Continued from: Pondering the ‘Afterlife’ Part 1 – The Emptiness of Eternal Bliss
Every year in Kampala, the most popular Pentecostal Church stages a production called “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames”. They’ve been doing this every year for the last 20 years or so, and this production has been extremely successful in winning converts to Christianity, and getting ‘lukewarm’ Christians ‘back on track’.
I’ve watched it twice – once in 1993, and the second time in 2008. The first time I watched this play I was already a born-again Christian, so for me, at the time, it served as a great reinforcer of my beliefs. The second time around, it was at the behest of an attractive lady who (bless her heart!) was trying to ‘convert me’ back into Christianity (I had long-since abandoned the faith by then).
In this play, various scenes depicting the lives of various groups of people are presented. In the one scene, we are presented with 2 strangers sitting next to each other on a flight to some destination. Once they get the small talk going, one of them starts trying to share his Christian beliefs to his new found friend. This new found friend is supposedly some sort of corporate intellectual who has no time for ‘such things’, and shrugs off the other guy’s attempts to evangelise. At that moment, the plane experiences a mid-air malfunction and crashes, killing everyone on board.
When the two of them ‘wake up’, they are at the gates of heaven. The ‘saved’ guy is obviously impressed, while the ‘unsaved’ chap begins panicking. An angel then steps forward and declares that Mr. Intellectual rejected Jesus and so is doomed to spend eternity in hell. Scary music starts to play, and a man wearing a monster mask (Satan) suddenly appears from back stage and prances about with joy as he drags the new inmate (who, at this point, is kicking and screaming and begging for mercy) into Hell’s flames.
Hell is depicted as – you guessed it – a LAKE OF FIRE – and I must say some very interesting effects were used to animate the flames on stage. It had a real ‘fiery’ look and feel to it.
Anyway, once Satan and Mr. Intellectual disappear, Jesus appears and leads our saved friend 
through the gates of heaven, as approximately 50 angels (standing on several elevated platforms spread across the back of the set) cheer his acceptance into the Kingdom of God.
This routine of sudden death springing upon unsuspecting people prevails throughout the various scenes with different people, and in each case the deceased wake up to find themselves at Heaven’s gates to be judged by Jesus. Indeed it is a spectacular production, with bright lights and beautiful costumes and some decent acting as well.
The moral of this story is clear…reject Jesus, and Hell will be your eternal home.
At the end of the play the presiding pastor initiates an altar call, and invites those who wish to give their lives to Christ, or those who wish to ‘rededicate’ their lives to Jesus to come forward. Hundreds of people rush to form long lines, frightened out of their wits, wondering where they might end up if death came to them as suddenly and abruptly as it did for the characters in the play.
One thing for sure is that, for them, HELL is not an option.
Pascal’s Wager
This play is essentially an attempt to dramatise Pascal’s Wager, which is a ploy used to highlight the supposed dangers of not believing in ‘God’.
According to Wikipedia:
Pascal’s Wager (or Pascal’s Gambit) is a suggestion posed by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should wager as though God exists, because so living has everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
In other words, you’d rather believe in ‘God’ than not, because if ‘God’ doesn’t exist, presumably nothing has been lost by the believer and the non-believer. However, if it turns out that ‘God’ does, in fact, exist – then the non-believer will go to Hell, where as the believer will go to Heaven. From this it is argued that one would therefore be better off believing in ‘God’ than not.
This argument has for a long time been deemed unconvincing.
To me, the most compelling objection, and it being one that I can relate to, is that believing tends not to be something one can wilfully, or consciously, do. One cannot ‘decide’ to believe. Each individual has, by virtue of his/her age, life experiences, upbringing and education, different standards for what he or she will find to be persuasive evidence. So no matter how much an individual wants to avoid Hell, if the burden of proof required to induce that belief has not been met, then the most this person could ever do is pretend to believe – in which case he or she would still be damned. Belief can only occur after one has been convinced – which is not something a person can claim to have control over.
