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In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:
Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.
Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.
Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.
At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.
There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.
It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":
(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)
It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:
The problem that religions face regarding hell is that the adherent can pick whether or not to believe in it, and whether or not to go to church or believe in anything at all. Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior. As a method of ultimate deterrence it can’t be triumphed over by good deeds. Why? For too many reasons to list really, but the big ones are: doing good deeds for their own sake puts the focus on an action, whereas morality comes from focusing on the Good which is God, and there would be no need to focus on the Good if a simple ToDo list saves all eternal ills; not every person can immediately do good deeds, even if they are essentially on a perfect moral path given their past behavior, which could lead to people like alcoholics and the infirm to feel that they are damned until they are cured; it reduces a person‘s interest in all religion, if all Good can be received from a simple checklist, and Christianity is a religion designed to socialize morality communally within the fully human Christ.
If hell is perfect deterrence, a huge problem arises in how to condition a person into this deterrence who is not seriously religious. A serious Christian sees the options as heaven or hell, but someone less religious sees it as “non-hell and probably heaven” vs hell. In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all? So in order to even buy into the punishment of hell, you need to first buy into religion generally; in the same way that first you need the boy to sign up for the Great War, and only later can you force him to walk through no man’s land at the battle of the Somme.
This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell. But in order for the magic of hell to work, you need to be always and perpetually saved from it by knowing the next moral action or step. And, in an ideal variant of Christianity, this is Christ — the socialized Good — and every step in your moral life would be his very steps on his path.
I am a big fan of hell, as an idea. It should be conceived of as not an additional thing to fear, but instead the One True Fear. So the kids today who are afraid that their zoomer haircut isn’t perm’d well enough, or that the Taylor Swift tickets are sold out — all of their petty fears would be sublimated to one great fear, the fear of evilness (which in Christian thought is eradicated from believing and imitating Christ).
People don' choose what they believe in. They choose what they profess to believe in.
Trying to solve everything by putting a policeman into everyone's head is not efficient.
That's where secular power comes in. If repeated beatings don't work because the transgressor is a psychopath (sensitive to reward only, not punishment), then execution or exile solves the problem.
...This meme is absolutely maddening. Are you asserting that profession of belief has no identifiable connection to actual belief? Do you at least agree that beliefs actually exist? If they exist, how do they come to exist, given that we can observe their absence at one point in time and their presence at another?
I read him as saying that beliefs are involuntary.
Yes. Why would one believe such a thing? Is there a FAQ or a Sequence this meme derives from?
Can you believe right now that your computer is on fire? (if so, could you take a second and do so?)
I find that I cannot bring myself to believe my computer is on fire. Likewise, I find that I cannot bring myself to believe that Communism is a beneficent and efficient political system. Granted, I did not try very hard; a handful of seconds each.
Examining these two failures, I find that while instantiating each of these beliefs is too hard to manage with minimal effort, they are hard for entirely different reasons. When I try to believe that my laptop is on fire, my brain checks against sense data of my eyes and hands, which immediately contradict the idea. When I think of Communism, my brain goes to memory, cached thoughts and arguments. It seems to me that the two types of belief are engaging with completely different mental processes; concrete vs abstract, say.
Suppose I concede that concrete processes really can enforce belief. Why should this make me believe that abstract processes can be similarly forced?
It's not just sense data. For an example, suppose I asked you to believe that your computer (or phone or whatever you're using) would catch on fire in 1 minute. You have no sense data to contradict that (at least, for the next minute). But I assume you can't just make yourself believe that your computer's about to catch on fire without being given any sort of evidence in favor of it.
This wouldn't seem to be using the concrete mechanism you described, I would think?
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Things I'm reasonably certain on:
forcing people to profess a belief may make some of them later come to genuinely adopt it
social pressure certainly makes people adopt beliefs of others as their own.
psychologically normal people (I assume) cannot choose what they 'believe in' consciously.
There's probably a bit of confusion here because due to interactions with my native language (slavic), I mostly use 'belief' in the sense of 'religious faith / axioms the individual assumes' etc.
