Perhaps there are more, but I think they boil down to the following:

1. Few, if any, atheists claim to be 100% sure that God does not exist. (99.99999% IS good enough)
2. Pascal’s Wager (which Adams’ post is based on – although perhaps not knowingly) doesn’t account for the multitude of beings which claim punishment for non-belief. Of course the other fallacies of Pascal’s wager are equally present in Adams’ post.

• Letter to the Editor: Kick the Atheists out of America – “I don’t care if they have never committed a crime, atheists are the reason crime is rampant.”
• Philosophy and the proof of God’s existence by Roger Jones – A nice summary of many of the traditional “proofs” of God’s existance, including the argument from design, pascals wager, and the philosophies of Kant, Hegal and others.
• What Evolution Left Behind On Humans – “I?ve always been fascinated with human evolution. To me, the most fascinating part of human evolution is learning about what was ?left behind? on our bodies from our ancestors and from our prenatal development.”
• Wife Beating – It?s therapeutic – I’m glad someone’s cleared this up. Wife beating is not a rule, it’s just therapeutic. Oh, but there are limits!
• Pharyngula: They’re running out of virgins! – Nice tasteless video about terrorists debating how many virgins they get in paradise

Pascal’s wager goes something like this:

Living your life as if God exists will bring infinite benefit (you go to heaven) if, in fact God exists. If it turns out that God does not exist, then you haven’t missed out on much. If, on the other hand, you were to live as if God didn’t exist, but you turned out to be wrong, then you’d suffer infinitely (hell and damnation). Even if you were right about God not existing, the benefit you’d gain while you were alive would be minimal compared to eternal damnation. In a more graphical format, Pascal’s wager looks like this:

The Wikipedia article on Pascal’s Wager notes a few rebuttals to this wager, most notably that Christianity is not the only religion which claims God will judge you based on your beliefs. Pascal also assumes that God rewards belief, and even if he did one might assume that God wouldn’t be too happy with simply accepting his existence based on the probability of damnation as this is not a “true belief”.

While I don’t claim to have the answers to all these problems, it seems that, given many of the world’s major religions share some fundamental aspects (belief in one ultimate power, be it Allah, God or Brahman, for example) it might be easier to accept a more general belief in a higher power than in the God of a specific religion. Let’s look again at the options discussed in my last post:

1. The teachings of all religions are wrong
2. The teachings of some religions are wrong
3. The teachings of all but one religion are wrong
   or
4. All religions are right

If all but one religion is “wrong”, then we have such a small chance of choosing the right one, it hardly seems worth it. Similarly, if all religions are “wrong”, then we have even less chance unless we try something radically different. If all religions are right, however, or even if many of them are acceptable to God, then by following the fundamental teachings of as many as possible, you would increase your chances of entering heaven.