ChaoSkeptic

You'll be excused for not noticing but the other day one of my very very old posts was hit up by a drive-by troll. In my award-winning post about Questions that Creationists Can't Answer the anonymous coward posted the following:

look up radioactive halos at halos.com
think about this:
if creationism is wrong and the bible is wrong than are we any worse for beliveing it? but what if it's right? than you have a lot to worry about. better safe than sorry!

The first part isn't even worth answering. If you want to know about the creationist claim that polonium halos somehow prove that the earth is young there is an excellent article about it on TalkOrigins.

As for the rest of that post, if you've studied theology for longer than five minutes you would recognize it as a creationist version of Pascal's Wager. The wager can be summed up as follows:

If you erroneously believe in God, you lose nothing , whereas if you correctly believe in God, you gain everything. But if you correctly disbelieve in God, you gain nothing, whereas if you erroneously disbelieve in God, you lose everything.

Obviously there are many things wrong with this. The first is the assumption that believing in God means you lose nothing. Then there is the assumption that God will reward you solely on your beliefs and not your actions (and not punish you for you simply hedging your bets). And there is the assumption that the Christian God is the correct one and not the millions of other gods and goddesses that have been worshiped since mankind first bowed to the sun.

Therefore, I have taken to come up with some new wager's of my own.

Cthulu's Wager: The god that exists may be the most malevolent being possible so it is best to worship Cthulu and hope that He eats you first instead of torturing you for eternity.

Dawkin's Wager: It is better to lack belief and do good on earth then hope that whichever god is up there rewards works and intellectual curiosity over mere belief.

Eris's Wager: All of the gods and goddesses might actually exist so it is best to worship as many as you can before you die in order that one might favor you enough to give you a VIP pass to the afterlife.