, are just mistranslations and that they don't exist. (Fun fact there were even discussions on if heaven even existed as well. The general conclusion being probably, but not as we imagine it) Personally eternal anything sounds like hell to me. I stand by any deity worth worshipping will care more about if I was a good person then if I believed in them or not.

Fascinating and intriguing!

I appreciate this. Is a respectful video, and you get to the point.

Loved this new video 💚

An eternity in a paradise that my loved ones were denied sounds like eternal torture. A cruel joke. Not even getting into the idea that the human mind needs stimuli and the potential maddening that experiencing eternity might cause.

I always imagined that Pascal wrote his wager to convince himself and maybe help others come to the same conclusion as himself. Considering he was a mathematician he might have had a hard time believing in supernatural entities and had to somehow reconcile with that using logic.

My fear of hell turned into fear of not existing. I used to be afraid of going to hell daily as my religion was pretty much built on fear of hell. I don't really have a problem with not existing anymore than any normal person's ego would cause. But I have this gap in my daily life where worry and fear used to be so my mind just filled in the gaps I guess.

You. I like you. This channel is exactly what I've been looking for for a while. Its now my buddy at work for a few weeks.

It gladdens me to think about walking with Thor and Freyja after my death and learning about their interests and interactions with other Gods. It’s interesting to think about how I’ll get to know them more and strengthen my relationship with them before I choose to take on another body, as Earth seems to be the place to be.

What I was taught when I was a Christian was that Heaven would be an eternity of praising God. I walked away when I realized that eternally stroking a Deity's fragile ego was just as much torment as Hell.

Great video. Have always leaned toward you manifest the afterlife you subscribe to theory over most. Like all things, it has to be a spectrum.

The pun at the beginning took me a moment, but then I genuinely laughed... good one :)

Virgin Monotheist: "you're good only if you believe in his omni-dude", "refuses to elaborate the existence of evil with his all loving omni-dude", "Heaven if you believe in his omni-dude, Hell if you don't", "spends hours every week boring himself to death with an army of others, mostly unknown, omni-dude believers". Chad Polytheist: "it's fine whatever you believe in", "Gods aren't perfect and they have their own agenda", "CYOA afterlives, no eternal damnation", "celebrations in nature with an handful of friends".

To me, the bit about halls, visiting family and friends is just the definition of heaven to me.

A boring numbing afterlife reminds me a lot of issues explored in the final season of the Good Place.

The concept of hell in islam is explicitly described as gruesome never-ending torture, arguably much more graphic, detailed, and horrific than Christianity's version. It's scholarly consensus that all non believers go to infinite hell, believers who sinned still do go to hell, (depending on how much they've sinned, they'll stay until their souls are purified) until they eventually end up in heaven. I don't see how this is widely different than Christianity's way of getting to heaven, since belief in religious dogma is ultimately the key for salvation in both religions

An interesting bit to chew on!! The whole of this is something I am going to take and ponder... As a " polytheist ", I appreciate the idea,being presented, there are several things that gave me pause... I will go n meditate for a bit..n come back with my discussion on this piece!! 👍🐺🧙‍♂️🦊👍!!

I would say that reincarnation “solves the problem” of the infinite, unchanging afterlife. I have long seen the various divine realms as a kind of in between state - realms where one exists between lives until their spirit/soul/whatever is ready for their next life. There is opportunity to heal from whatever spiritual traumas one may have experienced before going on to a different life. If you’ll forgive the extreme nerdiness of this, I think it’s a fitting metaphor: it’s like when you stop playing one character in some RPG and make a new one. Different appearance, skills, backstory, class/profession, but still the same player.

In other words Pascal's Wager rests on false dichotomies: those of a particular (usually Christian) God vs Nothing, and a particular Heaven vs particular Hell. I've started calling it Pascal's Roulette.

Cicero got that from Plato's depiction of Socrates in the Apology.

You have a couple of good points, but as an atheist non existence sounds great. And the only thing that can be better that nothing is ending up as a bladesmith in Valhalla

Ocean, I so love your puns! I could just die. 👍🌊💙💙💙🌊🥰✌

Saw a heathen in the wild yesterday. I thought these mythical creatures were hunted to extinction ages ago

Great video! It's important to keep Pascal's Wager in context. Pascal wrote 200 pages in "Pensees" why Christianity is the one true religion; he wrote about Jesus, miracles, prophecies and morality. Then, the wager comes in for people that aren't completely convinced either way. Pascal compares Christian commitment to a coin toss; a 50/50 gamble. He says skeptics should attend Church. Pascal's Wager was meant to be a tie breaker for agnostics stuck between atheism and Christianity. In that context, I think the wager is solid.

I loved that Terry Pratchett's answer to Pascal's Wager was that the man arrived in Heaven to find a group of very angry gods surrounding him, before giving him a good kicking for playing silly buggers.

