So. . . I had seen a lot of Christians here use the Pascal's wager argument, which is highly fallacious, to say the least. Today I happened to stumble upon an expanded version, which was less fallacious, and a brilliant analysis which showed eventually that choosing to do good deeds while you're alive is the safest way to go. By our evolved morality, we understand that 'good deeds' refers to whatever is best for humanity as a whole. Remember that the optimal choice is based on how lenient they are to unbelievers, and Christian fundamentalism was in dead heat with good deeds. This made me laugh, it only shows how wicked the supposed Christian god is. . . statistically speaking, he's even more evil than Allah in his punishment to the slightest mistake. Doesn't sound like a god I'd want to serve. Good Deeds emerged as the optimal choice later on, and mostly because most religions and their gods are nice to people who, although unbelievers, lived a good life. So I'll be posting extracts from the ablysis, along with my commentaries. Stay Tuned. Btw, for those who don't know what Pascal's wager is, here is the simplified, fallacious version:

Though the results depend on a number of assumptions, in many cases Christian Fundamentalism is the clear winner. Under other circumstances, Good Deeds can be the way to go. Finally, when we take reincarnation into account (i.e. playing the game more than once), we see that a mixed strategy involving either Fundamental Christianity or Good Deeds, with a slight probability of Hinduism, Buddhism, or other reincarnating faiths is optimal.

Before diving into the (non-pithy) details, a few comments:

1. The most important thing in choosing your religion is not the rewards/punishments promised by that religion. The most important thing is how OTHER religions will reward/punish you for following your chosen creed. This is because any one religion you pick is very likely to be the wrong one. Likewise, it makes no difference how tolerant your chosen religion is to others. One gains nothing by following Universalism.

2. It is hard to assign value to the different outcomes, particularly when eternity is involved. Is the “reward” infinitely good, and the “punishment” infinitely bad? We can assign finite values to these, but then what about reincarnation? Is it good or bad? And if it is either, is eternally recurring reincarnation infinitely good or infinitely bad? I will try to dodge these issues.

3. Are all the religions in the chart to be considered equally likely to be true? There is perhaps no objective way to assign probabilities, but there are a few pitfalls to assuming all equal probabilities. The results can be skewed any way you like by adding new made up religions. I don’t know what Pascal’s Wagerism is, but its inclusion here tilts the field in favor of the Christian faiths. Likewise, the division of Christianity into several sects which all go easy on each other also tilts the field in favor of Christianity. If we were to split Islam into Sunni and Shiite, that would tilt things towards Islam (assuming those two go easy on each other, though maybe they don’t).

We can analyze the expected benefit of different strategies by making the following choices.
1. Construct a matrix M^M whose entries correspond to the given matrix, where each outcome is assigned a score indicating the goodness/badness of that outcome occurring. Positive for good, negative for bad.
2. Construct a row vector qq, where qiqi is probability that the i_th belief system is the correct one.
3. Construct a column vector pp, where pipi is the probability that you will choose the i_th belief system.

Given 1-3, you live your life, die, and then experience an outcome with the expected score s0=qM^ps0qMp.

In general, I will choose the following scores:
Reward = 100
Punishment = -100
Purgatory, then reward = 80 (purgatory is a minus twenty on top of the reward’s 100)
Purgatory, then nothing = -20
Lost soul = -50
Uncertain = neutral = nothing = 0
Reincarnation can be either neutral, good, or bad, where neutral will be zero, good will be a small positive number, and bad a small negative number.
Reincarnation with punishment will be set by the reincarnation score, modified downwards.

Running the calculation described above, with all beliefs turning out to be equally likely (q_i=1/N) for the N strategies where you simply pick one of the N options, we obtain the following expected outcome. (The winner here doesn’t depend on the particular choice of reincarnation points.)

Commentary:
Apart from the technical gibberish (lol), we can see how Christian Fundamentalism was picked even before calculations as the clear winner with the most evil, merciless god of all existing religions, there by the safest way to go . My problem with that as a human being is that the practices of Christian fundamentalism are repulsive to me as a human being. First off, what us Christian fundamentalism?
It stemmed from the use of 'Islamic fundamentalists' to describe terrorists who commit evil in the name of Islam. Let's just call Christian fundamentalists the Christian version. An example is Westboro Baptist church. . . Or the Christians that go shoot up abortion clinics because its against their practices.
I prefer to take the other factors into consideration which finally puts good deeds as the winner, and the difference between Christian Fundamentalism and GD is that the former emerged the winner out of fear of a ghastly punishment, while the latter emerged because of its benefits in all religions.
The first picture down there is the EXPANDED PASCALS WAGER and the second one shows the results from the first calculations.