So, to restate, I don't think it's common for a person to consciously decide to e.g. 'believe in God' or 'believe that pitbulls are as harmless as other dogs'.
No, I'm just grumpy today, sorry. I'm arguing this same thing in a separate thread.
Suppose a missionary travels to some small country in east Asia, preaches to the locals, and some of them decide to convert to Christianity. They are clearly professing to believe in God, but suppose they also make significant changes to their way of life to conform to what they've been taught are Christian principles, and continue this new pattern of behavior indefinitely. Can it be said that these people have in fact consciously decided to believe in God? If not, what is happening here?
Ditto for belief that "trans women are women", or "love is love", or whatever other charged slogan you've observed abruptly exploding in popularity.
Maybe a few of them decided to try to believe in the new religion and then genuinely managed to do so.
But I'd say the rest of them may have had their worldview changed by the preaching, which collapsed their previous belief structure. They were psyopped, in other words.
Most people don't really have very sophisticated belief systems.
I remember laughing out loud when a Jehovah's Witness who was trying to convert me brought up a pod of beans as an example of intelligent design.
Would have worked on some people, for sure. etc.
Weak or undecided agreeable people subconsciously align themselves with what they perceive to be the most popular message.
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Hell is not purely deterrence, if you believe in some form of penal substitutionary atonement. If any part of Christ's death was to take on the penalty for sin, then it is not at all clear why that would be necessary or good, under a deterrence model—punishing Jesus doesn't really deter anyone, and it is mostly unclear what doing it in someone else's stead would accomplish, instead of just dropping the punishment.
Should people be trying to get away from fear, or from hell?
The proper model of hell is of it not being primarily about deterrence, but about retribution, not about setting up incentives, but that punishment for evil is a thing valuable in itself. I'm sure there are better quotes out there, but it was the martyrs in Revelation that came to mind: "They cried out with a loud voice, 'O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood upon those who dwell on the earth?'"
What I mean by deterrence is that the excellent philosophers of antiquity (probably including Philo) crafted Christianity in an attempt at an optimal way of life, which included the essential concepts of reinforcement and punishment baked in — or, incentive and deterrence. As in, the concept of hell has a utility. This is why the living philosophy of Christianity matches so well an optimal prosocial reinforcement model of behavior; because that was the point.
What would be the purpose of Christ in a narrative seeking to be the best possible reinforcement / punishment model of behavior? There’s a lot accomplished here. For one, if Jesus saves us from hell then it increases love for Jesus optimally. Second, if imitating Jesus is the way to heaven, then the person imitates an optimally prosocial and wise way of life. Third, a community gathered together to mourn our Perfect Martyr is a community which has perfect guidelines, a perfect exemplar, a perfect story, and a perfect friend and mentor in spirit, or in persona et spiritus Christi. Fourth, we see the damage of sin on display when humans killed God. Fifth, we see the holiness of God on display that he bore man’s sin while forgiving him. Sixth, we see the eternity of God in that he is resurrected.
Importantly, at least IMO, a Christian must fear Hell. This is literally commanded of us:
But that isn't really the case, at least, universally across Christianity. Protestant strains of Christianity separate works from reward in a way that removes much of the incentives. Protestants do of course believe that you should do good things, and they do believe that those who are changed will be sanctified, not remaining in the mire of sin to the same extent, but salvation in the end is not based upon the quality of the subsequent works. This lessens the incentives, and ends up with good works being done more out of duty or gratitude or, well, just thinking that it's a good thing to do.
I guess I also don't really see why you identify as a Christian (which I assume you do by the final us), if you seem to think of it as a merely human sociological phenomenon. Do you think it's beneficial, but not true? A noble lie?
This view of Christ is sorely lacking. You seem to view Christianity as an attempt to make people good. And so, it seems that Christ is useful, but not essential.
