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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 go 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.
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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