Theologians are also not keen to use this as a tool of prosletysation because, first of all, it gives the impression (and rightly so) that one has to be coerced into believing in Jesus. Naturally, theologians would rather not have Christianity reduced to being one-giant-not-so-veiled-threat. Secondly, if ‘God’ exists and is omniscient, presumably, he would know that a non-believer was feigning belief for the sake of self-preservation (avoiding Hell), and so that non-believer would still be damned.
Consider also, that there are thousands of religions in existence with some of them explicitly clear on what one must do to avoid eternal damnation. This means, even if one believed that a ‘God’ exists, this would not be sufficient to guarantee that one could escape Hell or eternal damnation.
For example, if Islam is true, then the Christian who continues to worship ‘God’ as a triune entity would be guilty of idolatry and end up in Hell. Meanwhile, the Muslim who rejects the divinity of Jesus and refuses to accept him as personal saviour would also go to Hell – if Christianity is true. So even if one believed in the existence of a ‘God’, one would first have to sift through and consider every religious tradition in existence in order to be reasonably certain that they were doing the things required by ‘God’ (that is, assuming that this ‘God’ – if it exists – requires humans to do, or believe, anything specific) in order not to be sent to Hell for eternal torment.
Thus, trying to convince a non-believer to believe in ‘God’ for the sake of ‘avoiding Hell’ really can’t work. As we have seen – technically, a believer in ‘God’ is in no better position himself, for he cannot know for sure that his religious tradition, or his THEOLOGY is the correct one, out of the tens of thousands of religious traditions and theologies that exist, have existed, or are yet to exist.
(Several other interesting and effective objections to Pascal’s Wager can be found here.)
As an atheist, of course, I don’t lose any sleep over this because there’s no good reason to think a Hell, let alone a ‘God’, even exists.
Life is beautiful..
There is only one life to live, and not a minute of it should be spent on unwarranted anxieties based on ancient myths and superstitions.
9 comments
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April 9, 2010 at 5:24 pm
The 27th Comrade
The only thing that, for me, seems to give the Hell idea any weight is the fact that all humans know that there is such a thing as punishment for wrong-doing. If one doesn’t accept this, fine. If one does, however, then there is no rational way to deem the whole Hell business to be gibberish; indeed, if one believes in punishment for wrong-dowing, then one believes in Hell.
My not believing in traffic fines (or the rationality of them!) does nothing to save me from the cops on the road, when I do wrong on the road. Hell, here, is the traffic cop’s punitive action. Considering the whole image (ie., considering where we get our irrational idea of right and wrong and their existence), there would be an equally irrational equivalent of the traffic cop’s punitive action.
No doubt, man. I fully concur. I would only add that some beliefs are warranted, even though they may be uncomfortable (and even uncomforting). In my opinion, final punishment is at least warranted. This is why most criticisms of Hell are going to have to commit the genetic fallacy of “Christians agree with it, therefore it is not true.”
April 9, 2010 at 8:44 pm
James Onen
Thanks for your comments, Comrade.
Do you hold to a traditional view of Hell (i.e. eternal torment in a lake of fire)?
I will be doing a follow up post in which I will be looking at the various Christian (and possibly other) understandings of the concept Hell. In the next few days, maybe.
April 9, 2010 at 9:08 pm
The 27th Comrade
I think “lake of fire” is imagery that should be understood, such that whatever the correct understanding is, it might as well be an eternal lake of fire. It suffices that I think Hell sucks, because punishment shouldn’t rock, whatever else it should be.
April 12, 2010 at 4:28 pm
James Onen
I strongly disagree. The idea of hell, to put it simply, is sick.
Just because one agrees that in some cases punishment is necessary, one can still object to what kind of punishment should be inflicted upon an individual for a particular action, or whether or not such actions are even deserving of punishment in the first place. We do this all the time. We have seen laws get repealed, once we realised that the acts for which legal sanctions were initially imposed were inconsequential.
