All you really seem to be saying is that you don't believe the premise. You don't believe the danger exists. You don't see the justification to believe in the danger.
Well I don't, but it's more on the level of You don't seem to think the premise needs any real justification.
You seem to think that it's enough that the two people agree to it and their justifications don't matter.
So like all arguments, garbage in garbage out. Not like all arguments though, this one would like to take any (even a remote and unfounded) belief in that one premise and magnify it.
No. Any rational argument leads from premise to conclusion, from the better-known to the less-known. Someone could very well believe in the possibility of Hell without inferring the conclusions regarding belief. That is what Pascal's argument attempts to remedy.
I don't think so. That's not really the structure of the argument. The end result of the wager seems to be true even if we know very little about it's premises being true, as you just said.
It is an attempt to weight
any fear we might have (no matter how remote) of that one premise being true more heavily than we actually know (as you just pointed out), not a usual rational deduction where we actually know the premises more than the conclusion.
No, that's just your pet interest. It interests you because you reject the premise. I assure you that Pascal's audience didn't give that premise a second thought.
An easy audience doesn't make for a better argument. In this case I think it makes the argument worse given that the premise contains the dubious emotional appeal to a fear of the unknown.
I have never seen an accusation of "Problematic emotional manipulation" that wasn't at the same time a criticism of motives.
Well in this case I've said the religion contains a problematic emotional manipulation that Pascal has designed an argument to spread. That is hardly likely to be his actual motivation even if true.
People can obviously buy into and make arguments for problematic emotional manipulation without being cognisant of that being what they are doing.
Which is why I might chose this line of argument instead of a different one, not because I'm "taking pot shots" but rather because I see the the idea in that premise differently than the people using it.