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I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
Do individuals relations need to be so strongly hyphenated with the zeitgeist. With individual relations, everything is negotiable.
Just talk to them. Make your boundaries known without having an explosion. Tell them in clear words that this behavior is not acceptable. Be ready to erect boundaries if need be. Talk to your wife before you do anything. Ideally, she will take care of it for you.
That being said, I struggle to make sense of people who are logical about everything except religion. Not so much about the existence of God or the social technology that is religion. I mean religion as the arbitrary yet oddly specific rituals that can make or break your entry into heaven.
It is one thing to delude yourself for comfort or to believe in the social value of religion. But, to live in a world of Science in 2023 and to think that the specific sub-set of rules outlined by your pastor will get you into "Christian heaven" is some proper hypocrisy. By definition, if these people believe in the power of these specific rituals to get you into heaven, then don't 99% of all living humans go to not-heaven. (hell?). Even if these in-laws are right, then surely a place where 99% of people go after death, can't be THAT bad.
I know, "2005 called, they want their Christopher Hitchens rants back". But still, do these people never reflect on what they believe in ? Even for a moment ?
What I struggle with is the idea that those who are in heaven can be in paradise with knowledge that maybe their parents, brothers, sisters, spouse, kids, etc. rot in hell. How could anyone find paradise knowing that?
Part of the joy and sorrow of Heaven I anticipate is having no illusions.
This means I will remember the full depths of the public and secret sins I’ve been saved from by Jesus’ sacrifice. I will be made aware of the kinds of sins I would have committed if I hadn’t been sealed by the Holy Spirit and motivated by love instead of spite or greed. I will be left knowing just how righteous God would have been to condemn me away from His presence for eternity.
With no illusions, I will also be able to see the righteousness of the condemnation of all who chose to reject the Way of love-for-all and the damage they willingly cause wherever they may be. If one of the dwellers in misery is a close relative or even a lover, I will mourn them, but I will be disgusted by the depths of the evil they chose and agree they deserve their fate, just as I would have.
This all assumes the particular variant of Christianity I’ve been taught is theologically and cosmologically accurate. I’d like to be pleasantly surprised that all humans throughout history have ended up accepting Jesus’ forgiveness either before or after their death, and Hell ends up holding only the demonic angels who rebelled. I pray nightly that all will have ended up saved. But having watched both Sound of Freedom and the documentary Anne Frank Remembered this month, I don’t have hopes quite that high.
That idea is just alien to me. I couldn’t imagine my sweet daughters suffering in hell and me just saying “yep infinite torment is justified for being born and not choosing to believe in a particular religion with all human frailties.”
CS Lewis (along with many others) does have a solution which is that hell is proverbially locked from the inside. You seem to hint at it as well (ie maybe one can be saved after death). But are we really to believe that it is just to suffer eternally for not accepting a gift that was unclear if true, especially when there are many other religions with their own afterlife? Sorry you picked wrong eternal damnation. I can’t reconcile that with (1) a loving god and (2) a place where I could be happy. The Lewis solution seems at least palatable to me but being raised Protestant sola scriptura still has a heavy pull on me.
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I'm not clear on how this differs from "I could be happy in Heaven despite knowing there are people in Hell because my mind would be rewritten to consider this justice". A divine entity reshaping you like that could make you think of anything as justice. How would you tell the difference between this, and the Hypothetical Reverse God who condemns all Christians making you think you perfectly deserve misery?
...Also, I can't help but notice that this whole "without these specific rituals and beliefs, you suffer forever" business feels a lot more like an idea maximising pressure to spread it than the kind of thing you'd expect from the Almighty. It seems very petty, very suspiciously human, for an entity with the majesty and sheer greatness of God to hold that kind of a grudge.
Who am I to teach God mercy? Well, I don't have a torture-dimension for my enemies, so I have that going for me. I sort of feel like the Almighty should be able to outdo me here, rather than the opposite.
The only necessary belief is that God counts Jesus’ death as fulfilling my death penalty for the harm I’ve caused.
The only necessary “ritual” is that I do not “blaspheme the Holy Spirit.”
The eternal suffering comes from being imprisoned away from the source of all goodness and kindness with all the other hateful people, and malicious powerful spiritual entities imprisoned too.
Boy, all those people with the thick book and the huge churches must be really wasting their time, then.
Necessary is the bare minimum to escape condemnation. It defies belief that you can have misunderstood this when user rolfmoo was talking about the many specific rituals and beliefs he thinks one must hold to enter Heaven and escape fiery damnation. The thick book, huge buildings, many rituals, and ancillary beliefs all serve the minimums, but have additional purposes.
