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Jiro comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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Ordinary English doesn't work like that. "If X, then Y will happen" includes possible worlds in which X is true.
"If you fall into the sun, you will die" expresses a meaningful idea even if nobody falls into the sun.
Exactly. "Did not" is not the same as "can not." Particularly since God's threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don't happen even though they can.
But we don't even need to look to God's forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
I think a lot of Christians would say that the eternal torment isn't for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes; what believing in Jesus would do is enable one to escape the sentence for those other crimes.
And a lot of Christians, mostly different ones, would say that the threat of eternal torment was a mistake that we've now outgrown, or was never intended to be taken literally, or is a misunderstanding of a threat of final destruction, or something of the kind.
Not for "other crimes", but specifically because of the original sin. The default outcome for humans is eternal torment, but Jesus offers an escape :-/
Some Christians would say that, some not. (Very very crudely, Catholics would somewhat agree, Protestants mostly wouldn't. The Eastern Orthodox usually line up more with the Catholics than with the Protestants, but I forget where they stand on this one.)
Many would say, e.g., that "original sin" bequeaths us all a sinful "nature" but it's the sinful thoughts and actions we perpetrate for which we are rightly and justly damned.
(But yes, most Christians would say that the default outcome for humans as we now are is damnation, whether or not they would cash that out in the traditional way as eternal torment.)
Wouldn't Protestants agree that without the help of Jesus (technically, grace) humans cannot help but yield to their sinful nature? The original sin is not something mere humans can overcome by themselves.
They probably would (the opposite position being Pelagianism, I suppose). But they'd still say our sins are our fault and we are fully responsible for them.
This sounds like making people feel guilty on purpose.
Saying "you are responsible for your own choices" is making people feel guilty on purpose?
(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that's the case, please stop.)
My remark was not about the "fully responsible" part, but about the "your fault" part.
Note that guilt has nothing to do with being responsible for your own choices. The feeling of guilt is counterproductive regardless of what you choose to do.
Telling people "this is your fault" is a pretty good way to ensure that they feel guilty.
Could be. (For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not endorsing any of this stuff: I think it's logically dodgy and morally odious.)
[EDITED to fix an autocorrect error. If you saw "I'm not encoding any of this stuff", that's why.]
I liked the version with "encoding" :) It makes sense in its own way, if you have some programming background :)
Fair enough, but a lot of those "other crimes" are thought crimes too, e.g. Exo20:17, Mat5:28.
Jesus was pretty clear about this. Mat13:42 (and in case you didn't get it the first time he repeats himself in verse 50), Mark16:16.
Oh yes. I wasn't saying "Christianity is much less horrible than you think", just disagreeing with one particular instance of alleged horribilitude.
Actually, by and large the things he says about hell seem to me to fit the "final destruction" interpretation better than the "eternal torture" interpretation. Matthew 13:42 and 50, e.g., refer to throwing things into a "blazing furnace"; I don't know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed. Mark 16:16 (1) probably wasn't in the original version of Mark's gospel and (2) just says "will be condemned" rather than specifying anything about what that entails; did you intend a different reference?
There are things Jesus is alleged to have said that sound more like eternal torture; e.g., Matthew 25:46. Surprise surprise, the Bible is not perfectly consistent with itself.
On hell:
It seems pretty obvious to me that descriptions of hell could easily be just metaphorical. There is a perpetual, persistent nature to sin—it's like a never-ending fire that brings suffering and destruction in way that perpetuates itself. Eternal fire is a great way to describe it if one were looking for a metaphor. It's this fire you need saving from. Enter Jesus.
Honestly, it's a wonder to me hell isn't treated as an obvious metaphor, but rather it is still a very real place for many mainstream Christians. I suppose it's because they must also treat the resurrection as literal, and that bit loses some of it's teeth if there is no real heaven/hell.
Yeah but Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
That's ingenious, but it really doesn't seem to me easy to reconcile with the actual Hell-talk in the NT. E.g., Jesus tells his listeners on one occasion: don't fear men who can throw your body into prison; rather fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. And that passage in Matthew 25, which should scare the shit out of every Christian, talks about "eternal punishment" and is in any case clearly meant to be happening post mortem, or at least post resurrectionem. And that stuff in Revelation about a lake of burning sulphur, which again seems clearly to be for destruction and/or punishment. And so on.
If all we had to go on was the fact that Christianity has a tradition involving sin and eternal torment, I might agree with you. But what we have is more specific and doesn't seem to me like it fits your theory very well.
Yes, I think that's at least part of it. (There's something in C S Lewis -- I think near the end of The problem of pain -- where he says (or maybe quotes someone else as saying) that he's never encountered anyone with a really lively hope of heaven who didn't also have a serious fear of hell.)
