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Sure, it's not proof, at least not at the beginning, but it's evidence, however weak. In the beginning the evidence is more "the Bible teaches useful lessons" but I'm confident that as you actually apply that evidence you'll get more and more evidence actually pointing to the Bible being literally true. Eventually the heap of evidence, or a singularly impressive piece of evidence, will constitute proof.
Fairy tales do often teach good moral lessons, so in this sense as you follow the lessons better you'll see increasing evidence of both those moral principles and of God. I don't really see any issue with this. The bible will generally serve you better but it doesn't have a monopoly on truth.
If you truly do zealously follow some fairy tale about honesty or whatever, you'll cultivate other virtues alongside honesty, and those other virtues will tell you when it's time to look for moral truth elsewhere.
I think you mean no sufficient evidence. Evidence exists for essentially all hypotheses.
In my own life the strongest proof is the aforementioned mechanism of increasing moral intelligence. You have your own habits which you know to be sins; I claim that the way mortality has been designed, you have the power to conquer those habits, and doing so will improve your life. No belief in God required, but if you consistently do so I do think that you, like me, will begin to feel the hand of God helping you along and giving you strength to continue in your efforts. This is easy and undeniably worthwhile to test, and has quick results.
As far as physical proof, here are some miracles I've seen. I've essentially never earnestly prayed for something without either getting it, getting a clear response along the lines of "this isn't something you should ask for," or in one case both.
I have performed bayesian analysis on my own prayers in the past. Eventually the results were clear enough that it felt disrespectful and counterproductive to continue testing, rather than putting that effort into increased praying.
As far as tangible proof available to all, I've pontificated in the past about why we probably shouldn't expect to see that. In short, greater understanding leads to greater accountability, and you don't actually need greater understanding to tackle your current sins.
Why is greater accountability undesirable, assuming greater understanding?
Sin and evil are harmful to the soul and lead to less happiness in the long run. The greater one's understanding of a choice and the ramifications of that choice, the worse the "damage" i.e. negative consequences should the choice be the wrong one.
Greater understanding is good if we're ready for it--if we're using the understanding we have reasonably well.
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Wow!
"I've essentially never earnestly prayed for something without either getting it, getting a clear response along the lines of "this isn't something you should ask for," or in one case both."
That is an amazing superpower!
Guess all those parents of millions of sick and dying kids just didn't measure up. They and their parents were undeserving of God's grace. You must be one of God's true Chosen!
I'm really happy to break this to you--all kids go to heaven. They all get God's grace, and in fact everyone does.
As far as superpowers, getting everything I asked for would be one thing, but all I claim is to know beforehand when one of my requests is inappropriate. This has more to do with a correct understanding of God than any spiritual sensitivity or righteousness on my part.
Lucky you, to know the true mind of God...This is really trending towards the absurd, even for religious nonsense.
Exactly what is your claim? I've been recording these things for years and have advance predictions written down.
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There are a whole bunch of Christians who disagree with you on this. Some have even posted here.
"Grace" is a broad term which refers to more than just salvation. I think pretty much all Christians would agree that everyone has access to God's grace.
But more importantly, it's not like I'm claiming that all Christians are correct about everything.
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I think your miracle evidence is confused, but in lieu of that I'll point somewhere else - many intelligent Muslims and members of other faiths have similarly seen personal miracles from their god(s) and used them as evidence for their faith. Their arguments are very similar to yours. Which is weird, right?
No. Why would God ignore their prayers? I'd expect people of other faiths to have somewhat fewer prayers answered because they have less understanding of what to ask for, but that's all--they're God's children too.
The other types of claims give me more pause. It's clear that some people believe (to some extent) that they've genuinely been visited by angels or dreamt of a message from their god, etc. When I hear the actual account though, it's generally fairly easy to dismiss it as a hallucination, a fabrication, or simply a normal dream.
Right, but then your miracles are evidence for 'any entity or process that intervenes in the world to help humans', not 'God specifically', because by that logic it isn't evidence for the Muslims when "Allah" appears to do it.
I think there are some rather sophisticated claims of Buddhist, Hindu, and Islam miracles, and many unsophisticated and obviously false Christian miracle claims. This means the distribution of miracle claims on plausibility is as far as I know similar for different religions, so if you're arguing that this is evidence for Christian God over others I don't think that's true, although I'm not sure if that's the argument you're making or not.
The thing is Christianity, I think, claims that a significant number of instances of angels visiting people / God speaking to people / observable divine intervention happened. It's weird that it just stopped, and all we get now isn't easily falsifiable.
Also, I think you're just getting lucky generally. You pray a lot, sometimes something like it happens, you count the few pieces of strong evidence that prayer works and discount the larger number of weak evidence that it doesn't.
Yes, I know this. Put another way, my miracles are evidence concerning the existence and nature of God. They're not sufficient to prove God's existence, let alone nature, but they are indications of both.