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Just as you do. Christianity is not salvation by being sufficiently good enough, but is by the mercy of God in forgiving our sins.
Thanks! Clarification: …but I will be disgusted by the depths of the evil they chose and agree they deserve their fate, a fate I would have shared were it not for grace.
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I can never tell if people who are saying this are just being unserious, or are actually this unfamiliar with the thing that they're trying to criticize.
Hell is the absence of good. It is unpleasant be definition, if you are imagining being in a place and it not being so bad actually then you are by definition not talking about hell. There isn't a bargain to be made here where actually things aren't bad because "that's where all the cool people are" or something.
It doesn't make sense that pretty much everyone goes there but there's no good there. Are all non-Christians evil?
According to Christians, everyone is evil. Part of the whole salvation thing is that you give God root access, and he patches you to be capable of being incrementally less evil. One interpretation has it that without the patch, people get steadily more evil from the point at which they learn what evil actually is. Since death doesn't actually end them, this decay continues until they are completely evil, at which point they have achieved the state of Hell. There's no socializing with cool people in hell, because the part that makes people cool is one of the ones that goes away, along with the parts that allow socializing, and the parts that make one "people".
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Yes, according to Christianity, and all Christians too (although they're being fixed over time).
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Catholic doctrine isn’t so definitive as you’re likely familiar with from Protestants. While Jesus is the only savior, who is to be saved is not fully defined.
Here’s CCC 847:
I think that's hard to fit with the supposedly infallible council of Florence damning all heretics and schismatics and jews and pagans, but I'm not Catholic so it's not a big deal to me.
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I find people who are unable to fathom how an intelligent person could be a Christian have often never engaged with any Christian apologetics, and often don't even really know any Christians in real life. I think Christianity is false, but I don't think you have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to believe in it.
I can agree that they're not stupid, but willful ignorance? Absolutely.
A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.
Cue apologetics about how if God was obvious, then there would be no need for "faith", which is absolutely howl-worthy when you consider how convenient it was that there were clear and obvious miracles right up till the point we could properly document and examine them.
That is willful ignorance, for all that they're drinking their own kool-aid. At some point a rational entity who hasn't fucked their own priors sees that an explanation without a million epicycles that reduced to God doesn't really do anything is better stated as God not existing.
Well yes, because if they're not documentable, they don't eliminate the need for faith. If they are, then they would, so they don't happen.
I don't even necessarily disagree with you, but this is just a terrible point. It's countered by the very argument it's trying to address.
What exactly changed that anatomically modern humans living in the period 3-1k BC deserved to have glaring and obvious information doled out from the heavens and yet we moderns are so unfortunate? The seas don't part themselves anymore, it's up to us to raise them the old fashioned way by raising global temperatures.
Call me cynical, but I see a glaring decrease in the intensity and magnitude of such interventions as documentation and history keeping improved through the ages. Christians can claim that Jesus was a real person modern Israel, not that he lead an army to overthrow the Romans, because actual Roman scholars would have disagreed.
How exactly does your degree of faith matter, if your omniscient creator knew exactly how much of it you'd have well before you were even born, and whether it would sufficient or not to spare you from a Hell of their making?
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I believe that miracles continue to happen and that the Catholic Church documents the ones with substantial evidence. It’s also on guard against hoaxes and mistakes and rarely declares an event to be a miracle.
I know it sounds hokey to a non-Catholic, but look into the Eucharistic miracles. Especially those examined by pathologists .
I looked into eucharistic miracles a while back. The chain of sources inevitably bottoms out in Catholic publications. While they are often touted as having been examined by pathologists, the only one in which I've ever seen an actual research paper detailing methods and findings (rather than simply an assurance that the miracle has been authenticated by qualified persons) was the miracle of Lanciano, and in that case all that could be confirmed was that it was an actual piece of a human heart, not that it had ever been a host. Nor was it miraculously preserved, but completely desiccated.
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The variant that persuaded me actually came from the Atheists, who asserted that a God who attempts to secure your love through threats of eternal torture is a monster. That seemed like a pretty good argument to me, along with the obvious-when-you-think-about-it point that if a God existed, and if he wanted us to know he existed, we'd simply have the unalterable knowledge baked in. Of course, if we knew for a certainty that he existed, then the promise of heaven and the threat of hell would be dispositive, even if Hell is the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. On the other hand, if God existed, and wanted us to choose to love him of our own free will, the only way that works is if we get to choose whether or not to believe in him as well. In that case, leaving his existence plausible but ambiguous makes perfect sense, together with Hell as the absence of God and a choice we make, etc, etc. It fits even better if you presume annihilationism is correct, and the people who reject God get exactly what they're expecting: death, and then non-existence.
