Re: Responses to "Hello, can anyone help?"

From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue 18 Feb 2003 - 13:31:14 GMT

  • Next message: William Benzon: "Re: Sue Blackmore lecture Wednesday 5.15pm London"

    >
    > His response to my question to him if he could prove the existence of
    > hell?
    > I don't remember his exact words, but the gist of it was "Better safe
    > than sorry!" LOL
    >

    Heh... That is and old one. It is called "Pascal's wager". I am copy/pasting from Wikipedia:

    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager

    "Pascal's wager is Blaise Pascal's famous argument that belief in God is justified as a "good bet", regardless of any metaphysical uncertainty, because disbelief has great cost if wrong, while belief if wrong costs nothing."

    Some refutations: http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/arguments.html#pascal http://fp.bio.utk.edu/skeptic/Essays/pascal_weager.htm

    >
    > Funny thing, he's probably got one of the highest IQs of anyone I've
    > ever known.
    >

    According to Michael Shermer:

    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002F4E6-8CF7-1D49-90FB809EC58800 00

    "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons."

    >
    > No use at all.. and I'd rather not read ANY bible for nothing.
    >

    The Bible could be an excelent case study of a sucessful memeplex. It could give you some intution in how people think. Well... if you don't have anything more interesting to read, that is.

    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue 18 Feb 2003 - 13:28:09 GMT