I don't think "sometimes an omnipotent superbeing can stop you being consumed when you're thrown into a furnace" is much of an argument against "furnaces are generally better metaphors for destruction than for long-lasting punishment" :-).
Hm. Not worth getting into a line-by-line breakdown, but I'd argue anything said about hell in the Gospels (or the NT) could be read purely metaphorically without much strain.
A couple of the examples you've mentioned:
Seems to me he could just be saying something like: "They can take our lives and destroy our flesh, but we must not betray the Spirit of the movement; the Truth of God's kingdom."
This is a pretty common sentiment among revolutionaries.
I think it's a fairly common view that the author of Revelation was writing about recent events in Jerusalem (Roman/Jewish wars) using apocalyptic, highly figurative language. I'm no expert, but this is my understanding.
The Greek for hell used often in the NT is "gehenna" and (from my recall) refers to a garbage dump that was kept outside the walls of the city. Jesus might have been using this as a literal direct comparison to the hell that awaited sinners... but it seems more likely to me he just meant it as symbolic.
Anyway, tough to know what original authors/speakers believed. It is admittedly my pet theory that a lot of western religion is the erection of concrete literal dogmas from what was only intended as metaphors, teaching fables, etc. Low probability I'm right.
This was just a joke funny to only former fundamentalists like me. :)
Yes, but more precisely I think he was writing about recent events and prophesying doom to the Bad Guys in that narrative. I'm pretty sure that lake of burning sulphur was intended as part of the latter, not the former.
Yes, that's one reason why I favour "final destruction" over "eternal torture" as a description of what he was warning of. In an age before non-biodegradable plastics, if you threw something into the town dump, with its fire and its worms, you weren't expecting it to last for ever.
It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure how plausible I find it.
For the avoidance of doubt, I did understand that it was a joke. (Former moderate evangelical here. I managed to avoid outright fundamentalism.)
The Biblical text as a whole seems very inconsistent to me if you are looking to choose either annihilationism or eternal conscious torment. The OT seems to treat death as final; then you have the rich man and Lazarus and "lake of fire" talk on the other side of the spectrum.
It is my sense that the Bible is actually very inconsistent on the issue because it is an amalgamation of lots of different, sometimes contradictory, views and ideas about the afterlife. You can find a common thread if you'd like...but you have to glaze over lots of inconsistencies.
I think there's a joke to the effect that if you're bad in life then when you die God will send you to New Jersey, and I don't know anything about translations of earlier versions of the bible but I kind of hope that it's possible for us to interpret the Gehenna comparison as parallel to that.
If someone told me that when I die God would send me to New Jersey, I'd understand that he was joking and being symbolic. But I would not reason "well, people in New Jersey die, so obviously he is trying to tell me that people in Hell get destroyed after a while".
Yeah, that's a better example.
I wasn't speaking about "did not". I was speaking about "will not", which is distinct from "can not" and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future - unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being.
According to official Catholic doctrine:
In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.
Jesus very plainly disagreed:
"Mark16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned."
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you're ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren't ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
In fact, it doesn't just apply to knowing Christianity's existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. "Can be saved", not "will be saved"--it's entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
It could be that (1) if you are ignorant of Christianity you can escape damnation by living a good life, but (2) living a good enough life is really hard, especially if you don't know it's necessary to escape damnation, and that (3) for that reason, those who are aware of Christianity have better prospects than those who aren't.
(Given that the fraction of people aware of Christianity who accept it isn't terribly high, that would require God to be pretty nasty, but so does the whole idea of damnation as commonly understood among Christians. And it probably sounded better back when the great majority of people who knew of Christianity were Christians at least in name.)
I don't think that you are, in a practical sense, disagreeing with me or lisper, even if on some abstract level Christianity lets some nonbeliever be saved.
The only thing I'm disagreeing with you about here is the following claim: that from "nonbelievers can be saved" or even "nonbelievers can be saved, and a substantial number will be" you can infer "proselytizing is bad for the people it's aimed at because it makes them more likely to be damned".
"The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight." -- Terry Pratchett, Eric
I disagree. Most people are ignorant of Christianity.
I don't mean that most people haven't heard of it. Most people have. A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false; or have merely heard of it but no more; or, worse yet, have only heard of some splinter Protestant groups and assumed that all Christians agree with them.
It is quite possible that a large number of people, hearing of the famous Creationism/Evolution debate, believe that Christianity and Science are irreconcilable and thus, in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right. This, to my understanding, fits perfectly in to being a person who "is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it".