For example, as recently as 2006, a man could have gotten 7 years in jail in Singapore for engaging in oral sex with your spouse/girlfriend. That ridiculous law was repealed in 2007. Oral sex between consenting adult heterosexual couples thus stopped being a criminal offence as of 2007 in Singapore – and today we would be appalled if anyone tried to incarcerate someone on those grounds.
Currently in Uganda sedition laws are being contested..we are now actively promoting women’s rights.. we respect freedom of speech..freedom of worship..
Our idea of justice therefore has very little to do with any concept of a hell where unceasing eternal torment is the de facto punishment for the breach of petty bronze-age laws like worshipping only one specific deity (Yahweh, and no other), blasphemy, not working on the Sabbath, a woman found not to be a virgin on her wedding day, etc.
I think the very idea of hell is twisted, along with the concept of purported redemption proposed by Christianity.
Let’s say Manish, a Hindu man, spent his whole life performing charitable, kind, and selfless acts. Unfortunately for him, he fails to find Christian doctrine believable, and thus rejects Christianity. According to most flavours of Christian theology, Manish will spend eternity in hell after he dies.
Meanwhile, a Catholic priest who spent his life molesting young boys will end up in heaven if minutes before he died he prayed to Jesus to be forgiven for his sins… Dictators, murderers, serial killers, etc.. all will get to spend eternity in heaven, if they are able to pray for forgiveness on their deathbed – while Manish, the kind and selfless Hindu will burn in hell for eternity? And this same fate awaits all other kind people of other faiths (or of no religion) who simply found Christianity too preposterous to be believed? Really? (..and don’t even get me started on the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election, which is simply appalling)
This is really a skewed kind of ‘justice’, and one that is hard to take seriously. So, sorry – while I believe that sometimes punishment may be necessary (especially as a possible deterrent for future would-be offenders) I completely reject the idea of a hell. But what does it matter anyway? Hell is a man-made myth.
True. The problem is, we see no reason to believe that a ‘cosmic’ traffic cop exists. Also, those that tell us that a ‘cosmic’ cop, with ‘cosmic’ traffic rules, exists can’t even seem to agree among themselves what those specific ‘cosmic’ traffic rules, if indeed there are any, actually are. This is one of the reasons why Pascal’s Wager fails, as we have already seen.
To play it safe, perhaps we should all be Bahai? 🙂
Perhaps by such criticisms committing the genetic fallacy you mean some would dismiss the concept of hell only because we have a fairly good understanding of its mythical cultural origins? If so you would probably be right.
However the problem with this line of defense is that you would also be accused of the same fallacy if you were to discount the existence of Poseidon, Apollo, the Cupid, and alien abductions on the same grounds, which most people tend to do anyway. Does this mean that Poseidon, Apollo, the Cupid, and alien abductions are real? No it doesn’t. We simply need to examine the positive evidence by which one came to the conclusion that any of these might be real.
But what happens, when good positive evidence is absent, yet the belief persists? In such a case, I think we would be justified in not giving such claims much consideration.
I also think in cases like this it would be worthwhile to consider other plausible explanations (besides the claim in question being true – which we reject) as to why a person may have arrived at that belief. There are very many good explanations as to how a belief in hell came to be, and how it has evolved over time to what it is today. Add to this there being no good reason to think that there is a soul that survives death, and the concept of eternal torment relies on there being a soul, so..
For these and other reasons I am strongly inclined, and quite happy, to dismiss hell as a human invention.
April 13, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Quitstorm
I agree with you James Onen
April 9, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Mudamuli
Interesting. I’d never thought of it this way.
April 12, 2010 at 9:13 pm
The 27th Comrade
The idea of traffic fines, to put it simply, is sick.