The clear winner is Christian fundamentalism. This occurs because the other Christian faiths don’t treat the fundamentalists too harshly, and “Pascal’s Wagerism” lets the fundamentalists into heaven. Since this isn’t very interesting, I will now exclude Pascal’s Wagerism from the possible true faiths (q(Pascal’s Wagerism)=0).

With the probability of Pascal’s Wagerism being true set to zero, there is now some symmetry between Christian Fundamentalism (CF) and Good Deeds (GD). They don’t have exactly the same set of outcomes, but if you set up the scores as I have with some symmetry between purgatory-reward, and purgatory nothing, then the scores for CF and GD come out quite similar. The only deciding factor between the two is whether reincarnation is counted as a positive, negative, or neutral. If reincarnation is neutral, then CF and GD are exactly tied. If reincarnation is a positive, then GD comes out ahead of CF, and vice versa. This effect entirely arises from the possibility that Wiccanism is the true faith, which stipulates reincarnation for Good Deeds, and uncertainty for Christian Fundamentalists.

There is a piece missing from the analysis so far. Given the possibility of reincarnation, you may get to play the game more than once. In fact, if you come to the conclusion that you should always pick, say Christian Fundamentalism, and Hinduism is the true faith, you may be playing the game infinitely. This raises some problems with the scoring. If reincarnation (with or without punishment) is a net positive or negative, is it cumulative? If one reincarnation is good, is infinitely many reincarnations infinitely good? It doesn’t seem right the have infinite reincarnations for continuously picking wrong be better than the reward promised for picking the right religion. It also doesn’t seem right to have an infinite number of lives on earth be worse than hell. I have solved this problem by considering a large, but finite maximum number of reincarnations (say 100), and setting the score for reincarnation to be say +/- 0.5, so that continuous reincarnation would be +50 or -50, as compared to the score for reward (100) or punishment (-100). I assume that if you are reincarnated, you are not consciously aware of your previous lives, but may have some unconscious positive or negative impact from your previous incarnations.

We can extend the calculation above to account for the possibility of multiple reincarnations. First, we construct a matrix R^R which has the same size as the matrix M^M and contains a one if that outcome involves reincarnation, and a zero otherwise. Given a belief strategy pp, the probability of reincarnation for all the different possible true faiths is the vector R^pRp. If there is the possibility of reincarnation, then you get another chance for reward or punishment, so we multiply the probability of reincarnation by the expected outcome for another round of the game: (R^p)⋆(M^p)RpMp, where ⋆ denotes element-wise multiplication. We can find the expected score from subsequent reincarnations by summing the probabilities for r sequential reincarnations, by raising the probability of one reincarnation to the r_th power (element-wise). We can then write the expected score, including up to Rmax reincarnations:
s=∑Rmaxr=0q((R^p)r⋆(M^p))sr0RmaxqRprMp.

So as to not bias the further results, let’s just take reincarnation to be neutral (score of zero), and reincarnation with punishment to be slightly negative. This way, Good Deeds and Christian Fundamentalism are in a dead heat. (Again, due to the Wiccan outcome, GD is ahead if reincarnation is positive, and CF if the opposite.) The expected outcomes, if your strategy is always to pick one of the possible faiths is shown below.

Commentary
It gets even more interesting here. As the author said, adding reincarnation as a factor, making it a continuous loop, makes the game even more interesting! If reincarnation is a good thing, GD comes out as the clear winner. If its a bad thing, Christian fundamentalism leads. If its neutral, GD and CF are tied in dead heat. Is reincarnation a good thing to you? Personally, it is, if it existed. . . a chance to come try again and start over/continue where you left off. However, the answer treated reincarnation neutrally with a slightly negative tilt, leaving GD and CF balanced.
CF treats everyone else(non believers) terribly, and even Pascal's wagerism let's Christians into heaven. Lol. If only Universalism was true. Then there's be no need for all of this because everyone would be right . I agree with the author's removal of Pascal's wagerism as a faith. . . lol, its not even a real religion.
(Keep in mind that this expanded version doesn't include all 5000 gods, but as many as possible, and is the best analysis you could get).