I wouldn’t know personally but, I doubt boredom exist in either Hell or Heaven….. But, I never died and stayed in Heaven or Hell for eternity.

Thankyou for Channel, I've really enjoyed it & your delivery 🙂 I have a question. In your studies have you ever come across a lady with one purple eye, one broze/gold eye? In/Or a flat 2D vibrating dark place, with thundering, crashing rocks & the low hum is very loud?

I, for one, am very interested to see a pagan polytheist's thoughts on the infamous Pascal's wager. Also, may i suggest responding to President Sunday's response to one of your videos that he did in his channel.

Another problem is how can a god be considered just and moral when he is literally willing to punish a finite crime (or at least what a god percieves as a crime) with an infinite punishment?

Rollo duke of Normandy apparently didn't like wagering: on his deathbed he both donated gold to the church and sacrificed a bunch of slaves to Odin

This is a perspective on the wager that I haven't seen before. I like it. Your perspective on afterlives particularly resonated with me. I'm an atheist, I think there probably isn't an afterlife. But if there is, neat! I think some other approaches also score points against the wager. For instance, a little thought reveals that proposing infinite reward kind of breaks cost-benefit analysis. What if I claim to be God, and offer you a ticket to heaven in exchange for all of your posessions? By the same finite vs. infinite logic, rationality would require you to accept. This is obviously untenable, so I think we must exclude infinite rewards from this kind of cost-benefit analysis.

10:25 first time I see this mentioned in the context of Pascal's Wager. I'm actually holding this position. Eternal UNCHANGING whatever (bliss or torture doesn't matter) will become torture eventually. So I'm happy without any kind of afterlife

The biggest problem for me in the pascal's wager is that it assumes a 50/50 chance of God existing/not existing. If probability of God's existence is infinitesimally small then then the ultimate benefit in believing and ultimate loss in not believing can become finite depending on what kind of infinities we are talking about i.e. wagering on God's existence does not guarantee infinite gain versus finite loss and wagering on God's non-existence does not guarantee infinite loss versus finite gain.

I think Heaven, if real, is a bait and switch. In order to get in there, you have to revel in the idea of an innocent man being tortured to death so that you can escape a deserved punishment. It's a way for the afterlife to gather up all the sociopaths and keep them from bothering the rest of us.

You stole your pun from all dogs go to heaven, don’t even try to hide it ocean 😂

Omnipotent gods have no responsibilities, nobody can force them or punish them.

The thing that breaks Pascal's wager for me, as someone who never had the fear of hell drilled into him, is that every christian I've asked where the pastor who stole my dad's tools from my widowed mother ended up when he died, they would say it could have received forgiveness and entered heaven. You can't convince me heaven is a good place to go if the bastard who stole from my mother while she was grieving the death of my father ended up there.

One of my favorite pokes, is to point out the ten commandments admission. By demanding singular worship - it's tacit admission of other gods existence.

9:24 Isn’t there sometimes four heaven hell purgatory and limbo?

Infinity in an afterlife perhaps assumes time flows at the same time. Maybe time for the original living world is faster than the afterlife. Maybe it's slower. Time is perhaps relative to the observer?

I looked up Pascal's Wager when I saw the title of the video and realized that, to some degree, I had a similar philosophy. I figure, if my faith is misplaced then I have nothing to lose, so I wont abandon it without good reason. Am I going to say believing what I believe in is the only rational way to live? No, only that I think faith has merit. However, now I wonder if my faith was/is genuine. I feel it was growing up, but now I'm not quite certain.

Glad to see you again, missed my punaganism. And I had a very christian roommate in college, and he used pascal's wager in conversations about faith, he made it general but is was a attempt at conversion. It was passive aggressive after that, but I was no less the bastard either.

so what if my actions in this life qualifies for more than one afterlife?

12:29 You could argue the Epicureans had a similar vision in some respect

I'd like to see you and Paulogia do a discussion about the existence of gods.

The way I see it, a finite amount of torture is the same, practically, as an infinite amount, if such finite torture spans all of one's finite existence. If I'm tortured for my entire existence, and then I stop existing, I won't get relief--because I won't exist anymore. Which makes it the same as an infinite amount of torture, from which I will also never find relief.

William Lane Craig's comment about "people who believe in Odin or Zeus" can be chalked down to Christian supremacists being ignorant as per fuckin' usual.

Regarding an afterlife, I try to live my own life as best I can. If as a result, I end up in a bad afterlife, I may have some claim against the injustice of reality.

Shit I didn’t know there was any polytheistic action in youtube. I consider myself a pagan witch, not polytheistic mind you but happy to see pagans.

The thought of existing forever sounds exhausting.

I know you already did a video on Hel, but can you do a video about how each of Loki's kids came to be?

What made me a polytheistic Christian was the knowledge that Heaven as written in the bible was the worst hell I could imagine...