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Post by peterdamian on Nov 9, 2010 20:02:32 GMT
And as for the quotes about Inferno... Too difficult for me. Another difficult question is to what extent the belief in the inferno is cruel? Paul Johnson once said (I can't find where) that the belief itself was cruel. Gregory of Rimini was called 'the torturer of infants' because he believed that the souls of the unbaptised would go to the inferno. Is the belief cruel? You might say that God is cruel. But is the person who believes this of God is also cruel? Why? If God does not exist, no one has or will be punished, and so no one is hurt. If God exists, but does not intend to punish souls in this way, the same applies. If God exists and does intend punish souls in this way, then that is the fact of the matter. There is nothing that the believer can do to prevent the suffering. David Hume had an interesting theory that all professed believers are actually atheists. He says that all Catholics say that the St Bartholomew's massacre was cruel and inhumane. Yet these are the same people, he says, who condemn non-Catholics to an eternal torment. I'll try and find the quote. [edit] Found it ocham.blogspot.com/2006/03/overheard-in-bar_18.html |
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Post by unkleE on Nov 10, 2010 1:21:42 GMT
Another difficult question is to what extent the belief in the inferno is cruel? <snip> David Hume had an interesting theory that all professed believers are actually atheists. I think this is an interesting question. As you are aware, I feel quite strongly about it, but it seems it doesn't unduly worry most christians. Certainly my early days as a christian included the belief in everlasting torment, and while that led christians to be concerned about the fate of non-believers, I don't recall there being the same anguish about it as there would have been over one actual and physical death or suffering now. I can only assume that it is remote enough to dull the impact (the same as we all worry more about our football team losing than the deaths of thousands in other parts of the world), plus christians are happy to leave God's decisions with him. But I think the christian world is slowly changing on this matter. |
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Post by perplexedseeker on Nov 10, 2010 15:46:00 GMT
It is an interesting question. I don't think any good person would consider it OK to torture a person his whole life in punishment for stealing a loaf of bread just because he never felt sorry about doing it. So why would God doing worse than that somehow be alright? I suppose one could say that there's a disanalogy there, and that God has the authority to pass judgements it would be immoral for humans to pass. But I'm not sure why this should be so, other than the Divine Command theory that whatever God decides is good by definition (which of course lays you wide open to the Euthypro Dilemma).
As for if the belief is bad... As a personal answer, because I lean somewhat towards virtue ethics (put very crudely, Aristotle's position that rather than acts being good or bad, it's the person who becomes good or bad as a result of performing those acts over time), I'd be tempted to say that cruelty applies to a human disposition not to actions, so yes, holding such beliefs might make you cruel, as it might inhibit your ability to be sympathetic and compassionate towards your fellow humans if you think they're evil enough people to deserve the Inferno.
That might be me begging the question though, because from a virtue ethics point of view punishment isn't a good in itself anyway, but would be the virtuous thing to administer if it will correct vices and redirect wrongdoers to the pursuit of the good.
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Post by unkleE on Nov 10, 2010 20:34:59 GMT
It is an interesting question. I don't think any good person would consider it OK to torture a person his whole life in punishment for stealing a loaf of bread just because he never felt sorry about doing it. So why would God doing worse than that somehow be alright? The standard christian way to address this question is to start with God's absolute goodness, and our absolute sinfulness, and therefore we deserve the very worst, and anything less than the worse is God's grace. Grace is offered us, and if we choose to disdain it, then what else can God do? So them's the facts, and we'd better just get used to it. I agree up to a point, but I can't help feeling the modern evangelical view on all that is a little distorted. When I have stuffed up in some way, I certainly feel like I'm hopelessly bad and lost, but I don't think that is the whole picture we get from either the OT or Jesus, though it is closer to the picture we get from Paul. And I can't help feeling if the end result of creation is 10 times as many people being tormented forever as those enjoying eternal bliss, then maybe God should have foreseen that and decided not to bother. I think believing in everlasting torment can push people towards being insensitive and holier than thou, but it can also do the opposite. And mostly, like I said before, it seems to not affect most christians much at all. And I think the antidote lies in a better Biblical understanding - more based on a plain reading of the obvious, good scholarship, what the Bible says about itself, the guiding of the Holy Spirit, a dose of humility and a recognition that much of modern evangelicalism is a human construct. |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 11, 2010 8:48:26 GMT