In other words, not liking something doesn’t say anything about its reality. Also, sick to who? The policemen certainly seem gleeful when penalising on the road. To me, of course, it is and will remain sick. I hate even more the very idea of prison. It’s sickest, but still …
Of course. I wish, in fact, that there was no punishment whatsoever for wrong-doing. But, alas, what I want doesn’t force reality. I guess the afterlife is not quantum. 😉
We do repeal laws, the laws we make. However, not liking the fact that F = ma is why people die when they miss just one small single step while building a sky-scraper, that F = ma is why bullets, pangas, landslides, and tsunamis kill, not liking these facts doesn’t affect the law – Newton’s Second Law of Motion – and we cannot repeal it. Perhaps God is bad for making a universe where F = ma (and also for Hell), but that’s another debate. It’s certainly not an argument against the validity of Hell. (It even reinforces it, because Hell is expected to be the sickest possible thing to all who hear of it.)
Two things: our idea of justice has all to do with these laws, and also this doesn’t matter regarding Hell.
First, our justice system is based on Judeo-Christian justice. That is why when the Brits came here, they introduced anti-sodomy laws where previously we had none. Now, we are moving away from these laws of which you speak, but still, even things like “innocent until proven guilty” are due to the Judeo-Christian heritage of our legal system. (We find the family courts that kill women who dishonour the clan in the Middle East to be silly, because Judeo-Christian laws emphasise independent testimony. We find the in camera trial of Mr. Sibat for sorcery to be wrong, because of the same.)
Secondly, it ultimately doesn’t matter on the question of Hell what our laws say, and how we perceive the “petty bronze-age laws”. As I’ve been saying all along, it doesn’t matter what I think about the traffic policemen and their fines (for the record: I hate them and everything remotely associated with them, with such a rich and irrational hate). It doesn’t matter what I think of these “petty digital-age traffic laws”; even in my unbelief and scoffing, I am still going to be pulled over, impounded, fined, imprisoned, and maybe exiled.
You should pay very close attention to the fact that these “petty bronze-age laws” were supposed to be petty, short of which they would be trying to accomodate our weaknesses (such as wanting to fuck the whole town and still get away with it), rather than reflecting the rigid perfection of the God who gave them to these semi-literate Hebrew goat-herds. To those who, like me, are inclined to sin and sin yet more then sin harder one more time, these laws will look petty, irrational, and out of touch. Not unlike pupils in class thinking a (perfect) teacher a sadistic demon for refusing to give them a mark in the exam just becase they mis-spelt one single, simple, common, unambiguous, four-letter wrod. This pettiness of these laws has the effect of magnifying our depravity as seen from the God-side. Quoth:
And St. Paul also later discusses the importance of this Law that we could not keep (as in, if we can’t keep it, what is it for?)
Emphasis mine. I have always said that if one thinks himself righteous, it is because he has not tried hard enough to be righteous.
Again, two things: whether or not we think Hell is twisted does nothing to affect its reality. I would prefer if there was no Hell, or even talk of it, but then, I do the same about the tax rates. 🙂 What I feel about the taxes (or, heck, even their use) doesn’t affect whether they are real, what rate they will be, how they will be enforced, and so on.
The other thing is that the redemption that Christianity speaks of is not twisted and everybody who has ever had a debt to pay – such as yourself – will understand it. There is nothing twisted about saving a drowning person, or paying bail money for a broke friend. And, of course, you know this, so what you above is, to be gentle, a simple untruth even to yourself.
I have a friend called Manish, so I will feel uneasy writing this. 🙂 I hope he never sees it.
James, the problem is not so much not being good as it is not being perfect. Manish’s problem is not that he is not good, but that he is not perfect. This is the difference between Jesus and Manish.
Now, is it even sane for God to punish people for imperfection? I wish it wasn’t, just like you. But it is, because God, who we understand to be perfect, doesn’t abide imperfection.
Manish’s problem, now, in rejecting Christianity, is not the rejection itself, but rather his rejection of the fact that the judge will find him imperfect. Most of the rejection of Christianity is not because it is not convincing (for it is), but rather because those who reject Christianity feel that they can pay the price themselves. They do not know how high it is. (Ever rejected the help of a lawyer, expecting that you could stand for yourself in court, only to find that you didn’t know when and where to say “herein forthwith attached, my lord, is the aforementioned affidavit of the defendant as per request of the bench pursuant of the terminal clause in Act 34 Sec. 14 regarding the force majeure incident therein entered by the defendant forthwith on the pendant pertaining lawsuit hithertofore covered under Act 34 section 45″? The rejection of Jesus’ redemption is a lot like that.)
