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Notes -
At this point I would prefer to be ruled by the pink haired feminist communists than the AI techbros.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” -- CS Lewis
I always wondered if Lewis considered the ultimate application that quote automatically suggests, being a card-carrying believer in the most supremely omnipotent moral busybody of all. I feel like the benevolent deity who fails to understand the wants and needs of His subjects is a somewhat exhausted trope now, but was it already back then?
You are totally free to go to Hell if that's what you want. He won't turn off your brain and make you a drone that can only obey the rules. "We want what is bad for us" is also an exhausted trope, but still applicable. "Dear God, please make it okay that I want sterile sex with robots instead of marrying one wife and having children with her, that's not too much to ask now is it? And I would feel so much better if that term "sin" only applied to really bad people, like Trump voters, because it crushes my valuable self-esteem to be told I'm sinful too".
Look at all the talk on here about curing obesity, because obesity is a bad thing that costs the rest of us money. Not too much "understanding of the wants and needs" of the sinful there, just "they are a problem, we must fix that problem". Why, it's almost like society is a rule-imposing deity!
Which version of it, the "separation from God" one or the "fire and brimstone" one? If it's the latter, "hey, I'm not forcing you to do anything, I will just torture you for{ever, _aeons} if you don't obey" doesn't register as a particularly compelling vision of freedom. I know that especially Evangelical Christians would consider "God is evil" to be very nearly an oxymoronic statement, but if their God created me, why did He equip me with a moral compass that says it?
Separation from God has always struck me as a cheat too. You never give informed consent to separation from God; you are just told "doing X automatically separates you from God, but since it's your own action, you don't get to blame anyone for it".
Alternatively, "informed consent" doesn't work the way you appear to be arguing it does. Does a 3-pack-a-day smoker give informed consent to the consequences of smoking three packs a day? Obviously not, since they didn't know for certain what the consequences would be or what the subjective experience would actually be like, right?
We've got a variety of fairly reliable evidence that smoking causes cancer. The evidence that unrepentant sin sends you to hell is, let's say, more on the hearsay side of things. If the best evidence for smoking causing cancer is that somebody said it totally does, it would be a different story.
@sun_the_second also.
Sure. But you don't know you in particular are going to get cancer, or that by abstaining from smoking you won't get cancer anyway. You don't know how having cancer will feel in a subjective sense. You don't know what else might happen that might obviate all downsides of cancer; maybe you're destined to die before any negative health effects would arrive and smoking would be a pure net-positive for you. All of these can "support" the absurd claim that one's decision to smoke three packs a day was not sufficiently "informed", if one's reasoning is motivated. And as I've argued a number of times before, all reason is motivated.
Do you recognize that Good and Evil exist, that the difference between them is comprehendible by humans, and that they have important consequences for humans engaging in them?
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