Yeah, I agree Pascal’s wager isn’t a good way to frame your life. I was just using it as a counterpoint to your explanation on why the standards for proof are so high. If it is because you’re trying to avoid the risks of a bad afterlife, you’re already doing Pascal’s wager, just with the wrong approach. The only way I can see that being the best approach is if you’re actively evaluating all the known religions to weigh the odds of each against how bad their hells are. But then there also better be reason to suspect that the ideal religion might gatekeep you for having once been part of a different religion, yet not gatekeep you for having been an atheist or for going in with the motivation of Pascal’s wager. Otherwise you might as well sign up with the best you know of right now and keep looking. But don’t do that because the wager is not a good : )
When I mentioned life on Earth, I was referring to having high standards because it’s going to affect your mortal life, rather than because of the risks of a bad afterlife. I think that’s a more sensible approach because it doesn’t require you to start from the assumption that an afterlife is possible, and the costs can be empirically measured instead of going off whatever the holy texts claim (outside of miracles, of course.) If the cost is 10% of your money and a day a week, then yeah, you probably want to be pretty sure before you commit, but if there are clear benefits, it might be worth it even without a rock-solid proof of a deity. Does that make sense?
Yes, I see what you mean about using the Bible to prove itself. I hadn’t noticed that the earliest manuscripts of Mark’s gospel didn’t have the account of Jesus appearing to the disciples, so that raises the possibility that when Mark (or whomever wrote that) was collecting notes of the stories around Jesus to spin a narrative, he decided to fabricate the idea of Christ appearing to all 11 at once in order to make it seem more credible.
The gospel of Mark is believed by scholars to have been written around 65-73 AD^[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible#Table_IV:_…], predating the other gospels, but it’s not the first book of the New Testament to have been written. 1 Corinthians, which scholars are sure was written by Paul, is believed to have been written around 53-57 AD, and it explicitly says that Christ appeared to the twelve disciples^[www.bible.com/bible/111/1CO.15.5.NIV].
Now it’s not exactly clear how many of the disciples were still alive by then, and at least one of them had died, but there were still some of them around. Seeing as they were still kicking, it wouldn’t make sense for Paul to make up an eyewitness testimony on their behalf, and if he did, they would have heard about it. His letters weren’t exactly kept secret. So even though we don’t have a direct claim from the (probably illiterate) disciples that they saw Jesus resurrected, it’s safe to conclude that they did make that claim.
EDIT: Though I suppose this brings up a fourth possibility (or fifth if you count aliens) that Paul was a chessmaster who made up the appearance to the twelve, and arranged to have any disciples who disagreed with his plan executed before he wrote about it… I think that’s pretty far-fetched.