Pascal's Wager

While Kierkergaard characterizes his Christian faith as a 'leap', the innovative mathematician Pascal likens it to a quantifiable 'wager'.  For, given the absence of empirical evidence, one way or the other, to believe that God exists is, according to Pascal, a gamble that after death there is eternal life, rather than nothing.  He argues that this wager is risk-free, since there is literally nothing, i. e. eternal death, to lose, and everything to gain.  However, this metaphor betrays Pascal--a wager in the present entails risking something of present value, not a future something of no admitted worth.  In other words, his scenario ignores the potential this-worldly costs of committing oneself to beliefs regarding posthumous events--for example, economic deprivation and psychological stunting, as, notably, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, explain.  So, the terms of the wager are not eternal life vs. eternal death, as Pascal frames it, but unverifiable possible after-worldly existence vs.the one actual life that one verifiably has.  'Sacrifice', rather than 'wager', might better describe those terms.