It is an interesting question. I don't think any good person would consider it OK to torture a person his whole life in punishment for stealing a loaf of bread just because he never felt sorry about doing it.So why would God doing worse than that somehow be alright? God doesn't send people to hell for a single act. All people, due to the Original sin, are predetermined to be damned. God's omnibenevolence doesn't allow evil to be unpunished, and, since every single person had done an immoral act, she's qualified for Hellfire. But God, being merciful, doesn't want humanity to perish, so he made a penal substitution for humanity's sins by sending his son on the cross, and, by this, left a way wide open for everyone not to be damned. Hell's infinite duration is understandable and not in contradiction with God's all-loving nature. Every sin is an offense to God's honor, and God's honor is the highest, the infinite. When a being with the highest honor gets crucified and so is humiliated the worst way imaginable (not to mention, having the memory of it eternally after it), then that sacrifice provided infinite payment to anyone who wants to follow Jesus' path and become a Christian. Those who don't acknowledge and reject God, his laws, and his sacrifice exclude themselves from the payment and are destined to an existence accordingly made to their acts and their express wishes not to live together with God. The Eutyphro dilemma is easily resolvable. God's commands are the reflection of his necessary nature and so cannot be arbitrary or independent of him. |
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Post by unkleE on Nov 11, 2010 10:55:22 GMT
God doesn't send people to hell for a single act. All people, due to the Original sin, are predetermined to be damned. God's omnibenevolence doesn't allow evil to be unpunished ...... Hell's infinite duration is understandable and not in contradiction with God's all-loving nature. Every sin is an offense to God's honor, and God's honor is the highest, the infinite. I think you are missing PS's point, in fact I think you are unintentionally illustrating it. I don't believe in the doctrine that many many people are punished forever, but if I did, I think I could only talk about it with tears. That's how I think PS also feels, whereas you seem to be quite comfortable with it, which could appear to some to be quite unloving and uncaring. And I don't really think the argument is strong either. Punishing evil doesn't necessarily mean punishing people forever - one would think that putting the evil out of existence would at least be more humane and dealing with evil decisively - after all, allowing evil people to continue to live surely allows evil to continue to have an effect by continuing to exist? And if I thought God's main concern was his honour, rather than (as I believe) his sacrificial love for us, I'm not at all sure I would find him worthy of worship - as if the almighty God needs to worry about that! I think by historical theology standards, I am a heretic, but I believe the NT supports what I am saying so I will have to settle for that.  |
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syzygy
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Post by syzygy on Nov 11, 2010 13:14:46 GMT
I like Perplexed’s ethic of personal character and agree that belief in hell can “make you cruel.” I think belief in heaven can have bad effects on character as well. If either of these things actually happens, I believe it would be the latter quite a bit more than the former. I think we’re more likely to become complacent than cruel. When I look at the lives of committed Christians that I know and those I read about, I see something different happening. I see intense commitment to the welfare of people around them and to the concerns of this world. Maybe their belief in eternal realities, including heaven and hell, helps them to see something of ultimate value in the things of this world.
I don’t think about heaven much, and when I do, it’s mostly to recall that Jesus left there to announce the advent God’s kingdom on earth. I have trouble thinking of hell as punishment and of Jesus' sacrifice as paying some kind of price. Hell as a consequence makes sense to me, and as a symbol of the ultimate seriousness of the choice between good and evil, it might even be good to think about once in a while.