I think it's very weak evidence of the Christian God over others, and fairly strong evidence (at least for me) of some kind of God.
To be clear I am extremely skeptical in general, and entirely discount pretty much all claims of miracles both in and out of my own religion. This is just my natural impulse and if I hadn't seen such things as I describe myself I would also discount them as made-up or exaggerated. I think this impulse is essentially correct but I cannot deny my own experience.
It's not all that weird given what I was saying about agency and accountability. Given that, you'd expect such obvious miracles to grow much rarer. That said I'm also highly skeptical of essentially all such accounts.
I worried the same and conducted tests to try and determine whether this was happening. I wrote down a list of things I wanted, randomized which I prayed for, attempted to determine the likelihood of each happening on its own (e.g. without prayer) and then attempted to evaluate the results. It was the closest I could get to a randomized controlled trial.
This worked fine, and produced extremely strong evidence in God's favor, but I didn't really find it all that convincing, due to the possibility that my own bias seeped into the experiment. Since then I've conducted plenty of other tests. The most relevant to this discussion is that I always write down when I seriously pray for something. Since I started doing so no serious prayer has gone unanswered in one way or another.
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I had to break the news to maybe 200 people over the past 6 months that their cancer was fatal. Including maybe a dozen children.
I had to clean out the suppurating wound in a patient who had a mandibulectomy for a orofacial carcinoma. When I removed the bandages, coated in pus, he could have played a flute both ways. I suppose his incoherent prayers and moaning were of no avail because they ended up directed simultaneously to heaven and hell. Then again, that ward has poor cellular reception.
I have heard earnest praying and fevered pleas for divine aid. It was never forthcoming.
What facile excuses for miracles you recite. If that's the standard of evidence you deem acceptable for the sweeping claims of Christianity..
What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was? Wrong deity I presume? The post-office does a better job directing mislabeled mail. Do you think a "fast" done by your family outweighs the RCTs showing that prayer, both direct and directed, is useless?
Thankfully I have not had too many cases of people thanking the Lord/Allah/Ram for their cures, or I'd have gone to jail for strangling them. Most of them are far more genuinely grateful for the actual miracle that is modern medicine, and by
Godwe've got more to show for it.What sin did I commit, getting ulcerative colitis and spending months in agony? What sin did anyone commit to experience any amount of suffering at all?
You stand upon others' graves and claim that their suffering was for naught. I stand upon my own experience and disagree in the strongest terms possible. Each moment of life, even when experiencing some of the worst pain imaginable, is still better than even. In our very worst, most agonized moments, God has seen fit to grant us greater and more meaningful pleasures than the pain which we experience. It's simply a matter of being able to recognize it. I have spent hundreds of hours in physical agony, but relative safety and calm, so I've had time to think about this and know it better than most.
The true tragedy is not the dead children, who have been taken to heaven and will be reunited with their family eventually, but the parents and siblings forced to cope with their absence for decades afterwards, lacking any knowledge that their child is okay. I promise you that that kid is okay, though, and that all of this will eventually work out to everyone's benefit. There are greater joys meant for humanity which we must be prepared to receive.
To be clear, I have seen miracles far greater than the ones I've shared. The greatest, to me, is the miracle of my own conversion and moral growth, but there have been plenty of others. I'm glad I didn't share them--you would probably be calling me a liar directly, rather than just insinuating it. I've already told you that I don't think I deserved any cure for my UC, but that the timing of it does indicate its miraculous nature. And I've already told you that even such miracles don't outweigh RCTs for me, but that they did give me confidence enough to continue investigating, including by conducting my own trials.
Given that we've already discussed all of this, and that I've already addressed each of your points in detail, I'll choose to interpret the substance of your comment as a result of your anger at the problem of suffering rather than as deliberate bad faith argumentation. I understand--it's certainly a problem I grappled with as well. Next time you do experience serious pain, I encourage you to slow down and experience just one instant of the pain at a time. It soon becomes clear that no matter the severity of the pain, a single instant of it is really quite tolerable, easily outweighed by the simple joy of other sensory inputs. The real trouble comes when our brains run ahead and try to experience all of the suffering at once, both feeling the pain of the instant and dreading the countless instants to come.
The same is true of all suffering. It may feel unjust, it may feel like God has unjustly condemned us to suffer agony for nothing, but the pain teaches us, and God has also unjustly granted us countless joys to pad life out and outweigh even the worst of our pains.
Who is “us” here exactly?
Countless humans and sentient creatures have not been granted “countless joys” to outweigh their suffering. Your theology deals with this moral inequity by saying god will make up for it in the afterlife.
Only problem there is the lack of evidence for said afterlife.
As I said, the simple pleasures of existence, rational thought, and physical sensation outweigh physical pain.
