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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1231 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 15, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Inspired by the fear the reaper thread, It's always been odd to me that so many Christians and ex-Christians report being scared of hell. It always seemed pretty easy to avoid to me absurdly easy in Protestant's case but even for Catholics and Orthodox you just need to ho to a priest.

I guess it's a perception where the magnitude of the negative outcome ("ETERNITY" burning in hell) makes the fear much bigger than its low percentage likelihood implies. Even when it's significantly under the person's own control. Assuming the deity's commandments are accurately portrayed, all you gotta do is follow them.

It's a known phenomenon in lots of phobias and irrational fears that are common in the human mind.

It doesn't seem irrational to be deeply, persistently terrified of going to hell, if you genuinely believe in a religious doctrine where your actions can send you there. The standard model, as I understand it, is that hell is infinitely bad and lasts forever. Feed that into any reasonable expected utility calculation and the answer is that you should be doing everything reasonable, every unreasonable thing, and a fair amount of stuff that would normally land you in my outpatient clinic, just to nudge your probability of going there down by an epsilon.

The obvious rejoinder, and I'll concede it freely, is that belief in this kind of doctrine is itself irrational in the boring "insufficient evidence for wildly disproportionate claims" sense. Of course I believe that. I'm an atheist.

My claim is conditional. If you believe, you ought to be acting like you believe. You should be giving away every cent you don't strictly need and praying until you can no longer stay upright, treating your eternal soul with at least the seriousness that most people reserve for their pension contributions.

Almost nobody does this. The structural limitations of the human brain and psyche prevent true believers from following their professed beliefs to the logical conclusion, and memetic pressure has clearly selected for less extreme (but more incoherent) behavioral phenotypes. The version of Christianity that actually requires you to sell all you have and follow Jesus loses, evolutionarily speaking, to the version where you go to Mass on Christmas, baptize the kids, and otherwise live a perfectly secular life.

So in a very specific and very narrow sense, I respect the Jihadist more than I respect the nominal Muslim washing down a pork sandwich with a glass of whiskey. I respect the Christian Fundamentalist homeschooling six kids more than the milquetoast Cultural Catholic who shows up to Mass because his mother expects it, instead of because his Holy Book demands it in completely unambiguous language. The extremists are at least taking their own stated premises seriously. The moderates engage in a motte-and-bailey where the doctrine says one thing and their lives say another, and they've made peace with the contradiction by declining to ever look at it directly.

That respect is, of course, an extremely narrow form of respect. It is not the same as liking the Jihadist or the Fundie more than the normal/modal religious person. I'd vastly rather hang out with the typical Anglican, who is functionally indistinguishable from an atheist like me on any given Tuesday afternoon. I just happen to respect coherence and adherence to principle a great deal, even when the principle in question strikes me as embarrassingly unsupported by the underlying evidence.

You should be giving away every cent you don't strictly need and praying until you can no longer stay upright

This is not what the Christian life should look like, it's a caricature. We know because it's not even what Jesus' life looked like. He prayed a lot, but he did lots of other things too, including apparently being a full time carpenter for most of his life.

Christianity teaches that God has a unique purpose for each of our lives, and the only way to discern it is to submit to the Holy Spirit and trust in His Providence.

In fact one of the big issues we Evangelicals have with Catholics is that their salvation relies on their behavior and on the grace provided by the sacraments. The problem is that no amount of holy behavior can get you to heaven, only Christ's grace - but that grace is freely given, and we can in fact have confidence in our salvation.

Catholics who take their faith seriously end up like Martin Luther, who famously would spend hours every day in Confession. That is, until he developed his understanding of Sola Fide - our salvation is only through our faith in Christ.

There's not to say we shouldn't pray, but a Christian prays because we want to hear from our Father, not because it will earn us eternal life if we do it enough.

This preference for following ideas through to their conclusion was often speculated to be what leads in the perception of an abnormally high number of engineers and scientists in ISIS. (I should say I never quite bought it; "Arab society does not have the Western correlation between education and secularism, and Westerners are surprised to see that expectation subverted" seemed truthy and sufficient to explain the observations)

Yup. Most Christians (myself included!) are "functional atheists". The current milieu is one of agnosticism rather than spiritualism, and it is easy for professing Christians to fall into that cultural rut. Of course, most atheists in 1600-1700s Europe were "functional Christians" when the surrounding culture was "Christian".

I do disagree with your claim that Christians should be doing every action possible to save themselves from Hell. Reformed/Protestant Christianity says that outside the work of the Holy Spirit even our good deeds contribute to our damnation (they are done out of alignment with God's desire). It is only through Christ's atoning work that we can be reconciled to God ("made alive in him"). Salvation comes from acceptance of this reality (or predestined selection for this reality, if you are TULIP inclined), not from any work/action that we can do.

Yeah I agree with all of this, except obviously I don't think hell is eternal and generally think God is more of a chill guy than most Christians. Which, I hope, helps make my actions a bit more reasonable.

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