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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 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.
Just curious—what was the (personal, it seems) evidence that was compelling to you?
So, what I was taught is that the way to verify the truth of things is to pray about them and wait for a spiritual confirmation. This did indeed happen for me, but I considered it far more likely to be placebo--either a normal thing the brain does if you expect it to do so, or me interpreting an unrelated sensation as a spiritual confirmation because that's what I was looking for.
Since then I have become convinced that praying is indeed a good method to determine the truth, but quite a few unlikely events had to transpire in the meantime to convince me of this. I can give a few examples.
The aforementioned condition was quite stubborn and did not respond to a series of 5-6 different medications over the course of around 8 months. The last one I tried was supposed to work within 6 weeks IIRC but still was not working after 12. Finally it calmed down and I was able to function again. I mentioned this a few days later (when I was more sure it was not a fluke--I had never been healthy for a few days before) to my parents and they told me that my extended family had done a fast for me the day I recovered. This was significant to me because I did not know about the fast, so I could not blame it on placebo, and due to the longevity of the condition it was somewhat unlikely for me to have been healed like that with that precise timing.
A few weeks after my first girlfriend broke up with me, back when I had basically zero self-esteem or self-awareness, I was desperate to just see her again. We went to the same college and I was walking back from a college-wide seminar there (consisting of maybe 20,000 people) when this feeling of loneliness hit me quite hard. I prayed as hard as I could to just be able to see her. I got a strong spiritual impression that it would be a bad idea, and would not make me feel better or increase the odds of us getting back together at all, and I basically fired back mentally that I wanted to see her regardless. A few seconds later she did show up, we exchanged very awkward greetings, and she hurried past me.
Similar thing here with the timing--one time I was on a 50-miler and my 14 year-old brother got separated from the rest of the group. We all made it to the campsite, a ~15 mile hike through the jungle from the last one, and realized thirty minutes later that he still had not shown up, and nobody had seen him in ages. I went back down the path looking for him, becoming more and more worried as time went by and the sun sank below the mountains. Finally I said a very strong prayer. that he would be safe and I would find him. Less than a second after the prayer was finished--basically as soon as I opened my eyes--he showed up on the path in front of me. Turns out he had been eating cake with some other group camped a few miles away the whole time.
One time after listening to 5ish hours of screechy broken broadcasts, I interrupted the congregation to suggest we say a prayer that the broadcast would be fixed. We said a prayer and it was indeed fixed very shortly thereafter.
I was quite worried about anything which could possibly be placebo, or due to overly generous interpretations of events, such as praying for things that would normally happen (or at least are not too unlikely) and then praising God with amazement when they do end up happening. I was very paranoid about being born into this religion. I think God knew that and so gave me quite a few miracles which were somewhat more difficult to explain away as a result of my own desire for the church I had been born into to be true. The miracles which I shared are particularly significant to me due to the timing aspect. If I had prayed and then my brother had showed up 10 seconds later, this would be about 1/100th as significant to me as him showing up immediately. It's obviously not something that gives me proof positive that the church is true, but combined with many other similar events it gives me enough evidence for me to feel justified giving the spiritual evidence some weight. I've had quite a few experiences similar to the ones listed above, plus another 2 much much more significant experiences which I don't really feel comfortable sharing.
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