There are plenty of other joys, but just one or two of those are sufficient to outweigh pain.
"us" is everyone and virtually everyone has been granted such gifts or has died very quickly after birth.
This is like... your opinion. There are countless persons that live in constant pain, unable to escape it, with thoughts constantly dominated by their pain. For many of them non-existence would have been a gift, not their worthless lives.
I was one of those people in constant, inescapable, attention-grabbing pain. Existence was still a gift. I enjoyed every day despite being essentially incapacitated and often lacking the mental faculties to do more than endure. It's fact that some people, at least, possess the same capacity to enjoy even very bad circumstances. It's my opinion, but I think a well-founded one, that everyone has such capacity.
Well, my experience is the complete opposite. I am in constant, inescapable, attention-grabbing pain and I wish I were never born since I can remember, even when I was not in such dire circumstances. Success does not bring me joy, achievement does not bring me joy, relationships do not bring me joy. I am quite disgusted by the world and by existence at large. I have the mental faculties to endure otherwise I would have killed myself years ago, nevertheless I still do not think that it is worth it. My only consolation, as I said in the Sunday thread, are my escapists fantasies that I know one day will stop working, because their efficacy wanes and every time I get up again they become less and less appealing. Good for you for not experiencing such hopelessness, but it is not the rule, mostly because there are no rules.
It sounds like we're talking about somewhat different things.
When I say attention-grabbing what I mean is that it seizes control of your thoughts and leaves virtually no room for anything else. It's not that reading a book or watching a show is unenjoyable while in pain, it's that you're not mentally capable of doing it because so much attention/mental capacity is directly occupied by the pain.
What I'm saying is that if you were currently in this level of pain then you wouldn't be browsing TheMotte, let alone writing comments.
That's not to diminish whatever it is you are going through too much--I'm sure you're in a lot more pain than I am now, and it sounds like you've been in pain for much longer too--but I want to make it clear that I don't think physical pain is your problem, as much as it may feel like it is. Success, achievement, relationships, etc. should operate on a totally different channel than physical pain and be mostly unrelated. In other words physical pain should not diminish emotional joy. They should remain separate and you should experience them as two different sensations happening simultaneously.
When they do interfere with each other it's usually not due to the pain itself but due to how you feel about the pain. The only reason pain should directly harm your mood at all is if you are doing what I described and trying to experience all of your future pain at once. Not only experiencing pain in the moment, but looking ahead at all the expected future pain-filled moments and dreading them.
Physical sensation cannot hurt your mood, or diminish other sources of joy, unless you let it. The sensation itself can be fruitfully separated from the emotional impact of the sensation.
There are plenty of indirect reasons pain should harm your mood--for example, maybe you're disappointed that debilitating pain renders you incapable of performing most jobs or accomplishing most goals--but these are normal emotional states to be dealt with like any other problem. You mention achievements and relationships, so it sounds like there is some hope to that aspect of things.
You have my sympathy. If you feel hopeless, though, I think depression or aimlessness are more likely culprits than physical pain.
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The answer to this question becomes mu when you recognize that the Universe has no particular regard or disdain for you, it simply is.
You did not commit any "sin" in order to come down with ulcerative colitis. It boils down entirely to mechanistic interactions between your genes and the environment, and the way it moulded your body/immune system in a defective manner. While genes and environs are certainly components in what can be considered one's moral predilections, being Mother Teresa herself is no recourse from an agonizing death.
The only place where sin approaches a meaningful concept is when it comes to things that are the outcome of behaviors that are (nominally) amenable to intervention. A thief has sinned and loses his hand for it. A child with a Philadelphia chromosome has probably cried a little too often, but I wouldn't call that warranting a death sentence or the misery of chemotherapy.
All efforts to reconcile the stochastic distribution of boons and curses dished upon us with a belief in an Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnibenevolent Creator are, well, rather moot when you recognize that there's no reason (or grossly insufficient reason) to assume one exists.
And taken at face value, a Creator who knows with omniscience everything a conscious being will go through, including that it will inevitably sin and be punished for it (infinitely so, depending on which doctrine of Hell you adhere to), is prima facie disgusting to me. It certainly conflicts with any reasonable definition of benevolence, though attempts to torture them into reconciliation have been a pastime for theologists for aeons.
It would be akin to me "torturing" a sorting algorithm for putting 1 before 3 in an array, when I know with ~100% confidence it will make that decision every single time.
That is the relationship between a 3-O God and every poor bastard down here.
I would call you deluded, rather than a liar. It is a common enough delusion, but there is no more polite way of phrasing it.
You do not recognize the sheer magnitude of the empirical, physical, metaphysical and ontological claims you make if you think any amount of "moral growth" should sway your opinion one jot.
I have suffered plenty of pain. I put more stock in painkillers than your approach, not that I am calling it useless. Meditation and other techniques do help. They just don't help as much as fentanyl when you've broken your hip or are choking on your own secretions.
