The Atheist's Wager is an atheistic response to Blaise Pascal's Wager regarding the existence of God. While Pascal suggested that it is better to take the chance of believing in a god that might not exist rather than to risk losing infinite happiness by disbelieving in a god that does, the Atheist's Wager suggests that:

The premise for the wager is often expressed in terms of an alleged quote from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

However, there is no indication that he ever wrote the quote attributed to him. In his Meditations, Marcus expresses the view that life would not be worth living if there were no gods, although he doesn't doubt their existence. He also writes repeatedly that being remembered after death is not to be valued, as it will make no difference to the deceased whether they're remembered or not and everyone who remembers them will themselves be dead in a very short amount of time.

The Wager states that if you were to analyze your options in regard to how to live your life, you would come out with the following possibilities:

A straw man is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

The origins of the term are unclear. The usage of the term in rhetoric suggests a human figure made of straw which is easily knocked down or destroyed, such as a military training dummy, scarecrow, or effigy. The rhetorical technique is sometimes called an Aunt Sally in the UK, with reference to a traditional fairground game in which objects are thrown at a fixed target. One common (folk) etymology is that it refers to men who stood outside courthouses with a straw in their shoe in order to indicate their willingness to be a false witness.

The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument:

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious, because attacking a distorted version of a position fails to constitute an attack on the actual position.