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Post by peterdamian on Nov 11, 2010 16:07:38 GMT
My question was not whether it is cruel for God to condemn people in such a way. Nor whether such a belief 'makes you cruel'. The question is whether it is cruel to entertain such a belief, or whether it is a sign of insensitivity. >>Hell's infinite duration is understandable and not in contradiction with God's all-loving nature. Why not? >>Those who don't acknowledge and reject God, his laws, and his sacrifice exclude themselves from the payment and are destined to an existence accordingly made to their acts and their express wishes not to live together with God. To 'reject God' implies the conscious rejection of a being who is assumed to exist. If I do not believe in the existence of God, I do not believe that I have rejected anything, for there is nothing (in my eyes) to reject. This is true whether God exists or not. To reject x, it is necessary that you believe in the existence of x. And what about someone who has not been told about God? When I was a teenager visiting a U.S. state years ago I did not know it was illegal to hitchhike in that state. I was stopped by the police who said I could be sent to prison for this. But they kindly let me off because of my English 'ignorance of the law'. It seems God does not allow 'ignorance of the law'. That seems cruel to me. But I am straying from the point. My question remains as above. The question is whether it is cruel to entertain such a belief, or whether it is a sign of insensitivity. If someone tells me that thieves should have their hands cut off, or that murderers should be burned alive, I feel that person is cruel. But this is not the same case. That person would, if they could, influence the law so that this happened. It's different in the case of someone who believes in Hell, since they cannot influence God's law or judgment. [edit] I found a good post here www.davidlrattigan.com/hell.htm which gets close to my question. One argument is the story of a preacher who said that, if hell was real, he would crawl 100 miles on hands and knees across broken glass to save a single sinner. Do most people who believe in Hell go to such lengths to try to prevent this? It also raises the same question I raised here ocham.blogspot.com/2006/03/overheard-in-bar_18.html - do fundamentalists really believe in the inferno anyway? The Channing story is particularly illuminating. Here is another link isnrblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/belief-in-a-cruel-god-makes-a-cruel-man-thomas-paine/ |
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Post by himself on Nov 12, 2010 2:44:46 GMT
Time is the measure of motion [change] in mutable being; that is, in material being.
Absent change, there is not "time" but eternity.
Eternity is not "a really long time." It is not "an infinitely long time." It is an absence of time.
Therefore, there is no "duration" as we understand it. It is [analogy alert!] more like being in a photograph than being in a motion picture.
The torment of the damned therefore has so duration, but is more like a single suspended moment of turning away, of being deprived, of refusing to join the party. But being not in a material body, there is no sense of the passage of time.
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Post by elephantchang51 on Nov 12, 2010 6:35:46 GMT
This is all highly confusing,surely even a single suspended moment has a duration however brief it might be?Sorry if I've missed the point here,I would like to understand it better.
What constitutes a non material body?What evidence exists for their existence?
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Post by unkleE on Nov 12, 2010 7:11:37 GMT
The torment of the damned therefore has so duration, but is more like a single suspended moment of turning away, of being deprived, of refusing to join the party. But being not in a material body, there is no sense of the passage of time. I'm pretty suspicious of this sort of theology, I must admit. But if what you say is true and the damned (in your view) don't really suffer as much as we might think, doesn't that mean the blessed are also not very blessed, by the same reasoning? |
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Post by perplexedseeker on Nov 12, 2010 15:43:56 GMT
Thankyou for your contribution Matko. Your post did a good job of focusing these issues. But my basic objections remain: God doesn't send people to hell for a single act. All people, due to the Original sin, are predetermined to be damned. Well, you see, this would make sense to me only if simply being born with evil dispositions was enough to make you evil and hence guilty. But firstly, as a virtue ethicist I reject this (you presumably are not a virtue ethicist, but if so I'd like to know what alternative basis your claim has). A naturally kind person does not have the virtue of kindness, because they do not perform acts for virtuous reasons, but because they don't know any different. The same applies to inborn dispositions to vices. Secondly, I would require an explanation as to how it is possible for you to be culpable for a sin your ancestors committed. If Original Sin is to be understood as an inherited disposition, then culpability is a complete nonsequitur. But if it's instead some kind of claim that we're essentially guilty by our very nature, that makes a mockery of the free will that's essential for many accounts of salvation. In addition, it seems to me to require what appears to be a weirdly literal version of Genesis to get off the ground. Agreed. But what do we mean by "punish" here? What goods are served by punishment? It's a good in itself if and only if the retributive theory of justice is correct. I would need to see compelling arguments to the effect that it is. I'm a little confused as to why this should be so. Qualified for suitable justice, no doubt, but it's the justice of hellfire I find lacking. Two questions: 1. How is it possible to offend God's honour if he is immutable? And how exactly is honour a perfection God could be said to have? Isn't it a human social construction to do