Religion is the opiate of the masses. I can't ding it too much on those grounds, I prescribe plenty of opioids myself. But what it also happens to be is a sheer refusal to take the universe as it is and a distraction from efforts at making it better.
No deity has pulled Mankind out of Malthusian Hell, we've dug up the rendered corpeses of our primordial ancestors and burned them, smelted steel and split atoms till we are in spitting distance of a Heaven on Earth, of our own making. Or we could all die after we build a Molochian monstrosity trained, in part, on this very conversation. But we live and die by our own, human hands, and God certainly hasn't been swiping in often enough for me to give him any credit.
Taken to its logical conclusion, any attempts at alleviating it is cheating God and his ward out of a valuable life lesson, though what that might entail to a child with appendicitis is questionable.
Not all suffering is bad. But I have seen far too much needless suffering to remotely privilege that claim. And when it has come to mitigating it, I assure you that even Jesuit clinics will hand out medication instead of just thoughts and prayers. When a child with ichthyosis vulgaris comes out of the womb and lives a short, yet excruciatingly painful existence before inevitable death (which can only be drawn out for a while, not remedied till the normal age at which we're supposed to die), I struggle to think of any mitigating factors that might make their short time on this Earth a net positive.
You do not know pain. Pray that you never have to.
Please talk to me directly, or create a blog somewhere rather than pretending you're actually responding to me.
I wasn't actually asking you, and you know this. You have no privileged position as a doctor and the bearer of bad news to accuse others of ignoring people's suffering. The problem of suffering is the same no matter the degree of suffering.
My approach isn't a way to deal with pain, it's a way to understand it. It's a test you can perform yourself which will grant you evidence one way or another regarding the veracity of the rest of my claims. If you think I'm right or wrong, say so, but don't pretend that I was giving you pain management tips.
I don't have anything against painkillers, but the fact that God didn't grant us the ability to dull our own pain at a whim means that pain-without-painkillers is a problem which must be addressed.
We've already been over this, but, like you, I suppose I'll have to pretend to be talking about this for the first time and pretend to have never heard any counterarguments from you.
Agency is extremely important. If one cannot choose then they lack agency. If one's choices lack consequences, then they cannot choose. I prefer being free to choose, even when that means making harmful mistakes, to being locked in to a life of unwilling righteousness. I prefer being created, even if that means occasionally being punished for sin, to not being created.
Whether sin should be punished at all is its own question. I find punishments for sin to be quite merciful so it's easy for me to understand them as corrective rather than punitive. They provide immediate consequences to actions which might otherwise become habit and lead to a greatly diminished capacity for joy in the long run.
Only if you're also assuming that no other principles exist. "Pain teaches us lessons" doesn't preclude things like "helping others teaches us lessons," "pain-lessons have diminishing returns," etc.
Taken to its logical conclusion, I don't think it's ethical to prevent literally all of the suffering of any single person--at least unless some other method is discovered for teaching the same lessons. That's all.
lol
I struggle to see how I haven't been directly responding to you.
Is rich, when it's immediately followed by:
So you are, I presume, the sole wielder of rhetoric here?
I must respectfully disagree. It is a privilege of this profession to see all the varieties of pain on offer, in enormous doses, and hence it lends additional weight to my claim that there is usually nothing ennobling or enlightening from it.
You are ignoring suffering. Much like the survivor of a tsunami thanks the Lord for answering his prayers while carelessly (and not even maliciously) forgetting that his next door neighbors were praying even harder before being swept away, you suffer from an enormous amount of survivorship bias.
I'm, thankfully, still alive, and hence technically a survivor too, but I get to see the ones who don't make it.
Have we? I genuinely don't recall.
"Agency" is a joke, in the eyes of the God as you presumably believe in.
What agency? What choice? Those are the illusions of beings without omniscience.
Now, if you notice that glaring flaw and knock it out, you're 1/3rd of the way there.
Depends on the sin in question. Maybe consumption of shellfish is a bad idea with ambient oceanic mercury levels.
You seem to think that pain and suffering are, on net, good. I disagree, even if I can recognize instances where they are adaptive. Your toddler will learn quickly not to touch hot stoves. He will not learn from many, many, other painful things.
The world as it exists aligns far more with an uncaring, mechanistic universe than one that is even slightly designed to minimize needless suffering. Your praise of a hypothetical, benevolent creator that refuses to do its job or even needs this kind of apologetics is saddening.
There exists many possible worlds where suffering exists, but the overwhelming majority of lives are worth living and no senseless suffering plagues us. A world with guardrails, so you toddlers can get an owie but not electrocute themselves. We are not remotely optimized, we do not get idealized amounts of negative feedback without verging on senseless torture.
