Reference no: EM133262931

DO you agree on James is writing a bit hard to decipher. However, I believe his main assertion is that religious belief or lack there of is not something that should be determined bye a wager for eternal happiness or an all out rejection for lack of hard evidence. He asserts that religious devotion can only arise from a non-coerced decision based on living options, or hypotheses that are familiar and rational to the subject.

I do very much agree with his assessment of pascals argument, because I feel it reduces faith to a very basic and selfish decision and strips it of spiritual significance.

I do, however, think any living option must have once been a dead option because it was unfamiliar and therefor unintelligible. Especially now in the age of easily accessible information, any dead option can quickly become a dynamic living possibility. James's premium on free will still holds true, but I believe his use of the words dead and living are a bit careless here because they implies permanence. Perhaps better terms could be animate/inanimate or dynamic/static.