alt Hacker News> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?
That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.
But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "attested" there, it's doing a lot of work.
Certainly there are specific propositions that someone will or has attested to that a god exists that will punish you for believing in the Christian god.
Sure, if you insist there is more reason to suspect the existence of the Christian god than other gods, then your decision is already made for you; it was not my understanding that Pascal's wager was based on that assumption, but I guess it was implicitly, sure, while explicitly claiming to be based on a clean slate of assumptions. Which makes it even sillier.
Pascal's wager was not at all anchored to any specific attestations, you are taking his wager and reinterpreting it to give it some kind of legitimacy that it never originally held. The entire point of the wager was to justify belief in the absence of sufficient evidence, by appealing to the asymmetry between infinite reward and finite cost. If your now arguing that Christianity is more credible because of historical evidence, so be it and stick to it but you've abandoned Pascal's wager and moved on to an entirely different argument.
> But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus
Right, but that's the problem with it. It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.
Betting that Pascal's god exists isn't the safe choice that the wager makes it out to be, because it's equally possible that some other god exists (or just some other version of the Abrahamic god, say Allah or the pre-messiah god of Israel) and your faith in Jesus is just going to piss him off.
Believe in Jesus all you want, but Pascal's Wager is a pretty terrible reason to do so.
Edit to add: Your description is also not even the only possible New Testament god. Some (myself included) would argue that that particular image of god was painted more by Paul than by Jesus.