I watch an old man die in the hospital. He was not religious man of his life at all, but at the end of life for him, he was given oxycontin for his pain. He claimed he could hear and see all his relatives that were dead, and he would talk to them from his hospital bed. (Oxycontin hallucinations) He also wished to talk to a priest to "help him get to heaven" So this was his Pascals wager. It brought him comfort to bet on possibility of god and heaven at end of his life. So god did bring this man comfort of peace of mind. No harm done.
Lordy! That was some serious...uh, news! Now for the good news! The minds within the world are an hallucination within the mind that hallucinates the world. I seem to be speaking to those minds. But rather, I am speaking to the mind that hallucinates the world through its hallucinations. It is an equal to "me". These minds offer a "window to the soul", so-to-speak. Each is like a portal, capable of looking within, and deciding what it wants to experience. At this juncture, there are only two experiences to choose from: Willingness to accept oneSelf as is [Lord]...or resistance to willingness. The world is the experience of non-Lordship. It makes up, teaches, and reinforces scenarios in which the Lord is not Lord. Each mind has the power to accept willingness [to know thy Self]. This is the same as the power to release resistance [to knowing thy Self]. To accept someone else, or something else as "Lord", maintains the experience of resistance. It's a trick of a tricky mind that mocks acceptance. In acceptance mode, you can think of thy Self as the process of God that allows a "thinker" to think up this world. That "thinker" is the "creator", "maintainer", and co-destroyer of it's own hallucination. It "destroys" [let's go of] it's own "creation" as the Lord talks it down, convincing it to give itself up...lay itself down...turn against itself. In this sense, Christ! the Lord has power to cast out "demons", one by one. A mind may think God is a big fat ugly rat. And that is an expression of freedom. A mind is also free to pretend to shut down the freedom to think such things. But whatever a mind thinks, it thinks about itself...at the core level..."within"...where it is Lord. Such thoughts give rise to big fat ugly rats through the process of creation that is the Lord. But such thoughts can never be more than just hallucinations because they are judgments that are not true. Judgment is the tool of illusion. Judgment distracts from the truth of your experience by focusing your mind on the *prop* [ie. big fat ugly rat]. Judgment is a distraction because it denies who you are, and it denies what you do. Judgment makes real that which is false. Christ!
That is right Thunderdog, and that is what I tried to say. The man was not religious through his life, but when he was dying, he must have "thought " if there is a god, then he is safe to go to heaven if he talks with a priest. And these thoughts of his gave him comfort. His pascal wager.
Okay, except he did not understand the inherent flaws of Pascal's wager very well. Since some Christians and those of other faiths believe that any religion other than theirs, specifically, will send the worshiper to hell, I wonder how the elder gentleman reconciled the dilemma of mutually exclusive choice. Perhaps he simply chose to focus on what gave him comfort and ignore the rest of the nonsense.
Then where was this man's integrity? Where was the common honesty in finding comfort in placing a bet by which his own moral soundness throughout his whole life is hedged against a doubted possibility? Unlikely he scrtinized his understandings of non belief enough just to hand wave them all away for a moment of comfort in taking a dubious bet. Sounds very shallow to me. Nobody would begrudge him his comfort, but the grounds on which he found it are extremely questionable.