It’s not what they do that justifies them; it’s what Jesus did that justifies them. All they do is let the rich man (Jesus) foot the bill that, in their poverty (sinfulness) they cannot even begin to foot.
Many of us think we are more-justified than the serial killers. We may be in for the hugest shock.
That you wrote that sentence is very strong testimony that you know how easy it is to get what you are passing up. Maybe the Hindu guy may never have rejected the sacrifice, never quite knowing as much as you do that the sacrifice (to quote John the Baptist) “takes away the sins of the World”. Many have not been exposed to Jesus’ true message, and have therefore never rejected it. Against such, there is no charge (assuming we don’t bring in how closely they followed their natural revelation which pointed them dimly to Jesus, and so on and so forth).
You do not find Christianity presposterous, because you know that Jesus died for the sins of the World, of which yours, mine, and the serial killer’s, are merely a small subset. If Manish knows as much as you do, then he has no excuse; if he doesn’t know this (for this is the gospel – “Good News”) then he has no charge.
For those who die without having been given the true law that you have mentioned above (summarised as “You are insufficient to save yourself, and Jesus is sufficient; so believe and be rescued,” or, even harsher, “You are insufficient to represent yourself in court, and the lawyer is sufficient; so pay him and be rescued”) those are not condemned, because they had no law to break; they had no Jesus to reject. For those who know the truth, rejecting it is something they are responsible for. (To drag the lawyer metaphor even further, the laws of this country allow you a public defendant or yourself, and you are free to reject the defendant provided by the government on your tax money. Now, if you do, and you are defeated in court due to your insufficiency, it’s your fault. If, however, you would have taken the lawyer, but the kangaroo court didn’t give you one, and you lose due to your insufficiency where the trained lawyer would have sufficed, it is not your fault.)
I’ll summarise this thus: We know that “Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died”, because “before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.” Now, when we know that “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son”, what awaits one “who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ and again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
I completely reject the idea of justice. But what does it matter anyway? Justice is a man-made myth.
My first comment contained a reason for why the cosmic traffic cop exists.
This cosmic traffic cop is rendered by any proof that renders rhe existence of right and wrong.
These things – right and wrong – on the philosophical naturalist-eliminative materialist doctrine, are irrational, and it is irrational to believe that they exist. But we have them anyway (for, in a twist of the hypocrisy I accuse them of repeatedly, these atheists do believe in the existence of right and wrong, in spite of not having proven them to exist, and not being able to, for as long as they cannot also prove that God exists). If we do have right and wrong, then we have an equally irrational source for them; this source we understand to be God, the cosmic traffic cop.
Or, to put it another way, since there is my answer to 1+1 (which, as we all know, is 42) that disagrees with your answer (2), we all know that there is no right answer, no correct rules of mathematics, et cetera. Right?
You, James, happen to know the truth. 😉
No, I mean that he would dismiss it because of those who hold the beliefs. As in, the Christians. The genetic fallacy is a fallacy (as a variant on the ad hominem) precisely because it considers the tenants of the idea, rather than the idea. In other words, the opposite of what you say.
No, these are not like Hell. These are events, and they can be investigated. But Hell is not an event, and is not subject to such investigations.
As for Cupid and Apollo, well, we have dealt with this before, and a comment to deal with that will be too long, even as merely a part of this already-long one. Suffice it to say that, while natural revelation may have pointed the Greeks to God, God is the Uncaused Cause and citing Cupid or whatever is not representative of what you should be dealing with as an atheist. After all, the Greek Orthodox Catholic Church still sings hymns directed at Zeus (modern spelling: Theos, from which we get Theology and the like).