I see Christianity as the manifestation of the divine work of reconciling God and man. Christ cannot be dispensed with in this, he is at the center of everything. The second Adam, our substitute, the mediator between God and man, our intercessor, the firstborn from the dead. In Ephesians, this is shown powerfully, as over and over again we are told that every blessing that we have, from predestination to adoption to redemption to our inheritance is all "in Christ." Our being made better is merely one (important) aspect of that work.
Protestantism is a strange case, because iirc the original Protestants (Luther et al) believed that works followed nearly intrinsically from proper faith. Today, I don’t think this is really the case among Evangelicals. I find this impossible to square with the contents of the Gospel, for instance that those who say “Lord, Lord” but do not help poor brothers are damned and in fact never knew him. This is one of the last things Christ said before the Passion and it is clearly explicated in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. I think what happened is a kind of superstition where “believe in Christ” turned into “believe I don’t have to do anything because Christ will do it”, whereas the original believe/faith meant in assenting to the whole of Jesus as a living message from God. As Jesus clearly says for us to do things, “believe in Jesus” would very much mean that we have to do things. But it’s more expansive than that, and also means that we have to imitate him.
If I could be most charitable to early Protestantism, I would say they were trying to prioritize motivation from love with no fear of hell and no care for conscious imitation. The atonement works through pure spectating, with none of the “carry our cross daily”. Instead of imitating Jesus, the focus is purely on how Jesus healed your sins. This should turn into maximal thanks and gratitude; the gratitude then naturally leads you to follow Jesus because he suggests you do, but you do it with zero faith. I think such a theology could work if a person has a perfect love for Jesus. But that perfect love is hard to come by. I think contrite repentance, continual thanks, and some fear is much more likely to develop a perfect love over time than a “once and for all” Herculean spectator crucifixion.
I definitely think Christianity is beneficial, provided it is explored in the right way. I consider it something like… “clothed philosophy”. The Logos becomes Man, to ease the yoke and lighten our burdens. Because I think if a person is able to see how maximally joyful human life could be, they would consider their current lives to be approximately hell. Religion is about the perfection of human life, so it turns philosophy into story and ritual. So I see everything in Christianity as intended to make us better, not just morally but in emotion (spirit) as well. I think without this in mind, religion is apt to become superstitious and then wasteful and ultimately deadening.
I don't see how that example is at all difficult to be squared with the beliefs of the early protestants (If I'm parsing that correctly). (Feel free to model me as an early protestant.)
Right, believing in Jesus is not separable from doing things, though it would not itself be the doing of those things.
Are we reading the same early Protestants?* Here's Calvin:
and
So there certainly is a carrying of your cross. But if your point is that that is not the means by which the atonement applies, that is correct.
What do you mean by "you do it with zero faith"?
Am I correct in reading this that you don't think that Christianity is true, merely beneficial?
*a rhetorical question
Going to use bullet points just for ease of replying to individual things
If Protestants hold that “believing in the crucifixion is sufficient to save us from the punishment of sin and guarantee the new life”, then they can’t also hold “Christ says you must perform certain actions to be resurrected into the new life”. Christ specifically says that those who believe in him but do not perform certain actions will be thrown into hell, because Christ is found in the poor-off brother, and so whatever you do to him you do to Christ. These two conceptions of the Judgment are mutually exclusive. If anyone holds that “believing alone” guarantees salvation at the judgment, or that the crucifixion alone as something one agrees happened, they have to deny what Christ said on numerous actions: that certain actions are required to be saved from hell. Now, if instead you take “faith” to mean “assenting to every word Jesus says”, then this expansive-defined faith is sufficient. Because under the umbrella “faith” you find “must do certain actions to be freed from hell”. These actions are in Christ in the sense of spirit, they spring up from the Christ in a person versus a person’s identity. Yet, they must be performed using your mind and body and heart.
Re “it would not itself be the doing of those things”, Christ specifically says that it is the doing of those things. If Christ wanted to say that simply professing he is God saved, then he would say that. But he says certain things just be done, else hell.
The Protestants you posted do not believe that imitating Christ is what grants heaven and the new life. Instead they suggest you do it. This is actually what I wrote by the way. The problem is that there is hardly a motivation, because simply believing that Jesus died for sins is sufficient to save someone from damnation.
