= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gjm comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (429)
Looking at another translation:
(footnote: "Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.")
Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of "so that no one would kill him", but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning - something easily understood as "DO NOT KILL THIS MAN" - but I don't see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain's life.
There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, "if A then B". Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes "if 1=2 then B". Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: "If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold". Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned.
I don't see how it's possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds.
I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God's Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point.
I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am wrong.
Are you familiar with the trolley problem? In short, it raises the question of whether or not it is a morally justifiable action to kill one innocent bystander in order to save five innocent bystanders.
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?
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.]
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.
Yeah, that's a better example.
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. :)
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.
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.)