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Okay, sure, those are all possible.
But are they more likely? Once we've gotten to the step of "ok, we should care about infinites" there's not really any going back. The game is no longer about feeling a little happier today, or satisfied in a few decades, or getting the next promotion. It's no longer a matter of mere life and death. Now the concern, the only concern, is about pursuit of those infinite goods, and flight from the infinite bads.
You ask, how should we know? How may we judge some more likely than others?
Well, you may find it hard. Fair enough. But that doesn't change that that is fundamentally what things are about, what matters.
So: is it possible that there's a god that rewards atheists with heaven, and punishes the religious? Sure. But is there reason to think that that's more likely than the reverse? I don't see any reason to. But if that is the most likely source of infinites, then sure, maximize around that, and flee religion like your life depends on it (or, well, do the most to forget about the whole thing). But do you actually have any reason to think that that is the case? Religions being divine revelation seems more straightforward.
So, do you think that that's more likely, or only that it's possible?
"Religions being divine revelation seems more straightforward."
How so? Isn't the most likely thing that all religions are made up? You just stumbled into the one true one by blind luck (or divine plan)?
There is no way to rationally discuss something so fundamentally irrational, in the end it boils down to "I believe, or I have faith". I try not to get bogged down in the weeds with people who study the bible for fun. It is like engaging with any fandom in their domain. The difference is, most fans of Stargate don't consider it to be a factual representation of events taking place under Cheyenne Mountain in the late 1990's and early 2000's
To be clear, I'm not trying to say here that religions being divine revelation is more probable than not.
What I was trying to say was that a major religion being divine revelation seems to me to be more likely than that there is a god that rewards atheists infinitely or punishes theists infinitely. Specifically, for the argument, the question is about looking around to find the best way to get infinite expected value. I'm guessing you don't think there's any especially likely way to do so, so now we're looking for the least unlikely way to do so (even if it's still very unlikely). I think a religion could well be that.
Why a major one? I don't know, seems intuitively likely that a big one's more likely to be true than a small one. Like, if the god's interested in contact with humans, it would be unsurprising if that god is interested in contact with a lot of humans. Yes, that's a judgment call, but it seems like the right call to me—at least more reasonable and workable than the alternative. Is there any reason you might think otherwise?
If you recall, this was to you posing alternate wagers; I'm talking here about how to gauge between them. But I don't think posing alternate possible wagers entitles you to reject wagers altogether.
Anyway, I'm trying to make a rational argument here, so feel free to engage in reason.
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It seems like this is more or less isomorphic to utilitarianism, and my critique of it would be the same as my critique of utilitarianism: You seem to be trying to do math here, but I don't think it's actually math. That is to say, I don't think these calculations actually deliver repeatable answers independent of specific observers, and I don't think there's a way to fix that any more than there's a rigorous way to multiply potatoes by carrots.
I do, actually, think you can apply math here. You can use hyperreals or surreals: probabilities are able rigorously to be formulated in such contexts, I believe. And, mathematically, out comes Pascal's wager: a fanaticism for the infinite over the finite (and bigger infinites over smaller infinites, but I didn't want to complicate the matter), provided that we're always dealing with finite and not infinitesimal probabilities (which I'm relatively confident we are, but I didn't want to complicate the matter).
Now, assigning probabilities to things is tricky, but I think it's something that must be done. We can certainly think that things are more or less likely in general. It might be hard to do rigorously, to come up with exact numbers, but all you really need for this context is the balance of the matter, to figure out what's more likely from your own point of view, in the sense that the LessWrongers like talking about Bayes.
EDIT: just realized I wasn't quite addressing your objection. The Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem is pretty good evidence that your preferences, if you want them to have certain desirable properties (for example, one of the four is transitivity: if I would prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat pasta, and I would prefer to eat pasta now than to eat brussels sprouts, then I must prefer to eat a hamburger now than to eat brussels sprouts), must be able to be modeled by a utility function. That of course isn't saying that you need to just calculate whether this makes more people happy or something, and there, ethics is done. You're free to have among the things you care about how subjectively likely it is that that course of action might be violating some divine law, for example. Nor is it saying that you ought to be pulling out a function and writing down numbers or you're Irrational. But it is saying that, if you want your preferences to follow some pretty reasonable seeming properties, they need to have that certain mathematical structure. But you don't necessarily need to think about in your day-to-day life, you can just live it, caring about the things you care about.
I just realized in that last paragraph I was switching back and forth between ethics and preferences. I don't think those are the same, but I do think that ideally, our preferences should follow ethics. In any case, both involve "how do I decide what to do," so the same argument is relevant for each.
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