Re: truth of Christianity, no. Truth does not necessarily mean historicity or literalism. Literalism is not the way many early Christians interpreted scripture. A thing can be true because it represents greater truth.
Re: what faith is, the historical protestant definition involved both knowledge and trust, not knowledge purely.
And he does express, several times, that faith is sufficient.
Protestants usually understand the passages about what sorts of people enter eternal life either to be true because those who are justified by faith are also sanctified by the work of the Holy Spirit, or to be talking about what the law requires, which Christ has satisfied.
Ah, but look at what Paul says:
So Paul, at least, thinks that the actual literal claims are important, in at least one particular.
Jesus also consistently takes scripture seriously.
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Anyone who conceives of Hell as a concept, as opposed to an actual thing, is already atheist right?
So to be clear, the people being deterred can't know they're being deterred, right?
People have believed in hell, or similar, without a concomitant heaven. The classic example is the view of the afterlife for the Greeks and Romans, as shown in the Odyssey where the shades of the dead are mindless twittering things until they lap up the blood of the sacrifice and where Achilles says 'better a live dog than a dead lion', more or less:
Hence why the Elusinian and other mystery cults which held out promises of a better life after death were popular.
Other cultures have similar concepts, or concepts of the dead as malevolent, jealous of the living and so eager to work them harm. The idea that ordinary people could go on to a pleasant afterlife may not be unique to Christianity, but I think it had to be a big selling point.
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This depends on what you mean by “actual thing”. Philo of Alexandria was an influential Jewish Platonist who interpreted the Old Testament allegorically and had a large influence on early Christianity. Does this mean he didn’t think the stories were “actual things”? He believed that they conveyed actual, spiritual truths by way of allegory and symbolism. Same with Origen, another influential early Christian. When we talk about the reality of religion we also have to understand that perfect certainty in God is rare; hence the leap of faith, the “I believe, help my unbelief” in the Gospel. Believing with all your mind and heart that God is real, and tries you and judges you, and hell is an ever-present danger, is hard even for the most fervent literalist.
Religions must persuade people, and they are competing against lifestyles that abound in much more primitive pleasures. A person can believe in hell and know that hell is a deterrence IMO, but there’s a moral or philosophical development that must take place, or else they might opt out of the entire religion.
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My belief is the exact opposite of this. The whole reason hell's nature and existence is not obvious to everyone is so that it doesn't modify our present behavior.
I also find your focus on good deeds interesting. Good deeds accomplish nothing in the end, yes, but moral growth is what God wants, and moral growth leads to good deeds. I agree that hell is a deterrent, but that's not it's ultimate purpose. It is a fundamental necessity to satisfy the law of justice. We only know about it because knowledge of justice also aids in our moral growth and helps us to "grow up" spiritually. Also, we know that evil will always be punished, whether in this life or in the next. This helps us to rest assured that justice will be served, and focus on our own moral growth rather than chasing revenge or growing to resent God due to the success we see in wicked people.
I think it's more that believers are less harmed by fearing hell than nonbelievers, while the benefits of fearing hell are constant regardless of your level of belief. Doing good because you fear hell is the same as doing good for the reward. It's pretty much worthless and is not what God wants.
I really don't want to come across as unnecessarily combative (what would the point even be? Empirically, religious debate is people yelling at each other and not convincing anyone of anything), but holy shit, the sheer amount of mental gymnastics espousing this requires..
I can't reconcile a omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity intentionally creating a hell in the first place, let alone building entities it knows with 100% certainty will end up there. (And if it doesn't know with 100% certainty, it's not omniscient is it?)
That, to put it bluntly, is an asshole move.
I don't expect you (or anyone else) to have a good answer, because that problem is fundamentally irreconcilable, at least until you zoom out and realize you're arguing about the properties of a nonexistent entity.
I think Christians have plot-holed themselves into a corner, if they hadn't shot for the moon and claimed a truly all-powerful creator, then they could at least claim that evil exists because of an inability to completely stamp it out, while also endorsing that believing and practising was still a net positive in expectation.
