Why Do You Believe?

[Slander and/or Libel]

I'll refer to Albert Camus, a French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher:

 "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."

How can you live out your life as if there is a god when there are countless iterations of what god is and what it wants?

And, crucially, when many if not most of those iterations' demands are incompatible with one another?

[Slander and/or Libel]

I'll refer to Albert Camus, a French Nobel Prize-winning philosopher:

 "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."

Given that Camus was Catholic, I don't think he was just referring to God in the general sense. He would've been talking about the God of Isaac and Abraham, the God that came to earth both perfectly human and perfectly divine and died for the sins of man.

When you look at it that way, you find the real point of his quote. I'd rather believe in God wrongly than not believe and end up going to hell.

I don't know that anything you just said changes what anybody perceived the point of the quote to be.

[Slander and/or Libel]

When you bring up the "I'd rather believe and have it not be true than not believe and have it be true" argument, you have to take into account the fact that in that formulation, believing in something that turns out to be wrong is the same as not believing. So you need some kind of heuristic that tells you that the faith you're choosing to abide by is more likely than the countless others, if only by some small margin, to be true.