In reality, it’s called “not being terrified of something that you have no reason to be terrified about”. And in terms of a healthy mental state, it’s the best.
I’d be wary of bringing up Pascal’s Wager, lest you incur the wrath of another member here.
Let’s talk instead about Todd’s Wager, which is actually representational of reality.
You have a roulette wheel that represents all describable after-death situations.
One slot on the wheel represents no afterlife at all. No matter what you do, when you die, you cease to exist. The other slots represent different afterlives. We presume that in at least some of these afterlives, there is some god that makes a decision about what happens to you.
So how many slots are on the wheel?
There’s no way to know.
We can put on the wheel any god that anyone has ever posited that isn’t impossible to exist.
But beyond that, a slot exists for any god that could exist. A god that could send you to eternal torture for believing in any religion perhaps. The number of slots would be so large as to be uncountable.
So, statistically speaking, presented with a wheel with an unknown, perhaps incalculably large, number of slots, the only logical bet is no bet at all, unless you have good evidence that a certain slot is the only actual slot on the wheel.
For an atheist such as myself, there’s no evidence that any slot is more likely to exist.
And for someone that does have a belief, there’s no way to verify this belief with 100% certainty.
You can appeal to faith, but that’s tantamount to making a blind bet. You still don’t know how many slots there are on the wheel, or what each slot represents.
Don’t you want to use statistics correctly?
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