I happen to think we can make such a world, but it'll be by our own endeavors, and if we make a god, it will grown in datacenters and trained to be actually kind. Abrahamic religion is a pernicious memeplex that while very occasionally adaptive, also dulls and drags our ability to work with the only real world we have at hand.
Is very clearly conflicting with.
It certainly is a tip, and to an extent I even endorse it. Mindfulness helps with some kinds of pain.
I don't know about your God, but the Blind Idiot God of Evolution has blessed most of us with endogenous opioid receptors and the endogenous opioids to bind to them.
There was a newborn child banging his head against his crib when I passed the paediatric ward (thankfully not the one for those with cancer). Know why? It's because it prompts the release of internal painkillers "on a whim", distracting him from a colic, though I wouldn't advocate this as recommended route for adults with our predilection towards traumatic brain injuries and reduced neuroplasticity.
Buddhist Monks can suppress the pain of self immolation. Though that whim certainly took practise, and without it there's a lot of undignified screaming and rolling about while cops draw guns at you.
Scoff as you wish, I do genuinely know more about pain and suffering than you do. It is not an apple lightly eaten.
Oh, okay.
I can't blame this all on you, because I did just change my handle, but the conversation I linked above (where I mention the miracles I've seen) is a child of a debate we were having about this very topic. Given that you referenced the comment, and proceeded with a bunch of arguments which we've already debated in detail, I interpreted your words as grandstanding using my comment as your soapbox.
We have discussed pretty much everything here multiple times before though.
Rhetoric is fine, making the same tired points over and over, rather than actually addressing counterarguments, is not fine. I already understand, in good detail, your position regarding the fundamental apathy of the universe, and don't need it explained to me yet again. So when I say I wasn't actually asking you, I'm calling you out for using what was obviously a rhetorical question as an excuse to soapbox again. Combined with the many other arguments we've had over this exact topic, it seemed clear that you're essentially not addressing me (one who already knows your position) at all.
When you say:
you do so in response to me explaining why I addressed the problem of pain at all. Whether humans actually have access to painkillers "on a whim" is essentially irrelevant--the point is that even with painkillers, suffering still exists, and therefore needs to be explained. You're definitely smart enough to know where I was going with that, but rather than actually addressing my point you chose to use it as yet another soapbox.
I don't think your technicality here is even true--I wouldn't describe that as painkillers accessible on a whim--but it's really not important.
I think it's better that some amount of suffering exist than no suffering, but generally pain and suffering are bad. If suffering didn't exist at all I think our innate capacity for joy, and freedom to choose, would be severely diminished.
Here's another example of what I'm talking about. It looks to me like willful misinterpretation of what I'm saying. I know you don't need pain management tips. You know I know you don't need pain management tips. The context makes it clear that I'm not giving you helpful advice regarding pain management, but rather attempting to provide evidence regarding my own attitude concerning pain. Yet you deliberately choose to interpret it differently, pretending I'm a misguided, naive optimist who thinks that all those who think pain is bad just don't know how to manage pain.
Sure, it's a useful pain management tip, but you know that's not why I brought it up.
I really disagree, I think abject agony is on net pleasant from a hedonistic perspective. That's not to say I'm a masochist or anything, just that the innate joy of existence outweighs virtually any amount of physical pain. We've already discussed this in detail in the thread linked above. Some of the worst suffering people can experience is to lose a loved one. Given the infinite expanse of possibility space, I think the fact that essentially the worst thing we ever experience is an absence of joy is actually pretty good evidence of a benevolent creator. It's certainly more compatible with that than with an uncaring mechanistic universe, which I would expect to at least be capable of inflicting more physical pain than it does.
You may know more about physical pain than I do but that doesn't mean you know physical pain better than I do. One denotes knowledge, the other understanding. I've experienced enough pain that I think it's reasonable to generalize the lessons I learned to literally any degree of physical pain.
I don't really care to argue about enormous doses of pain always being ennobling or enlightening, sometimes they are but usually they just hurt. The point is that they're tolerable and that the existence of pain itself is pretty easily explicable.
More like we both got swept away, I came back to shore after a few hours, and then they came back a few hours later. A lot of the lessons learned generalize to worse situations.
This is again something we've already discussed in detail. In short I don't think you lose responsibility for your choices by blaming them on your neurons, nor do I think on any meaningful level determinism actually means you lack freedom or agency.
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Damn dude. If you want to move to the US I'll make it happen for you.
Are we talking flights or dodging the Texan Border Patrol? ;)
Then again, both do entail flying, and I'm not sure I'm currently up to swimming the Rio Grande.
Huh. While Skookum is off climbing mountains, it looks like I have another monumental physical feat to prepare for haha.
(On a more serious note, I appreciate the offer greatly. Who knows, you might have pull with the AMA or be a mysterious millionaire, I'll count that as a miracle heh.)
Well if you want to practice here it would cost you another 3 years, it is paid. I think it would be worth it.
