Which is more important?

[bwald]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Mark Hubey writes:
>As one joke
has it, a rational person believes in God. If he does not exist he has
lost nothing, but what if he does exist?

It's not a joke to everyone.  It was proposed in all seriousness by the
(great) 17th c French mathemetician, computer scientist, and Janesenist
philosopher Blaise Pascal, who called it a "bet" (pari) you can't lose.  We
see why Pascal is celebrated for his work on probability theory.

Now the stuff about resemblances among various languages.  Seems relevant
to Pascal's probability theory.  You're finding out that you can spend your
life collecting such things (or collecting previous collections of such
things), and you'll never live long enough to collect them all.
Probability theorists, recycle your messages.