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In contrast to Pascal’s Wager Triangle, Pascal’s Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case.
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Brilliant! This is one of those things that when you see it, it seems so obvious that you wonder how nobody thought of it until now. But it takes someone like Randall to pluck it out of the space of unexplored ideas and present it perfectly.
I’m not sure I get what this is saying.
Pascal was a famous thinker of their time, particularly in mathematics.
Two of the ideas they’re remembered for are Pascals Triangle and Pascals Wager.
Their triangle is a helpful tool for combinations of things. Their wager is a (kinda bad in my opinion) argument for why you should believe in the Christian God.
The xkcd comic is a combination of both ideas
Religion is a whispering game between generations. The message is heavily distorted by bow.
Isaac Asimov’s Bible guide convinced me that abrahamic religions are mostly made out from stuff either from Mesopotamia (Sabbath, Eden, the floods) or myths coming from later cults (e.g. Greece).
That. Book. Is. Fire.
And the original message was dreamed up by dudes on shrooms.
I don’t know about the shrooms, my reading of the old testament made me think it started with some old guy trying to stop his nomadic desert tribe dying of anything too stupid by telling camp fire stories with some sort of message. The whole ‘god will make the ground open up to swallow you and your family if you screw up’ is a desperate attempt to scare them into not doing stupid things like slaughtering too many of their livestock at once, or eating shellfish whilst wandering around in a desert. The stories get retold, changed and embellished over generations before being written down, and you end up with the weird mess of basic survival tips, animal husbandry, heroic stories and mystic fluff that is the OT.
The new testament is just the story of a fairly chill guy, with a slight messianic complex, wandering around with his mates and suggesting people be nice to each other, put through a similar transformation.
Hinduism with 330 million gods somewhere deep down that tree.
Since I read that number for the first time last month, I’ve been wondering which seems wilder to a Hindu: monotheists or atheists?
I think some Hindus would say they’re monotheists because all gods are just different aspects of Brahman. Don’t quote me on this though.