India has had World Federation for Medical Education for a decade now, that changes a lot.
Plus Maine needs doctors badly. Of course it would be through proper channels and a plane ride.
The reason I said pull with the AMA is that because I am, for no fault of my own, ineligible to give the USMLE. If not, there would be relatively fast options like the fastrack programs in under-served regions of Texas and Mississippi that would let foreign doctors begin working without repeating residency.
A cause of endless suffering and angst for me, I assure you. At least I'm licensed in the UK, which is a modest step up from India. Maybe it's a fixable issue, in which case I may make it to the States yet.*
*Fixing it entails unavoidable wrangling with unaccountable NGOs and maybe $50k. My cheapskate med school is unlikely to pay up, and I certainly can't afford that myself.
Ah that hyperlink didn't work for me. What is the nature of the issue?
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Isn't that very much disputed within Christianity? In addition the kids he speaks of are almost certainly Hindu and/or Muslim. I am guessing almost none of them are baptized. And then even if the kids get in because they were too young to actively choose, will the parents who are also most likely Hindu and Muslim be reunited with them?
Catholics:
"Likewise, whosoever says that those children who depart out of this life without partaking of that sacrament shall be made alive in Christ, certainly contradicts the apostolic declaration, and condemns the universal Church, in which it is the practice to lose no time and run in haste to administer baptism to infant children, because it is believed, as an indubitable truth, that otherwise they cannot be made alive in Christ. Now he that is not made alive in Christ must necessarily remain under the condemnation, of which the apostle says, that "by the offense of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation." That infants are born under the guilt of this offense is believed by the whole Church."
"The Roman Catholic view is that baptism is necessary for salvation and that it frees the recipient from original sin. Roman Catholic tradition teaches that unbaptized infants, not being freed from original sin, go to Limbo (Latin: limbus infantium), which is an afterlife condition distinct from Hell. This is not, however, official church dogma."
The Orthodox:
"And forasmuch as infants are men, and as such need salvation; needing salvation, they need also Baptism. And those that are not regenerated, since they have not received the remission of hereditary sin, are, of necessity, subject to eternal punishment, and consequently cannot without Baptism be saved; so that even infants ought, of necessity, to be baptised."
or the Protestants:
"Since we must make judgments about God’s will from his Word, which testifies that the children of believers are holy, not by nature but by virtue of the gracious covenant in which they together with their parents are included, godly parents ought not to doubt the election and salvation of their children whom God calls out of this life in infancy. "
The Baptists would back you up however:
"We do believe, that all little Children dying in their Infancy, before they are capable to choose either Good or Evil, whether born of Believing Parents, or Unbelieving Parents, shall be saved by the Grace of God, and Merit of Christ their Redeemer, and Work of the Holy Ghost, and so being made Members of the Invisible Church, shall enjoy Life everlasting; for our Lord Jesus saith, of such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven. Ergo, We conclude, that that opinion is false, which saith, That those little Infants dying before Baptism, are damned."
In other words aren't you assuming the best possible case for your argument here? What if you are right about God existing, but that those kids will never be reunited with their families, either because they will go to Limbo/Heaven as they were too young to choose Christ and their parents are Damned, through not being Christian? Would you still maintain that pain is worth it? Or that you are correct but that they will be reunited with their parents in Gehenna being as neither was saved, and suffer even more torment?
Your argument could be true for Christian baptized kids born to Christian parents and false for everyone else.
I'm just making a claim without arguing every single one of my positions from first principles. Of course if I'm wrong about my religion then I'm wrong about my religion, that goes without saying, and therefore my claim that kids go to heaven wouldn't be correct. If I were wrong I'd have to rethink essentially every belief I have.
Given the quality and good faith (or lack thereof) of the comment I was responding to, spending hours crafting a full dissertation on all of my beliefs would just be a waste of time.
edit: to answer your question, though, my own experience was that very great pain was very tolerable. This doesn't make it good or mean there are endless lessons to be learned from it, or even that any amount of pain is "worth it." SOME amount is useful to learn certain lessons though.
I think I should have been more careful with how I worded my original comment, given how people seem to be interpreting it.
So let's concede that your faith is not Catholic, Orthodox, or Lutheran-adjacent but a personal interpretation of faith that allows unbaptized Hindu children into heaven. You probably have a lot of theology to do, but put that aside.
The common Christian response to the problem of pain is a wonderful meme attached below. Suffering is God's chisel to sculpt us. (It is a great meme.)
Can you think of a type or manner of suffering that would falsify this hypothesis? That is to say, a Job-like situation of suffering so meaningless that it could not be didactic? And that if you found it to exist, your current paradigm would have to update? If you can't think of one, what does that rationally mean?