I don't see how that follows. Seeking the truth and doing God's will in accordance with your best understanding thereof seems to be what everyone should be doing. What "more" do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
That is true. If God were malevolent, opposed to saving people, then He could use those loopholes.
I don't think that God is malevolent.
They didn't get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense--all the things all those other Christians say, they aren't true Christianity.
If that counts as being ignorant, the same problem arises: It's better to be ignorant than knowledgeable.
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don't understand Christianity as requiring X, you don't have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I'm sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It's not as if examples are particularly scarce.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like "maybe he will save them but maybe he won't so becoming more Christian is a safer bet", Christians wouldn't proselytize.
In some cases they got them only very indirectly from Christians. And in some cases they got them from the loudest Christians; it would be no-true-Scotsman-y to say that those people aren't Christians, but it's perfectly in order to say "those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them".
It sounds as if you're assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you're supposed to do. But it could go the other way too: perhaps initially your "best understanding" tells you you have to do Y, but when you learn more you decide you don't. In that case, a rule that you're saved iff you act according to your best understanding would say that initially you have to do Y but later on you don't.
(E.g., some versions of Christianity say that actually there's very little you have to do. You have to believe some particular things, and hold some particular attitudes, and if you do those then you're saved. Whether you murder people, give money to charities, help your landlady take out the garbage, etc., may be evidence that you do or don't hold those attitudes, but isn't directly required for anything. In that case, converting someone to Christianity -- meaning getting them to hold those beliefs and attitudes -- definitely makes their salvation more likely.)
I bet he can. But that's not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
I do largely agree with this, with the qualification that it depends which Christians. I think some do genuinely have beliefs about God which, if true, would mean that he's benevolent. (I think this requires them to be not terribly orthodox.)
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren't Christian ideas at all and that people who think that that's what Christianity is like are mistaken, not just choosing a smaller group of Christians over a larger one.
It isn't "you do the exact set of things described by your mistaken understanding of Christianity, and you are saved". It's "imperfect understanding is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement". Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it. In other words, if you falsely think that Christianity requires being a vegetarian, and you fail to be a vegetarian (thus violating your mistaken understanding of it, but not actually violating true Christianity), you can still be saved.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It's not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
There are plenty of punishments short of eternal damnation that an omnipotent being can hand out.
From here:
I realise that it's totally unclear to me exactly which ideas we're talking about right now. CCC's original comment mentioned things widely believed about Christianity that are just false, and things that are taught by "splinter Protestant groups" but not widely accepted by Christians. I don't know what he'd put in each category.
Well, that's exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I'm afraid I haven't grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said; it looks like you're just reiterating your position.
(I think it's likely that some Christians do hold opinions that, when followed through, have the consequence that teaching someone about Christianity makes them less likely to be saved. I am saying only that I see no reason why Christians holding that some non-Christians will escape damnation by living a good life according to what understanding they have are in no sense required to hold opinions with that consequence.)
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false. And for many Protestant flavours of Christianity, it's saved from being false only by that last parenthesis: there are things you should do but that do not have a penalty. (So why do them? Because you believe God says you should and you want to do what he says. Because you want to. Because you think doing them makes it less likely that you will eventually do something that is bad enough to lose your salvation. Because you believe God says you should and has your best interests at heart, so that in the long run it will be good for you even if it's difficult now. Etc.)
I'm not stating a position, I'm observing someone else's position. "God may save someone who misunderstands Christianity", when stated by Christians, seems to mean that God won't punish someone for not following a rule that he doesn't know about. It doesn't mean that God will punish someone for not following a rule that he thinks is real but isn't.
I've never heard a Christian say anything like "if you think God requires you to stand on your head, and you don't stand on your head, God will send you to Hell".
I stand corrected for Catholicism, but the substance of my criticism remains. Just replace "Hell" with "Hell or Purgatory".
You make an excellent point. There are a number of things being proposed by groups that call themselves Christian, often in the honest belief that they are right to propose such things (and to do so enthusiastically), which I nonetheless find myself in firm disagreement with. (For example, creationism).
To avoid the fallacy, then, and to deal with such contradictions, I shall define more narrowly what I consider "true Christianity", and I shall define it as Roman Catholicism (or something sufficiently close to it).
One example of X that I can think of, off the top of my head, is "going to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation".
It is true that one who does want to be a good Christian will need to go to Church, while one who is ignorant will also be ignorant of that requirement. Hmmmm. So you have a clear point, there.
I think that one reasonable analogy is that it's a bit like writing an exam at university. Sure, you can self-study and still ace the test, but your odds are a lot better if you attend the lectures. And trying to invite others to attend the lectures improves their odds of passing, as well.