Pascal’s wager is the opposite of faith. It shows the same attitude as the rich man in Matthew 19 who looks for the minimum requirements for salvation. So if that is your reason for religion then you have wasted your time and missed the boat completely. Thus Pascal’s wager is a lost bet and all you have really gained for your trouble is payment to racketeers using religion as a tool of power and manipulation, those Jesus named children of the devil.
The idea is that there is a choice of action set X or not X and that you can calculate an expectation for these two action sets given the two possibilities that God exists or not. The premises being
A. If God exists doing X means you get eternal life.
B. If God exists doing not X means you get eternal damnation.
C. If God does not exist then it doesn’t matter what you do.
Pascal’s conclusion is that the positive and negative consequences in A and B outweigh any price you can put on doing X during a finite life.
But then which of the thousands of religious sects do you go by for the specification of X?
If it is Christianity then premise A is already denied by Jesus in Matthew 19, “with men this is impossible.” There is no X which can get you eternal life. And in Romans 10, Paul explains that faith means you don’t even ask any the question of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. That will only lead to entitlement which has always turned religion into a thing of evil. Christianity calls upon people to live by faith, which is believing and doing without entitlement – and that means believing and doing for its own sake just because it is right.