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My faith is LDS, i.e. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Eh, it's alright. I get off the train at step 5 or 6. My religion believes in a somewhat more limited God who did not invent righteousness out of thin air or have the capacity to redefine what Good and Bad are. You could say we don't believe in an omnipotent God, but there are different definitions of omnipotence, and some allow for "omnipotent" beings incapable of changing logic itself.
I'm not really sure what hypothesis you're referring to. Can I think of a level of suffering which would force me to update my own position? Sort of--it would be strong evidence against my position anyways, the same way the suffering which I observe is evidence for (but not proof of) my position.
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You should perhaps consider that you're entirely wrong. There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece your credulous butt would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead. It is all made up dude.
Do you really have the audacity and arrogance necessary to believe you are one of the few million out of 117 billion humans to have ever lived to see the light of the ONE TRUE GOD/RELIGION? Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not in the thrall of your particular sect?
Since we're on the topic of peer pressure against small rules violations
The only difference between these two sentence pairs is the insertion of scorn. Would it be so bad to tone this down please? If you're modded you might feel vindicated for proving The Motte is too soft for ingroup criticism, well done, but if so this will be the reason. While your instinct now is probably to go hunting for examples of scornful language elsewhere on the Motte, you're delivering scorn here in distilled juice concentrate.
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You're the one parroting the mainstream position here. I suspect we'd both be pantheon believers, but we'd also both be different people entirely without access to the scientific method etc. There is no me if I had been born in ancient Greece.
Other than that though, thanks, you've really given me a lot to chew on. I had never considered before that I might be wrong.
Atheism is not mainstream. Most people are religious adherents, 85% according to the most recent surveys. I'm the counterculture rebel here, not you. You would have been cheering on the death of socrates on charges of atheism and corrupting the youth.
First you say my position must be wrong because it's so rare, then you say I'm in the mainstream and following along with the rest of the sheep. Which is it?
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My point was, you could mostly be correct, especially about how your faith works for you and others who believe as you do, but wrong about the other parts you are basically generating yourself. For the moment let's say you have experienced miracles yourself and you are in God's grace and therefore your knowledge of how that part works is solid. Unless in one of those experiences God told you what He does about children and pagans then you are extrapolating what you know about how God is with you, with how God will be with others.
So when you say families will be reunited, is that because you know, (the same way you know the existence of God) or is it a less certain belief?
Miracles are evidence of God and somewhat weaker evidence for my understanding of God. The belief that families will be reunited stems from my understanding of God. So strictly speaking, [families being reunited] is contingent upon and thus less likely than [God existing], yes.
I'm not really sure where you're going with this, are you trying to argue that the miracles aren't good evidence that families will be reunited? I'll weakly agree with you there, the [families being reunited] belief requires a whole lot more knowledge of God than just what the miracles provided. Those miracles aren't the full extent of my religious knowledge and experience, they're just a few accessible examples.
Basically yes, which means when you say "families will be re-united" you don't have definitive knowledge of that (even accepting that your miracles are good knowledge of God existing). You should really say that you think the families will be re-united, which does leave your position much more open to critique. You're making a stronger argument for your position than you actually believe.
Stating beliefs without qualifiers is a typical method of communication often used on this very forum. For example:
This is a subjective opinion, certainly not one you have definitive knowledge is true, yet you stated it without qualifiers.
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What sin did Job commit?
Going for herbal and dietary remedies for pancreatic cancer, especially a variant that was amenable to evidence-based medicine.
(I'm aware.)
He's referring to Job from the Bible, not Steve Jobs.
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Please speak plainly and explain what you're aware of.
Of course. I am aware that the Biblical figure Job, and Steve Jobs (a messianic one, to certain tech evangelists) are different people. It was a joke.
So... uh... after that nice interlude... what sin did Job commit?
Some time-traveling Catch-22 shenanigans, apparently claiming you're not a sinner is a sin. All I know is I know nothing.
Fair enough. I would only express to you that it might be of value to understand that your opponents have done more than their fair share of wrestling with the general problem you propose. Simply asking, "What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was?" as though it were a complete, coherent argument for a specific position is sort of on the same tier as, "If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" Like, yes, Mr. Fundi, we have thought of that concern, but you'll need to step away from your Fundi Smugness for long enough to try to understand anything about how this tradition works.
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Having read your linked thread, it seems you are a Mormon.
Tl;dr: Proper epistemology can save you 10% of your lifetime earnings (and more!) if you let it.
BLUF: Independently researching and leaving Mormonism was the hardest intellectual/emotional thing I’ve ever done. Trapped priors, anchor beliefs, upbringing and social pressure all make it very challenging, because you have been emotionally conditioned to perform confirmation bias to develop a testimony since before you could talk, and to avoid “antimormon” sources and evidence (the very opposite of an isolated demand for rigor). Try pretending you were born a Muslim or a Buddhist and consider how this version of you would be, religiously. Would you end up leaving your childhood faith and somehow finding Mormonism?
