The Wager Rhetorical Analysis

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Kayla Marie Wiseman Humanities 101: Knowledge 345101MQ 3003 Greg Polakoff Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 Humanities Midterm “The Wager” by Pascal talks about how believing in God is like gambling; we should not gamble with what we believe in. Passage 420 (126) tells us that just because you can not see something does not mean its is not there. Many people believe in God however many more do not. Pascal says we should not wager our belief in God, we should just believe. We are always leaning new things so what is to say that there is no God. We may not all believe in the same God but almost every religion has one, and each religion says that if we do not believe in that God we are sent to Hell. Does this mean there is more than one God…show more content…
For the man to go to the market place early in the morning he would need light because it was still dark out. No light same as no sun. The sun may represent God. . If the lantern represents light that is the sun when there is light outside, basically in theory the sun is God. If it represents God then when the man smashed the lantern it may represent killing God, the same as what the character told the crowd how we all killed God. Killing God can be the lack of practice of religion back then, however it is much worse these days. The way the man reacts to the death of God could be the way he felt because of the lack of believers in the world at the time and even now. Not many people follow religion anymore, more so know then back then, but our ancestors not believing cased a chain reaction for us not to believe. It could also be that the man was scared that this would happen; people not following religion anymore, meaning that we would not believe in a God. The man might have been really religious the way he was talking about us killing God and all, and maybe he wanted people to follow him in a journey to find more believers that would help him preach and keep his religion alive. Nietzsche was religious himself, he may have created “The Madman”(181) so that he could write his own thoughts without anyone judging him, because they might think it was a joke or that it was just something…show more content…
The difference between metaphysical philosophy and existential philosophy is that metaphysical philosophy has to do with fictional thinking, such as creative writings, things that are not relatable. On the other hand existential philosophy is when it is more literal or relatable such as when you talk about an addictions like gambling and theories that have the same concept. An example of metaphysical philosophy is when “The Madman”(181) talks about how “God is dead”(Nietzsche, Gay Science, 125). Nietzsche wrote a story that probably never happened; however it is entertaining, that talks about a man that says we have killed God. Not everyone can relate to that because not everyone believes in the same God and for some any God at all. An example of existential philosophy is “Pascal’s Wager”. Pascal talked about how we should not gamble our beliefs. It is something we can relate to, it is something we do every day, gamble with every decision we make there is a
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