If any other non-Christian culture has a conception of Hell (and many do; and almost all have an after-life), that name suffices to work among those people for the Christian concept. Christian Arabs appropriate their word, “Jahannam”, just as the Acholi will happily say “Lubang’a” to mean the Uncaused Cause.
No doubt the way you dismiss belief in (the efficacy of) good positive evidence due to the absence of good positive evidence in support of (the efficacy of) good positive evidence.
O, James. Do you believe in belief? Why does your belief in belief persist?
Also, I have given you a reason up there for why belief in ultimate punishment is rational (even unavoidable), so you have good, positive evidence for it. (Well, at least insofar as you have good, positive evidence for the existence of right and wrong. Many of your fellow atheists drop this baggage of believing in right and wrong, precisely because they cannot be reduced from their “superstitious” status, and that road ends up rendering “superstitious” things like Hell, so they drop the belief in right and wrong; do you?)
My friend, that’s a fallacy. So I believe that you are wearing a shirt right now, because I threw my Magic Dice and they told me. It may be an unreliable way to find out this, but I arrived at the truth. Just refute the statement, regardless of my motivation or method of having arrived at it. You are wearing a shirt, James.
This reminds me of anti-evolutionists who say “Ah, but those Darwinians only want this neo-Darwinian explanation because they are atheists and don’t want to concede that a Creator exists!” So what? Deal with the arguments, leave the genetic fallacies alone.
Then again, this kind of fallacy is more-common (indeed, quite staple) among atheists.
Add to this there being no good reason to think that there is a truth that can be arrived at by ape minds …
Do you believe that truth exists?
Also, there is a reason why the existence of a soul is a logical necessity for beings that have bodies and minds. But let that debate be for another day, in a more-appropriate place.
I also notice that you play off the Christian conception of Hell against others. And even the Christian belief in Hell against the (other) disbeliefs. Well, once again, just because I maintain another (indeed, the other) answer to 1+1 doesn’t mean that there is no correct answer.
And Christianity says something that reason (and, of course, faith) can lead you to recognising as the zenith of revelation: Love is the most-excellent way. A full defence of this won’t fit here; suffice it to say that there is a reason I have a blog. Hit the latest four posts on my side; they touch on these issues of revelation, natural revelation, and love, with a bit of Grace scattered all over. (Hey, you know you want to sin against the inexistent god and look at the forbidden literature, do you not? 😀 Kidding.)
This, then, is why Christianity is correct (among other lesser reasons), and the others, from the Baha’i (a derivative of Islam) to the Muslims (which has syncretic effects from Judeo-Christian scripture and tradition), are not the zenith (to which they may nonetheless point).
And, in closing, a very twisted reason for why Christianity makes more sense. God is perfect, and in Christianity He demands perfection. (If God weren’t perfect because He could stand imperfection – for example, if He didn’t think me utterly depraved due to my imperfection – He would not be God. God, to be God, because He is God, is perfect and doesn’t abide … blemishes.)
Now, He demands perfection, and gives perfect law, but we are imperfect. Ain’t no bitch like perfect justice for imperfect people.
And in this picture comes the divine coup. If the poor people can’t buy the food, let the rich buy it and feed them free. If the prisoner can’t communicate with home, let the visitors take the message. If the slave can’t buy himself (because slaves don’t earn), let a freeman buy him to freedom.
Grace is the only time a perfect God can make sense to an imperfect people; and God is perfect and makes sense to an imperfect people; therefore Grace is correct. Grace being Christianity, we see that Christianity is correct on the conception of God as perfect while imperfect people like me prowl the night streets seeking victims. 😀
April 13, 2010 at 1:06 am
James Onen
Thanks for the book-length sermon, Comrade! A few things:
1. When I expressed my feelings about hell I in no way intended it as an argument for why hell is not real. I am merely expressing a sentiment. You can take it or leave it. I find it morally bankrupt. My rejection of hell stems from the lack of evidence to persuade me of its existence, among other things.