When people complain about utilitarians having to grapple with repugnant conclusions, none of the conclusions are as offensive as this is to any reasonable sensibilities.
It's akin to some bored kid setting up a terrarium, not feeding anything it, and then crucifying the starving survivors for the crime of cannibalism. It's all on you dog backwards.
Well, under a Christian view of how serious sin is, having sin with hell is better than the same sin without hell, since at least in the sin with hell, the sin is punished. The actual difficulty is why God would create beings that sin in the first place.
One possible answer is that the redemption of some that did happen—Jesus dying and rising from the dead and converting sinners and God's converting sinners, from the patriarchs to Israel down to the Christians of today—made the whole worth it, that this is in some way better than just having men that never fell.
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Well you could start by figuring out my actual beliefs instead of telling me that the beliefs you've imagined I have are wrong. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as a Mormon, so keep in mind my beliefs aren't shared by the majority of Christianity.
God is omnipotent compared to us but not literally omnipotent. He has to follow the rules. He can't change what 'good' is, and probably cannot create or destroy matter either. Most importantly, he cannot give us agency without allowing some of us to be evil. If we do not have agency then none of us can truly choose to be good, so having agency is more important than guaranteeing that we're all good.
I think it's consistent to view God as all-powerful, but incapable of changing the fundamental rules of logic. Having been through quite a bit of physical pain in my life I remain unconvinced that natural evil exists or is very important anyways. I think if we were all hooked up to 5 gallons / s IVs of heroin, we would experience a temporary rate slowdown to 4 gallons / s as pain. We need some natural opposition in order to be able to recognize the good for what it is.
If God were Logically Omnipotent and could change the rules of logic, then yes, that would imply that he has chosen for 'evil' to exist. Still, I'm not sure that means he's not omnibenevolent. To remove evil would require changing the rules in ways we humans cannot possibly understand in our current forms. Would you choose to delete suffering altogether? Doing so would perhaps lead to vast consequences related to our ability to perceive joy at all. Magically recreate our ability to perceive joy, even though we've never experienced anything else, and I would wonder whether perhaps then a more fundamental rule of logic would be violated, and so on.
To be clear, I suspect we are already metaphorically in the 5 gallon / s IV scenario. Like I said I have experienced extreme pain, and even in the moments that it was worst, existence felt much happier and more pleasurable than nonexistence.
This is pretty esoteric at this point but I really do think there are satisfactory answers to the problem of theodicy.
My apologies for assuming, but the majority of the Christians I've argued here with on-and-off for years were from more standard denomination.
That being said, I have no idea how anyone remains a Mormon when the overwhelming evidence of fraud in its very foundation exist. At least Catholics and Protestants make claims that were so far in the past they can't be trivially debunked.
Sure, I can grant that it's still meaningful omnipotence even if God can't ignore the laws of logic.
That being said, I don't see how you can hold that a decrease in pleasure is pain, while not recognizing that it's possible to have diminished agency while still having agency.
Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.
It doesn't forgive the outright infinite amount of suffering consigning even a single person to hell does. That's the work of an asshole, or at least someone who doesn't claim to be benevolent. There are certainly people I'd consign to Hell myself, but I never claimed perfect benevolence as fact about myself.
Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. This does not gel at all with a biological understanding of pain as a whole, since pain is a qualitatively different qualia, and not merely the absence of the sensation of pleasure.
The very existence of gradients of pleasure is sufficient to allow one to infer the opposite direction, and posit something that is outright negative pleasure, not merely no pleasure or a lesser yet positive level of it.
For an obvious proof, humans had never encountered negative numbers in their ancestral environment, and there is no single physical entity in the world that itself can be negative. It's only by interaction between entities that we can usefully build intuition of negatives. You can have 1 or 2 apples, not -1 apples, but you can use that concept to simplify the mathematics of things such as being indebted to provide someone an apple on demand. But at no point do you actually have less than zero apples.