with reputation? Who does God need to have a reputation with? 2. (purely out of interest) Since God is purely actual, wouldn't that mean his honour is an actual infinite? And if an actual infinite is possible, wouldn't that refute the Kalam cosmological argument? Or is there a distinction here that I'm missing? I'm sorry, but I really don't understand how this is supposed to work. Let us suppose we ignore for the moment the logical problems with the Incarnation. If it's possible to let people off by sacrificing yourself, why do people have to know that you've done so in order for it to work? After all, you know you've done so, and you know that your "honour" is thereby satisfied. What do the opinions of human beings have to do with this? On a related note, even if the doctrine of the substitute sacrifice is true, and that anyone who follows his teachings is thereby saved, how do we know that the contingent way in which the Church's doctrines developed over the centuries after Jesus' time on earth are an accurate record of his original teachings? I'm not a metaphysical naturalist, so I'm perfectly willing to concede ad arguendum that for all I know, perhaps Jesus did perform miracles to verify his teachings. But how are we supposed to know (save through heroic faith) whether our description of those teaching are accurate? There are plenty of (to my mind) solid arguments for the logical necessity of God. I have yet to find one for the inerrancy of the Bible of infallibility of a given Church that I found even prima facie plausible. It's the "express wishes" part that really bothers me. It seems to assume that people somehow choose to reject the actual God and his teachings by rejecting particular (flawed) conceptions of God and his teachings. Most people who "reject God" are in fact rejecting a strawman (many Churches in fact preach strawman concepts of God and religion), which, using their God-given faculty of reason, they would be quite correct to reject. If you've never heard of anything other than fideism, could you be blamed for believing that rational arguments for God don't exist? There are after all very few people who have actually argued that they would not want to live in perfect fulfilment for eternity. I know of plenty of atheists whose beliefs are a matter of bitter regret. They wish to believe in God, but are unable to force themselves to because of bad experiences they had with religion in the past. Perhaps that's not rational, but then again, is it any less rational than the (salvifically effective) faith of their former communicants who stayed in the fideist tradition they abandoned? Even so, I think peterdamien's point needs clarification - is it even coherent to say you can you reject something you don't believe exists? The statement seems to presuppose that you must know God exists to have decided that he does not exist. And what about agnostics? They do not reject God's word, neither do they accept it. They simply have the (actually very reasonable) belief that there's nothing you can say about such things, given how conflicting the alleged human records of God's word are, and the impossibility of empirically verifying the metaphysical. How can an agnostic possibly reject God if they have no opinion on the matter? I agree completely. But the corrolory of that is that God's ethical commands must comply with reason (as God himself is by nature perfectly rational). Therefore, if a particular interpretation of a historically contingent religious doctrine appears to conflict with rational ethics, we have compelling reason to discard it, given what we know about God's nature. |
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Post by hawkinthesnow on Nov 14, 2010 17:14:29 GMT
The New Testament has very little to say about hell, or Gehenna. When Jesus spoke of it his listenes would have understood it in the light of the Valley of Hinnom, the city's waste dumb, where fires where all the city's rubbish was burned. Apparently, bodies of criminals would be burned there as well. It came to symbolise utter destruction. There are grounds for thinking then that Gehenna represents not a place of conscious torment, so much as a state (no state?) of total destruction. As Jesus said it is the "worm that dieth not", not the individuals that the worm feeds on. Is this just? CS Lewis says that in the end there are two kinds of people, those who say to God "Thy will be done", and those to whom God says "THY wil be done.". On a brighter note however, St Paul does suggest in several passages that the whole universe will eventually be reconciled to God, so there is some Scriptural justification for universalism.
Many Christian hope and pray that this is the case.
A final thought - although Jesus did speak about gehenna, his main concern was getting people to respond to God in this life, rather than giving us information about the afterlife.
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Post by himself on Nov 16, 2010 20:48:44 GMT
But if what you say is true and the damned (in your view) don't really suffer as much as we might think, doesn't that mean the blessed are also not very blessed, by the same reasoning? As I understand it, the suffering is very real, as is the Beatific Vision. This latter is the direct, unmediated knowledge of God as the ultimate in the good and therefore the ultimate in desirability, and therefore commands the assent of the will. The suffering of the damned is that they refused, persistently and willfully, to pursue the good, and therefore in the end do not attain it. It is like a man on a cold and darkling plain in the driven sleet who is invited into a tavern brightly lit and alive with singing and good wine -- and he refuses. He suffers then by his own choice. |
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Post by himself on Dec 13, 2010 22:20:48 GMT
Human beings cannot handle the possibility of eternity, where eternity is imagined as an indefinite extension of one's present experiences on earth.
Then it's a good thing "eternity" is not "an indefinite extension of one's present experiences on earth."
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