Debunking Pascal's Wager

One thing that made me hold my beliefs for as long as I did was Pascal's Wager. This is the idea that one should believe in god just to "be safe". If you believe and it turns out there isn't a god, then the worst that happens is you simply die. But if you don't believe and there is, the result is pretty severe. Therefore, it's better to believe and be wrong than it is to not believe and be wrong.

Well, there are numerous reasons this argument fails.

It ignores other heavens and hells, for one thing. What if you kick the bucket and Muhammad is standing at the pearly gates (and you're a Christian). Then you and atheists are both going to hell, but at least the atheists got to sleep in on Sundays.

Besides, there are over 30,000 denominations of Christianity, each claiming to be the "correct" one. What if you have the wrong denomination? What if it turns out the Mormons are the ones that got it right, and you're a reformed Calvinist or something like that? Even as a Christian, you've only got one chance in about 30,000 of entering heaven.

Hell's got quite the history behind it, actually. What if I told you that it is never mentioned in the Old Testament? In an accurate Bible translation, it never appears in the Old Testament. Ever. The King James Version of the Bible actually mistranslates the word "Sheol" into hell. Sheol, in Hebrew, is simply "the grave". This essentially means you die, you stay dead, that's it. Sheol is simply the resting place of the dead, righteous or otherwise.

The ancient Hebrews had no concept of hell. Hell is never mentioned, in its current understanding, until the New Testament, and it is believed that it only appears in the NT because of Sheol's mistranslation in the OT.

Hell is never mentioned, in any translation of the Bible, in Mosaic Law (that is - the first five books of the OT). Mosaic Law only deals with curses and blessings in this lifetime, not in the life to come. Now, you'd think God would have told his covenant people about a place like Hell. You'd think it would have been mentioned to Adam and Eve, or at least to folks like Abraham and Moses, but in is never mentioned to them.

So, the question is, where did Hell come from?

Well, like many other things in Christianity, the concept of Hell is plagiarized from paganism. The Greeks, for instance, believed in the underworld, where all the dead went, righteous or otherwise, to simply rest. No eternal torture. Around Jerusalem, many pagans did child sacrifices in a trash dump called Gehenna, where these children were burned alive in a sacrifice to Baal. It was the valley where the dead burned. Sounds familiar, huh?

Hell is merely an appeal to fear. In the early Catholic church, many people were not allowed into the church unless they believed that some would be in torment forever in Hell. Hell was used, originally, as a tactic for people to give the church money. Money to be kept from Hell. Hell is a scam.

There are actually Christians that don't believe in the existence of hell, and for good reason.

I would like to address the fence sitters at this point. Those of you who are beginning to think of throwing off those chains of religion forever. I implore you, all of you, to throw those shackles down. The natural world isn't so bad, guys. You get to go to bed without having to talk to the air, you can sleep in on Sundays, you can have all the sex you want (safely, of course), the list goes on. You are good people. There are many good people out there who could be at their full potential if they didn't have the religion monkey on their backs. Let's remove ourselves from the stocks of religion and become a healthy species!

-Matt