Since humans have shown a distressing ability to invent untrue and useless concepts like souls on a regular basis, I think that even in some utopian environment where nobody ever felt outright pain, someone will inevitably invent the concept of "pain", if only as a plot point in their equivalent to a horror scifi novel.
Easy, I have overwhelming personal evidence of the truth of the church. Besides, I bet the vast majority of the "overwhelming evidence" you have in mind boils down to "well obviously that can't happen because God isn't real." There is some weird stuff in the church's past for sure but not nearly enough to outweigh my own experiences confirming the truth of the church's claims.
I'm going to assume you don't have "warp the rules of logic" in mind here, because IMO it's pretty futile to talk about the effects of that sort of change, except to say that they would be vast and we cannot possibly understand what would happen (since our understanding relies on logic). So the only two possibilities I can think of here are that either all choices are basically the same, or some choices are substantially better than others but all choices are good. The former I think removes agency entirely. Humans entirely lose the ability to make any difference at all. The latter definitely allows for evil IMO. If you are consistently choosing to bake cakes for your friends rather than saving orphans' lives, I think you are an evil person even though both choices are "good".
Separately, like I was saying, goodness is only valuable to the degree which it is a choice. Agency is valuable in its own right. So it's not clear to me why God would limit our agency (and thus our ability to be good) rather than allowing for both good and evil.
Can be and must be are two very different things. If people are forced to make being better their life's goal, they have no agency at all. If they are not forced to, and they choose not to, then they are evil.
Sure. I don't believe hell is literally infinite anyways.
You've cherry-picked certain parts of biology in order to claim that the objective truth is on your side. I agree that pain is not simply an absence of pleasure, but my claim was not that it always was. What I said was that we would experience an absence of pleasure as pain. When I say "pain" I obviously don't mean "solely physical pain".
That said, brains have a remarkable ability to adapt to new baselines and ignore predictable stimuli. I am currently in a fairly large amount of pain--probably the equivalent of stubbing a few toes, if I had to guess, though my estimation is untrustworthy for reasons which will soon become clear. I do not notice this pain unless I think about it. It has remained at that constant state for years and now essentially feels like nothing to me.
On the flip side, pleasure seems to work the same way--we quickly gain tolerance to the strongest drugs. I think if someone were to remain on heroin or something for a long period of time (rather than experiencing the "down" when they come off their high) they would quickly stop noticing the high at all. Of course there would be plenty of neurological side effects, but basically what I'm saying is that if there was a magic button we could press to give ourselves a high, with no side effects at all (an impossibility I know), someone who kept it pressed all the time would be indistinguishable, both to themselves and to others, from someone who never pressed it. I think it would be fair to characterize the experience of someone addicted to hard drugs, but not currently on a high, as "pain".
Besides that, pain is simply not important. Getting broken up with hurt way more than crapping out liters of blood. The very worst pains which we as humans can experience have to do not with experiencing suffering, but with experiencing a loss of pleasure. Losing parents or a girlfriend or w/e only matters because those people were valuable sources of joy in the first place. I have not experienced any suffering due to my lack of a third parent, but I will suffer quite a bit if one of my parents dies, therefore deriving me of the joy which they would provide to me.
Negative numbers still don't exist though. They only exist to the extent that they affect positive numbers. You can't have -1 sheep. At best you can have to work much longer to buy your first sheep, since you first need to pay off your debt before you get one. The minimum amount of sheep a person can own is 0.
Similarly, yes, I agree that negative pleasure exists, but it does so only inasmuch as it subtracts from existing pleasure. You could basically call it the absence of pleasure. I believe pain to be in this category. It does subtract pleasure, so it can certainly be called negative pleasure, but I don't believe it can subtract pleasure to below 0. I don't think any human can ever experience such agony that their existence is actually more painful than not.
Sure, but even putting myself in the mindset of someone who had a propensity/desire to believe in some supernatural entity, the sheer degree of willful ignorance needed to become a Mormon would almost certainly make me opt for a denomination that had the kind fig leaf of being founded centuries or millenia ago, where these kinds of irregularities can be found.
