Pascal's "The Wager" is a reading that stands out most to me so far because he argues the real way believe in God is through our passions. He defines two sources in a human's belief formations: reason and passion. Reason is logic. No one disputes the fact that two plus two equals four. It is a stated fact and unchangeable. Unlike reason, passion is subject to change. Examples of passion are hobbies, the period a person is born, etc. Even though passion changes throughout a person's lifetime, it has more influence over a person's belief formation than reason.

To answer the atheist's question about how to believe in God, Pascal states to pretend to believe in God and eventually the atheist will. But, Pascal's response scares the atheist. Viewing humankind in this way is frightening. It shows that human beings can convince themselves of things that are untrue. They are comparable to trained animals that are in amusement parks.

Human beings are these intelligent creatures that are capable of doing great good in this world. But, once revealed that their passions could manipulate them, certain groups of people can use this as a way to override the reason of others. These people become gullible and susceptible to believing in things that hold no logic to them. Before, I mentioned that these people are like trained animals. These animals need to be taught by someone. This trainer is most likely not someone that cares about the greater good but only looks out for themselves. As seen in Bacon's rebellion, the wealthy plantation owners gave special privileges to the poor whites to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. It prevented any alliances between black slaves and poor whites. The rich is the trainer while the poor whites are trained animals. By only making them seem a bit more than the black slaves, they easily turned against them.