As you can see, GD and CF are exactly the same, with a score of 2.93. By following a somewhat more subtle strategy however, we can do better. The problem arises if you rationally choose your religion in every incarnation, and therefore pick either CF or GD. But what if, say, Hinduism is the true faith? Then you are going to be stuck getting reincarnated forever - you are stuck in a reincarnation loop. Even if reincarnation is neutral, it means you never get the reward. Of course, if CF is the true faith, and you pick Hinduism, then you are screwed. An optimal strategy, then, would be to pick either CF or GD with very high probability and pick Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Cao Dai, Jainism, or Sikhism, with a very small probability. Just what that probability depends on how bad the punishment is and how good the reward is compared to some number of reincarnations. For the 100 reincarnation maximum here, it turns out that it is optimal to pick one of the reincarnating/rewarding faiths each with about 3% probability. If the maximum number of reincarnations increases, then this optimal probability becomes smaller. The expected outcomes are shown below if you choose the listed faith with high probability, but mix in the reincarnating/rewarding faiths each with 3% probability.

If you follow this mixed strategy, then Good Deeds emerges as the optimal choice for your “usual” faith. This is again because of the Wicca Wild Card. As discussed above, if Wiccanism is correct and you pick GD then you get reincarnated, whereas if you pick CF, the outcome is uncertain (but we apparently assume no reincarnation). If reincarnation itself is neutral, then it gives no direct advantage to either. However, if you are following a mixed strategy, then it does give you further chances to get rewarded. Specifically, say Wicca is correct, and you are typically choosing Good Deeds. You keep getting reincarnated. Once in a while, you choose Hinduism or Buddhism - these also get you reincarnated according to the true faith - Wiccanism. But if once in while you pick Jainism, Shinto, Cao Dai, or Sikhism, BAM! Reward!

Note that you do not know if you have played the game before or not, and if so, what your previous choice was. So you want to pick the safe choice (Good Deeds) with high probability. The low probability of the other choices just guarantees that you have an eventual escape route from the reincarnation loop.

This mixed strategy is actually a sort of an interesting game theory type of thing. (I don't know much about game theory so maybe this sort of thing has a name.) You can consider a simplified system with just 2 religions, say Christianity (C) and Hinduism (H). If C is true and you pick C, you get +1 reward and if C is true and you pick H you get -1 punishment. If H is true and you pick H, you get +1 reward, and if H is true and you pick C you get 0 reward, but you get to play again. Let's say C and H are each true with probability 1/2. You have no recollection of the previous times you have played, if any. So you can just pick a strategy that is some probability PCPC for you to pick C, and some probability PH=1−PCPH1PC for you to pick H.


If you play this game with a maximum number of incarnations N, it is not too hard to show that the expected payoff is s=PC−12PNCsPC12PCN. For finite N>1, clearly the expected payoff is maximized when PC<1PC1. It is interesting to look at the limit as N goes to infinity (unlimited reincarnation.) In this limit, we find s=1/2 for PC=1PC1, but s=PCsPC for any PC<1PC1. So you want PCPC as close as possible to 1, but not exactly one. Furthermore, any 0.5<PC<10.5PC1 is an improvement over PC=1PC1.

Commentary
Considering the infinite loop you might end up in if you keep choosing Christian Fundamentalism and keep reincarnating to atone and atone and atone forever, good deeds emerges the clear winner. Other faiths that believe in reincarnation might be good for you, but the safest way to play the game is by doing good deeds.

CONCLUSION
Forget about judging others and being 'holier than thou'. It can't take you anywhere. The best way to live your life is by being a good person, and helping your fellow man when you have the chance. So before you listen to any religious leader telling you what to do, question it in your head: 'Is this thing going to help humanity in the Kong run or is it for their own selfish interests?'. Then make the appropriate choice.

Footnotes
https://www.quora.com/Given-the-following-payoff-matrix-which-religion-is-actually-the-most-optimal-to-wager-ones-belief-on-in-a-multi-religion-Pascals-Wager

AnonyNymous:

smh

we already know Pascal's wager to be bullshit just like any god idea
they're just meant to keep people in line