Sadly, I don't expect to convince you of this, because of the robust memetic immune system your upbring has inculcated in you. (I'm assuming you were raised Mormon, feel free to correct me)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith
https://www.mrm.org/sharing-with-mormons-joseph-smith-lie
Once I again, I reiterate that I'm helpless to convince you, and I submit this primarily to convince impartial observers that I'm not talking out of my ass.
Sure, doesn't mean they're not useful. Similarly, even our conceptions of "1 apple" aren't atomic, since the intentional separation of the apple from the environment from its environment is at least partially arbitrary. An apple is not an ontologically fundamental entity, to find truly discrete entities, one must dive down to the depths of Quantum Mechanics, such as "Planck time".
Sure, it can't literally delete the signal of pleasure, but it can produce states that are practically indistinguishable from only pure pain.
Someone getting their dick sucked while their teeth are being pulled out with pliers is getting some pleasure out of it, since the nerves in the penis don't give a shit what's happening to your teeth. But I think it's obvious that the situation is tantamount to someone experiencing a slightly less bad form of torture, or at least the person would be indifferent between the two.
I chose somatic pain because it's by far the best studied, and the one I'm most familiar with it. But unless you disagree that even more emotional kinds of pain don't bottom out in the firing patterns of neurons, the analogy stands tall.
Also, I'm happy for you if you're lucky enough not to have experienced bodily pain so fucking bad merely losing all of one's pleasure in life is getting off lightly.
Someone breaking up is certainly not as unhappy or in pain as another having their skin flayed off.
I can't say that even my worst breakup was anywhere near as bad as a bout of appendicitis in my childhood that had me curled up into a ball.
The implication that the memetic immune system associated with my religion is responsible for my beliefs is flatly incorrect. By far the strongest "immune response" it supposedly taught me was to trust in the results of prayer above all else. This is not something which I believed, and honestly still not something which I can bring myself to believe most of the time, due to its obvious epistemic danger. Far more likely is that I'm simply biased to believe in what my parents taught me. Honestly I think I overcorrected for that though, and spent much longer reading philosophy textbooks, atheist arguments, etc. than I should have, fearing that my belief was purely a result of my upbringing rather than due to any connection to the truth.
Memetic immune systems are simply not that powerful, full stop. There is nobody alive, and no possible memetic immune system, which renders anyone with their mental faculties completely immune to the truth. At best you can claim that it takes longer to convince someone of the truth than it should.
I hope you have enough respect for me to realize that I have already heard and looked into these sorts of concerns far more than you have. Besides, it's not like it takes much research at all to hear of this sort of thing. The church itself published the results you mention (that the recovered papyri were part of the Book of Breathing) in church magazines very soon after the original report was released.
If you look into it more, the papyri which the Book of Abraham came from were actually pretty clearly not the ones which were recovered. The eyewitness accounts alone establish this, while simple deductive reasoning sufficiently confirms it. IIRC Smith had about 100 feet of papyrus, most of which he himself claimed to be unrelated to the Book of Abraham, and of which only about 2.5 feet has been recovered.
As far as the Alphabet and Grammar, the theory about it which I prefer is that it was an attempt to reverse-engineer the language post-translation. It seems pretty clear from contemporary accounts that the language was not actually used in the "translation". I put "translation" in quotes because at other times Smith simply wrote "translations" of things, such as rewriting certain chapters of the Bible, from whole cloth. In most cases (as with the Book of Mormon) the source material does not actually seem to have been used for most of the process. This of course sounds pretty absurd. All I can say is that it is obviously possible with God involved and I have seen sufficient evidence in my own life to convince me that these things must be true, whatever the actual explanation turns out to be.
I think I was pretty clear in my position that negative numbers are useful. Your point about ontologically fundamental entities seems pretty irrelevant to me. There's no such thing as a negative Planck length either.