In any case, the chain of logic seems simple: God wants to share love with people. It's not love unless it's freely chosen. The choice is permanent, and the choice being offered is better than it not being offered. Certain knowledge of the consequences of the choice corrupt the free nature of the choice. Given those constraints, blinding the choice is the obvious way forward.
It seems there are a few pages stuck together here, linking "can choose whether to believe in X" and "can choose whether to love X".
Also, at least in the variety of Christianity I was taught, God doesn't threaten people with eternal torture. He simply gives people what they want for eternity: if that's to be without him, then so be it, and so they end up in a torturous existence by their choice - hell is simply a place where humans, angels, and perhaps others exist without God or the fear of death, which is all they need to create a terrible existence by their own efforts. I'm not a Christian, but like a lot of Christianity, this seems to be to be insightful and plausible in itself. It certainly makes far more sense than an all-benevolent, all-powerful God setting up a realm of eternal torture for fallible beings, and (for some insane reason) hiring a fallen angel to run the place.
That's no God then, that's an Asshole Genie.
Not sure about that: is it being an Asshole Genie to not force someone to love you and want to be around you?
If someone makes a prideful wish, should a genie revise that wish to something smarter?
The asshole genie thing is that God should know very well that rejecting religion and not worshipping God does not actually mean you wish to be away from all that is good in the world - you simply don't believe that the good things are all absolutely reliant on him.
Going "oh so you want to be cast into the outer darkness" is a cheap gotcha rather unbecoming of any deity that claims to be all-loving. "Oh you don't want broccoli? Well I guess I won't feed you at all."
Taking it further, this idea of the nature of Hell necessitates that God either isn't all-powerful so he physically cannot embrace those who rejected him, isn't all-knowing so he doesn't realize that people don't interpret their wishes as he would, or not all-benevolent so he doesn't give a fuck and would rather cast them into Hell out of spite for being wrong about his existence.
I see it as more "a sensible wish based on the information I have".
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This has been my general approach too. There are few universal 'goods' across all religions. Those are likely good places to start.
Don't betray, murder, rape, lie, steal or be hypocrite. I try my hardest to do all of them. the not lying and not-betraying (even unintentionally) bits are especially hard to keep up all the time.
It's one of the reasons I don't buy people's crap on religion. I have yet meet anyone who consistently does even just these 5. If it's that difficult to follow the LCM (lowest-common-multiple) of all religions together. No way anyone is able to those and all the extras that come depending on which religion you think wins the jackpot.
Perks of being Hindu / Buddhist. Release from the eternal cycle of life/death is exactly what Moksha/Nirvana looks like. So by following an Indian-origin religion and rejecting Christianity, a person gets both the incentive (aim for non-existence) and a guarantee of success (non-existence). Thanks Jesus ?
Win-win if you ask me.
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Walking on water was only seen by Christ's disciples, who had already chosen to follow him. Would you consider bread and fishes glaringly obvious? I wouldn't.
More generally, Christ was very clear and intentional most of the time about keeping his miracles secret. When he raised people from the dead he generally allowed 1-2 people in to see it, if any. There are a few exceptions, but the general rule is that ambiguity is better for our moral development.
Pretty clear is not perfectly clear. Evidence of God is not a stepwise function. The more evidence you have, the more moral responsibility you have too. Some ambiguity is still present even when the evidence is overwhelming.
You make two arguments here:
Christians holds God's existence as axiomatic, which leads them astray
It is evident that God doesn't exist
2 is debatable. 1 is just dirty rhetorical tactics. Christians obviously do not hold the existence of God as axiomatic, or none would ever leave the church. If you can change your mind about an axiom based on evidence then it's not an axiom. Characterizing belief-in-God as axiomatic is just shorthand for "how dare they disagree with me even though I think they're wrong." More importantly, epicycles are a perfectly rational way of explaining a phenomenon given sufficient evidence for that phenomenon. The laws of physics as currently understood contain just as many epicycles, if not more.
You continue to make this claim without engaging with counterarguments. Even in this thread, @FCfromSSC directly defined hell as "the absence of God" which is quite a bit different from how you characterize it here (as a place God sends people).
