Pascal's Wager

Pascal's Wager
"Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."
Blaise Pascal

The harm that comes to you is the harm of living a cowardly life by the rules not of a god, but by the rules of bronze age men who, rather than earn a respectable living, plagiarized widely from previous religions and wrote a book intended to control populations through fear of death.
These are not men whose book I would read when in need of moral advice.

My personal morality is based on what I believe is right and wrong and on what will make me feel good about myself.
Morality is a prehistoric, tribal, survival trait. What is moral is what is good for the tribe.
These is the moralities by which I live my life. My personal morality and the morality of the human tribe.
There's no book that can tell me what my heart can tell me, nor any cleansing ritual that can erase the past. I cannot forgive myself with magic words.
Self forgiveness lies within a true and honest effort to become better than your previous moral lapses, so you will no longer feel bad about yourself.
The truly righteous person will understand that the love of self is a necessary and prior condition to the love of all else.
And to accept a cowardly wager like Pascal's is no path to the love of self.
As the love of self is based on truth and striving to improve yourself beyond immorality, I don't see how Pascal's Wager can be anything but self delusion; a pathway to a religion which doles out forgiveness for immorality without the need to improve moral character.
Pascal's Wager is a hedged bet and a hedged bet removes or reduces risk of losing.
It is removing or reducing the joy of life to coerce a god to give you a good afterlife.

I give you Varga's Wager:
Try to be a moral person in the human tribe.
If there is no god, you will have lived a good and worthy life.
If there is a god, it will embrace you for having lived a moral life.

But it all starts with loving yourself first.

Love you.