I gotta say, even by Mormon standards, those “answered prayer” stories are weak sauce.
“I was dealing with a problem, I prayed real hard for help, and so the omnipotent creator of the universe stretched forth his finger to help me find my keys” is a classic in the genre, but brings up the issue of why the power of prayer is seemingly so limited to things like not getting lost in the woods, healing from an illness, or encountering your ex, instead of solving larger-scale problems. God is so powerful, but his preference to work in mysterious ways really gets in the way of effectiveness.
“You are the easiest person to fool” and so “Bayesian” “analysis” of your prayer outcomes is just so remarkably divorced from a worldview based on keeping beliefs proportional to evidence (the antithesis of “faith”). Try running an experiment at scale on say prayer/faith healing at hospitals and then we can talk about Bayesian analysis. Or provide concrete evidence of a soul/The Spirit.
My favorite thing is that Joseph Smith claimed he possessed gold plates and other ancient artifacts, like a sword from the old world, and couldn’t just produce them as evidence. He had them, just take his word for it. He even had “witnesses” make formal claims they saw them (with their “spiritual eyes” as it turns out), and yet he wouldn’t let say outside experts examine them.
Strange way to go about establishing credibility. “I’ll let you see the relics but only if you already believe me.” It’s a level of credulity most children won’t demonstrate—Santa at least does provide presents.
Mormonism has no way to reconcile evolution, the archeology and genetics of the Americas, and the conspicuous lack of evidence of living prophetic power with its claims and doctrine—to a unique or stronger degree than trad Christianity, due to literal claims made by the Book of Mormon and early prophets. The apologists try to fit various camels through needles here, but it usually means contradicting claims and doctrine set forth by older prophets, which isn’t exactly good for establishing credibility. Early Mormon sausage making is just too well-documented for most moderns to accept, and Mormonism’s plunging conversion rate shows it.
Of course, the modem LDS church can’t settle the issue and make me look foolish because the plates and certain other artifacts were turned over to an angel. Tellingly, the one sacred relic the church does possess is a regular old seer stone, which was mostly ignored until recent times and is a point of controversy regarding exactly how it was the “translation” was done by Smith (it mostly did not involve looking at the plates, though most pictures depict it that way).
It’s a preposterous situation that would not survive scrutiny today (at any real scale), but people today—many of them very intelligent—can pretend it was a reasonable thing for a prophet of god to do in 1830 or so because they were raised believing it.
This is precisely why I took so long to eventually determine that Mormonism was true.
I never accepted anything along the lines of "you should avoid antimormon sources" and actively sought them out from a young age. Anytime someone would say something like that my respect for them would drop precipitously. Now, having read all the literature I could get my hands on, I find myself agreeing that there were better, more edifying uses of my time than deliberately studying such a vast quantity of opposing viewpoints.
I was raised by rationalists online more than by Mormons--I certainly understood rationalist doctrine better than Mormon doctrine, knew more details of rationalist doctrine, paid more attention to it, like it better, etc.
They're not the only ones I have, as I've mentioned elsewhere, but they're the only ones I think should be shared.
This is pretty easy, and has to do with accountability, as I was saying. The amount of evidence we receive is pretty much exactly the amount we're morally ready for. That said, "I prayed and found my keys" was pretty much always a laughable "miracle" lol.
I disagree, I think that keeping beliefs proportional to evidence is essentially the definition of faith--not the commonly-used, mangled "faith" that's been warped by centuries of apostasy, but the one described in the scriptures. There are many things I know to be true and yet do not live by because I lack the faith--my emotional strength of belief has not caught up to the evidence. This is true for all of us on a moral level, and is described by rationalists as "akrasia."
I'll provide concrete evidence of a soul when you provide a concrete alternative explanation for consciousness. I don't even need evidence, just any kind of materialist explanation at all which even vaguely makes sense. I'd love to run my own prayer/faith healing RCT, and may do so if/when I get the resources, but honestly I think given how convinced I already am that money is probably better spent on healthcare for the patients in those hospitals.
Martin Harris was the only one who said anything about spiritual eyes, and he also explicitly said that he saw them with his natural eyes.
Meanwhile we have direct statements like this one from David Whitmer:
as well as the plainly written language of the Testimony of Three Witnesses and the Testimony of Eight Witnesses, and the lifelong testimonies of the men involved, all of which directly contradict one maximally uncharitable interpretation of a single witness's words.
You should know as well as I do that there are fairly reasonable explanations for these things. I understand why one wouldn't give such explanations much attention--certainly, the null hypothesis should not be that Mormonism is true--but my own view is that the decades have steadily confirmed more and more of what were originally seen as anachronisms and other flaws.
If you want to discuss in more detail I'm happy to, but it will have to be another day, as I've been on this site way too long today already.
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