It's perfectly consistent for God to value agency above all else, especially since it's agency that gives meaning to moral virtue. It's perfectly consistent to suppose that if God did create people who were incapable of evil, he would not be granting them agency at all.
OK. Now do the whole Old Testament.
I'm using axiomatic to include priors with a probability of both 1 and 1-epsilon. Mathematicians regularly employ axioms, yet are open to reconsidering what they consider axiomatic if the downstream consequences are conflicting or nonsensical, they consider adjusting their upstream assumptions.
Who knows how the brain actually encodes Bayesian priors (it actually does do that, as best as we can tell), it might not be possible for a prior in the brain to be literally one or zero, but observational evidence tells me some people get close, and no amount of evidence anyone can feasibly muster can move them.
Frankly speaking that you even consider point 2 to even be up for debate given most reasonable starting priors, is strong evidence of point 1. What exactly would it take to convince you that God doesn't exist?
The whole omniscience part makes the concept of "agency" rather dubious doesn't it? Ah yes, I know perfectly well in advance if you're going to take the red pill or the blue pill, sucks that you're with 100% certainty going to take the one I've laced with cyanide. On you kid, L+ratio.
I asked Bing what the general consensus about what Hell actually is is the myriad strains of Christianity. Said consensus apparent doesn't exist.
I don't see Hell as the "absence of God" as a mainstream position, and given that it clearly seems to me that he's on an extended vacation, if this counts as Hell, then call me a happy sinner.
Besides, the number of epicycles that a theory is allowed to hold before it ought to be rejected is clearly a function of how useful said theory is at predicting experimental results and constraining expectations. The Standard Model of Physics does an awful lot better at predicting the nature and evolution of the universe than the Bible does, so we can tack on Dark Matter or Dark Energy with the clear knowledge that something must be missing in our understanding.
All the people in the Old Testament are constantly denying God, worshipping idols, etc. even after seeing miracles. Obviously the evidence they saw was still ambiguous or they wouldn't be doing those things.
1-epsilon still doesn't address the people that leave the church, it just sounds like it does.
This is a good thing and is how evidence should work. If something is true, it should be difficult to dissuade someone. If someone has seen lots of evidence for something over the course of their life, of course counterbalancing that evidence will also require quite a lot of work, possibly more than anyone can feasibly muster. Being confident in a belief is not the same thing as adopting that belief as an axiom.
Either you're wrong or they use a different definition of "axiom" than the commonly accepted one. Like I said, if your axioms depend on evidence, they're not axioms at all. Sounds like their actual axioms are something like "truth must be consistent", and the things you describe as axioms would be better characterized as useful assumptions. There is no such thing as a downstream axiom--it's either an axiom or it's not one.
To be honest none of those Bing options really address that; they're more concerned with the ultimate fate of people who get sent to Hell, not the nature of what Hell is. This is obvious enough that I question why you even included that point. I asked Bing "please describe a few commonly-held beliefs regarding the nature of christian hell" and on my first try got a much better response:
So, obviously "hell is the absence of God" is in fact a pretty mainstream position.
Yes I know. So now we're back to square one, as I was saying, where your claim is that there's not enough evidence for Christianity. This is a much less interesting criticism than one about epicycles, forgetting that epicycles are how we get things like the laws of physics in the first place.
If you don't know which of the pills is laced with cyanide, that's not exactly your choice, is it? If you do know, then it's still your choice even if the choice-offerer knows what your decision will be before you've made it.
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Such as? I don't really follow. I'll assume we're talking about Christians, in which case either they are protestants, where it's based on belief and trust in Christ, which is not arbitrary, and is justified by revelation, not the say-so of one pastor, or they're Roman Catholic, in which case it's repentance and mortal sin which ultimately determine things, which, again, doesn't seem terribly arbitrary. (Or Eastern Orthodox, which, I'm not as familiar with, but I would think would parallel Roman Catholics.)
Do you really only define the value of something in relation to other things? Or think that most people must, for some reason, do all right? Christians don't (or at least shouldn't), since we believe God literally had to die to get some of humanity out of going to hell.
I was not born in an Abrahmic culture, so forgive my ignorance, but...
At its core, each Abrahmic sect believes that they understand the words of God. I would assume that for a group that claims to understand God's words, surely you would have to be confident before making such a claim. Credit where it is due, Christians are confident. However, they are all confident in their unique truth and just as many of them are confident in the false hood of every other Pagan, Abrahmic and Christian sect.
