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lisper comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
For sure the Bible as a whole is far from consistent about this stuff. Even the NT specifically doesn't speak with one voice. My only claim is that the answer to the question "what is intended by the teachings about hell ascribed to Jesus in the NT?" is nearer to "final destruction" than to "eternal torture". I agree that the "rich man & Lazarus" story leans the other way but that one seems particularly clearly not intended to have its incidental details treated as doctrine.
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".
Nope, because dying is not a particularly distinctive feature of life in New Jersey; it happens everywhere in much the same way. So being sent to New Jersey wouldn't make any sense as a symbol for being destroyed. What if someone told you that God will send you to the electric chair when you die?
If someone said that, I would assume he is trying to tell me that God will punish me in a severe and irreversible manner after I die.
It's true that actual pits of flame kill people rather than torture them forever, but going from that to Hell being temporary is a case of some parts of the metaphor fighting others. He used a pit of flame as an example rather than dying in your sleep because he wanted to emphasize the severity of the punishment. If the metaphor was also meant to imply that Hell is temporary like a fire pit, the metaphor would be deemphasizing the severity of the punishment. A metaphor would not stand for two such opposed things unless the person making it is very confused.
Yeah, that's a better example.