CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@celesteh @Taco_lad @futurebird Anyway what I love about Homer's Heresy is how it tl;dr's that whole Reform Jewish lore dump in two sentences

@celesteh @Taco_lad @futurebird Oh yeah I meant blasphemy in the Evangelical context I grew up in outside the home; we were raised Jewish, so the specifically Catholic theology of Pascal's Wager/Roko's Basilisk doesn't really translate. Judaism is "sola opera", which makes the intent behind good deeds irrelevant; no Hell, and Satans (plural) are God's subordinate employees. It doesn't really solve the problem of "but why evil" though, so the Jewish equivalent of Pascal's wager I think is Maimonides' Via Negativa (We doubt that God is entirely good, because we see humans doing evil; we're certain that God is not entirely evil, because we see humans doing good)...seems to me this ends up as encouragement to act in alignment with our beliefs while hoping for something better than the worst case outcome (we're trapped in a universe with an entirely evil God)...rather than altering our actions to perform belief out of fear of the worst case

@celesteh @Taco_lad @futurebird About 20 years before Roko's Basilisk existed, also before I'd heard of Pascal's Wager or Homer's Heresy (which refutes them both equally well: "What if we picked the wrong religion? Every week we're just making God madder and madder")...I recall some other little kid in West Virginia told me that the pretty seashell fossils in the playground aggregate were "sent" to test our faith, and I precociously blasphemed, what's the point of worshipping a God who plays tricks on us