“Thou shalt not make unto thee
any graven image, or any likeness of any thing
that is in heaven above….“
Exodus 20:4

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

And it thus becomes obvious that Nietzsche has been falsely accused. It wasn’t he who had murdered God! He was simply the first who had the guts to write His death certificate…

My point being that what we call ‘God’ is a man made image. A concept.
It doesn’t matter, for this analysis, whether there is an actual god or not. What we call God is nothing more than our image of one.

And it had been enough. For a while.
For as long as we have followed the rules we ourselves had established to guide our own behavior – as in written them down – the God we’d imagined worked as intended. ‘Religion’ did what it was supposed to do. People had a ‘spiritual environment’ in which they behaved both coherently and cohesively.
Coherently and cohesively enough to evolve from slaves – owned and/or owners – to equal rights owning/yielding citizens.
Coherently and cohesively enough to evolve from horse driven war chariots to the M1A3 Abrams tank.
Coherently and cohesively enough to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ to the tune of 8 billion. Give or take. Not all of them following ‘the rules’ but all of them benefiting from the results of those rules having been followed for a while.

Yet, when things were unfolding so smoothly, why have we given up following those rules?

Have we outgrown the need for a shepherdly Father? For a Ghost to frighten us unto doing the right thing?
Or have we become so infatuated with our own ability to think, to reason, that we have turned it into an idol? Against all odds…
Despite having been warned about it!

Pascal’s wager is about turning the tables on ‘God’.
The image we made for ourselves about God, the ‘Holy Gost who frightened us unto staying on the straight and narrow’, convinced us to behave in a constructive manner. Benefiting the entire community.
The argument made by Pascal was made to convince us, individually, that we – each of us – should believe in God for their own sake. For their own benefit!
Effectively transforming each individual belief into an idol… ‘Graven’ by each individual, upon their own soul, in the likeness of things in heaven, for their individual use… Transforming the community creating God into an individual tool designed and believed to ‘give’ each of us ‘everything’.
Individually. As opposed to making it possible for everybody to exist.

As Nietzsche observed, by making Pascal’s wager – by transforming faith into a rational thing – we have collectively killed God. The same God which has made us possible.
Against everything we have been warned about, by our wise ancestors, we have replaced God with ourselves. So that we “gain all”. Individually. Each of those who had made the rational decision…