I feel like I've been pretty clear here and you're trying to sidestep me. I absolutely believe in biology, but your focus on your own limited understanding of neurons is muddying the water. You totally ignored everything I was saying about the pain that I experience, as well as the obvious tendency people have to grow tolerant to all forms of pain and pleasure. If your position is that pain is pain is pain, you are flat out wrong. The brain mediates all experiences quite heavily before our conscious minds perceive them, and can easily turn pain into pleasure or pleasure into pain. Heck, spicy food literally activates a pain receptor in the tongue and we experience that as a somewhat pleasurable experience.
Yes. Me too. My assertion is that such pain does not exist.
I disagree, as someone who has experienced more pain than that. I would rather have my skin flayed off a thousand times than go through what I went through again (at least as far as physical pain goes). I would rather go through what I went through a thousand times than go through that breakup again.
Sure, and states indistinguishable from pure pain are what I would call 0. You are losing a vast amount of joy by being incapable of thought, appreciating the world around you, etc. and that's it. The pain itself is entirely irrelevant.
What I experienced was severe ulcerative colitis which lasted about 8 months. Appendicitis has basically the exact same symptoms as ulcerative colitis, to the point that people with ulcerative colitis often mistake appendicitis as another flare-up of their own symptoms. I don't know which is more painful in the moment, but given appendicitis is much shorter-term I would choose to experience that every time.
Would you honestly choose to break up with your partner rather than experience appendicitis again? If so, I simply think you're wrong and would be happier suffering through the appendicitis again. If not, you understand my point, which is that the vast majority of suffering stems from a loss of joy. The correct way to think about pain is to give it basically no importance, except inasmuch as it interferes with actually important things like your ability to hold down a job and experience life.
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Seems to me that the big problem with hell is that in the modern world we don’t know what the next right step is. Things are so complex and even Christianity is so divided it’s hard to know who is right.
I’m, uh, pretty sure that the problem is all the suffering. The infinity of suffering. Squaring that circle with a loving God has led to far more contortions than mere earthly disagreements.
Yeah, no, that's a big problem too. It's sad, I genuinely want to believe in Christianity and/or God, but good lord is it difficult to square the mythos with the modern world in any logical or rational manner.
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Under a Christian understanding of hell, that suffering is earned, and so carrying it out is just. The real difficulty is why God would create humans who would do so grievous a thing as sin. There's the "free-will" response, but I'm convinced that Calvinism is correct. I'll just go with Romans 9:
That is, a hearty dose of "who am I to judge God" (see Job), while recognizing that that is indeed within God's righteous judgment—here giving the possibility that at least some is intended to highlight the his mercy, where it does exist. And, of course, Genesis 50:20's "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good" (referring to Joseph's brothers selling him) is relevant.
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Christianity solves this problem in a neat way. Imagine that you have with you a perfect friend and mentor who wants to shape you into a morally great person, and who uses the moral principle of “do unto others what you would have them of unto you”, and who has a collection of teachings he sent you. Now imagine he died to rescue you from eternal punishment. Then imagine the power of his moral teaching (the substance in a sense) resurrected himself, and that he will come back to judge you according to your soul — and those who are evil he will cast into hell.
Whatever action results from the belief is the next step, which is wholly contingent on a person’s background, personality, place in the moral process, etc (as it should be). By this I mean that a repentant pathological liar who cuts his lies by 5% every day is going to please God, versus a usually truthful person who has begun to lie 1% more every day without guilt. And it’s like this with all sins obviously. This is one of the points of the parable of the tax collector (an immoral profession) and the Pharisee, and the lesson of the widow’s mite. This is why the topic of moral discussion is not the consequent effects (actions) but the antecedent source (“out of the heart…”).
Then you might say something like, “oh, well then I will save my repentance for much later in my life”, but of course if you imagine an intelligent future judge this will not fly. What will be magically different about your procrastinating soul that is not in it today, when you are younger? It will be even harder to repent if your soul grows hardened, and of course there are many parables about this too. How would you personally judge someone who puts off the most important tasks out of cleverness? That is how God will judge. And in any case, the hour is near (the early Christians lived as if Christ was already “at the door ready to knock”; whether they truly believed that the world will end is far less significant than that they lived accordingly).
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