I never really understood Pascal's Wager.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.

Pascal's Wager if you read the entire book is more intricate than choosing to believe. He also argues that by practicing as if you believed, you may feel as if the choice is true and find God that way.

I see it as more of a rationalization. When you already believe something, you look for intellectual reasons to justify that belief. Pascal's Wager feel like that to me. Its main power is hardening an existing belief rather than swaying an undecided mind.

Except that 'pisteuō' means more nearly "to be faithful to" or, one could even say, to enter a type of contract (thus the Greek construct 'dia pistis', two parties relating "through faithfulness").

Anglo evangelicalism constrained its meaning to something like "intellectual assent", for its own purposes (in my opinion, it made for better sales models) some time in the nineteenth century. And as you essentially point out, intellectual assent is fairly meaningless.

Yeah, this is one of the more subtle issues with Pascal's wager.

If you're unfamiliar, there is a lot of historical context around Pascal's Wager -

Unless you live in a brutal theocracy, it's difficult to describe just how powerful institutionalized Christianity was at the time. Likewise the scale of religion-themed violence. A couple generations before Pascal's birth (in France), the Catholic-vs.-Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion had kill off something between 10% and 25% of the population of France.

Pascal's own religious beliefs changed several times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal#Religious_conver...

The Wager was published after Pascal's death, in an edited collection of his notes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es

In many ways, I'd interpret the Wager as saying "if professing quiet belief in the current local orthodoxy is relatively cheap, and those not doing so are occasionally slaughtered at scale, then prudent people will parrot orthodoxy".