Terry Pratchett fixes Pascal's Wager

[onager]

Anybody know which book this is from? I've read some of his novels, but don't remember this. I found it while poking around various sites tonight:

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?"

When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr. Clever Dick in these parts..."

:rofl:

Actually, I was Googling about Frank Pastore, the host of a local Xer radio show - the famous Intersection of Faith and Reason.

Just TYPING that makes me laugh...and really actually, I Googled "frank pastore a**hole." Which generated quite a few hits.

Pastore started today's show by claiming he was "an atheist for 27 years." (That would be birth to age 27, so I think he meant that he just wasn't religious.) After that, we got the standard Xer conversion story we've all heard a million times.

Oh, and - surprise! - an ignorant tirade about "Darwinism." Which has something to do with the ACLU, but he lost me somewhere in the middle of that rant.

[salvorhardin]

1. It's from the beginning of Hogfather

Everything starts somehwere, although many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problems with the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spellings of words.

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If its all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isnt then you've lost nothing right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...".
http://greensboring.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=10989

The Sky One TV two-parter was quite enjoyable too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNT7BZXYM7o