2. You have not provided positive evidence for hell, only speculation. Indeed Christian philosophers have done a great job of conceptualising a ‘perfect’ entity and have labelled it ‘God’. The problem is, there’s not much reason to think it exists in reality outside of the imagination of those that have conceived it. To argue that this conceived ‘perfect’ being can only make sense to ‘imperfect’ people therefore ‘grace’…thus rings very hollow, however novel it might sound to a believer’s ears. Its just not compelling.
3. I do not accept the concept of sin. It is made-up. Many religions have many different views of sin and how it is to be understood/dealt with in the context of their respective paradigms. So while your theology is somehow interesting (in a poetic sense), I really feel no obligation to take it any more seriously than the others, which I also find interesting, incidentally (in an equally poetic sense).
4. Our justice system is based on Judeo-Chrisitian practice? LOL. It is a ridiculous assertion – as if Judaism and Christianity grew out of a cultural vacuum. Plus, the last I checked Jesus was not OK with divorce. Meanwhile, our justice system is absolutely OK with it. In some countries gays have a legal right to marry – was that based on Judeo-Christian practice? If so why do many fundamentalist clergymen refuse to preside over gay and lesbian weddings?
5. You say justice is a man-made myth? Try stealing a car and we’ll see if that’s what you’ll tell the cops. Meanwhile, I don’t expect to be struck by a cupids arrow, or to run into Medusa, any time soon. 🙂
6. You say those who reject Christianity do so because they ‘think they can pay the price themselves’? This is pure BS. How about ‘THEY JUST DON’T FIND IT BELIEVABLE’????
Working with your analogy, I mean, why would anyone need a lawyer if he didn’t even know he had committed a crime, or didn’t know he was being charged with anything (having received no court summons)? If a lawyer insisted I had broken some laws I would be keen to have him explain to me exactly what laws I had broken. This is therefore not even a matter of me wanting to pay the price, its a matter of me not knowing what the hell this person claiming to be my lawyer was even talking about.
Actually, its worse. I can’t even see this lawyer myself! It is Comrade telling me about this invisible lawyer, who wants to defend me in an invisible court over charges I don’t even know exist! Your analogy of the lawyer and the courtroom is therefore deeply flawed, in my view.
7. When I said “I also think in cases like this it would be worthwhile to consider other plausible explanations (besides the claim in question being true – which we reject) as to why a person may have arrived at that belief.” I wasn’t presenting it as an argument for there being no hell. I just said it would be ‘worthwhile to consider’ (i.e. for curiosity’s sake). While not an argument in and of itself (which I gladly concede, and did not present as such), for me it serves to undermine the idea of hell further. Therefore no fallacy committed. You need to slow down.
8. About souls, suffice to say that most professional philosophers don’t think souls exist, and that neuroscience seems to ever be drawing closer to an even better understanding how the mind works through natural processes alone. So at least on this issue, I know I’m not off the tangent when I express disbelief in the existence of souls.
In any case, its probably an issue neither you nor I could ever resolve in a blog debate (especially since none of us are neuroscientists), so.. I guess I’ll sit this one out and wait to see where the evidence leads, if you don’t mind. I don’t think it will be a question that philosophy will provide an answer to, in my opinion.
Cheers.
April 13, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Quitstorm
Am wondering why Comrade 27 feels so sad that a non believer is not heading to heaven if it exists. All religionists feel sorry for me not heading to heaven , not because they want me to be there but the truth is…..as many people prepare themselves for heaven,…they give money,property and other belongs to make the way smooth for themselves but who takes these resources?
Without care about how the giver lives after loosing the money and other belongings,the religious leader jumps up like a dog chanting inside her/his heart that “today i had a great day” believers donated warmly and now my kids will be in that nice school i always wanted them to attend”
So Comrade 27,since you care about me being in good life for a eternity,walk that extra mile and pay for my rent for a year,you will have created my eternity here on earth and i will die praising you instead of your invisible freind in the sky