While there are a few inclusive Christians, most Christians aren't going around saying : "My Christianity has the highest odds of heaven, while it is 50-50 with the others." Most are going around saying : "Join us and go to heaven, everyone else will rot in hell with 100% money-back guarantee." Do note, Most Christians believe that most Christians (not them) are going to hell. (It's esp neat, given that Catholics are almost exactly 50%).
So yes, the entry to heaven is gated by engaging in very localized and specific sub-groups underneath Christianity.
Another thing that confuses me. How do Christians square off human agency against belief in God and his plan ? If I truly believed in Jesus, why would I ever take my child to a doctor or get treated for a wound. A true believer should allow life to happen to them, because the outcomes are determined by the omni-potent God. So any person who dares to exercise personal agency is not a true believer, and ends up in hell ? (at least from a protestant stand point)
Yes?
I'm not materialistic, but the hedonistic treadmill, lifestyle creep and trends are real things. Yes, a cute puppey and green mountains do evoke postive-emotions that seem universal and untethered to society. But, life is usually a healthy balance of emotions drawn from either source.
The increasing lack of omni-potence of the Christian God does not inspire a lot of confidence.
Not exactly true. Catholics have a doctrine of invincible ignorance, whereby non-Catholics can be saved (especially post-Vatican II), and protestants don't generally have a "one true denomination," rather thinking that theirs is the most faithful, and others are Christians, just ones mistaken in some respects.
Well, two things. First, he tells us to do things, so… Second, God generally works through means. So you're the agent in working out God's plan.
Surely you wouldn't apply this to heaven or hell?
Self-imposed restrictions. This is only required because of other requirements God's imposed on himself as to how to treat humans. It's not a lack of power, it's that there are other requirements that have to be kept as well.
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This position was historically held by quietists and you can read the general principles in the papal encyclical condemning them as heretical: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Innoc11/i11coel.htm
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Not sure where you're getting this from. If people have agency, God's plan includes your agency. If people do not have agency, God's plan also includes your lack of agency. Either way you can get your kid treated.
It looks like you're postulating that people do have agency, but any possible use of agency is going against God's plan. Why would this be? Choosing not to treat your son is just as much a choice as choosing to treat them would be. Setting aside how illogical that is, it's annoying when people say things like "I've formed my own conclusions based on about two seconds of thought on the implications of a hasty recollection of your doctrine. Therefore your doctrine must be wrong." No, the only thing wrong here is your idea of what the doctrine actually is.
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If we’re broad and say Christians can be saved, it’s historically been perhaps 20-40% of world population. That’s not nothing.
Further, as Catholics we believe that Christ descended into Hell after his crucifixion and proclaimed the good news to the just dead.
That modern people have chosen to reject the Church or even the heretical sects, doesn’t speak to whether the Truth of Christ is true.
See, here is where ethnicity matters. That number drops to 0-2% when looking at the continent of Asia.
Assuming the soul is somewhat immortal, Heaven is going to look whiter than a Cape Cod frat party.
It is awfully convenient to have your truth be unfalsiable. "I choose to believe what I choose to believe. I have no proof it works, but all of you are going to hell. I cannot be convinced otherwise."
You do you, but you can see how that is a hard sell right ?
Christianity's proportionally shifting from European countries toward Africa.
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Nope. 7% of all humans ever born are currently alive and a third of them are Christian.
It's awfully convenient to summarize literally any counterargument as a claim that religion is unfalsifiable. Let me remind about the conversation so far since you seem to have forgotten:
@screye:
@UnterSeeBootRespecter:
@screye:
@UnterSeeBootRespecter has directly addressed your arguments with the claim that Christianity actually has made its way to plenty of people who weren't Christian in this life, including in the continent of Asia. You've done a great job at sneering rather than addressing any of his actual arguments in your response.
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Why?
So? The Church holds that a non-Christian who has sincerely sought God and lived a good life, and just did not hear the Good Word may still be saved.
Adding to the fact that half of all the humans who ever were lived before Christ, and so may have been reached during the harrowing of Hell...
We didn't speak on unfalsifiability. Only that rejection by moderns doesn't falsify it.
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There is no logical connection between the number of people doing something and the goodness or badness of the thing they do in absolute terms. Everyone dies, and yet some atheists here are very, very afraid of death, and see its elimination as the preeminent moral imperative.
Many of them doubtless do not. On the other hand, it's hard to distinguish between beliefs that are stupid and beliefs you simply don't understand very well.
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