Religion Prevented Immortality
The other way was if you do various kinds of mumbo-jumbo then this great agent in the sky will come down and give you eternal life, in which case you could have an infinite number of sports cars. And so Pascal’s wager: either you believe in God or you don’t; if there is no God it can’t do any harm to believe in him because he’s not going to punish you because he doesn’t exist; on the other hand if you don’t believe in him and there is one then he’ll be mad at you and you won’t get eternal life. That argument convinced a lot of people that it didn’t do any harm to believe in religion. But in fact it did them harm and it’s what killed them all because if they had believed in science instead of religion 2,000 years ago we would all be immortal now. Pascal’s wager was exactly wrong. Well I think it was exactly wrong because it’s been a long time and I haven’t seen anyone get eternal life.
Notes:
From Marvin Minsky'S "Why Freud Was the First Good AI Theorist"
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