In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.

It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life - adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction.

Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.

Also, check out the "cryonics wives" effect. It looks as though some people are not happy about the resource-investment conflict between ice and offspring.

Prospective sleepers no-doubt have their own values. I am describing one reason why most people don't sign up for cryonics. It's partly because it makes little economic sense.

I should have clarified better. I usually don't meet people who make a big fuss about being aghostists and ridiculing ghostists and how irrational it is to be a ghostist and then enumerate all the pedophiles that are ghostists and how much money is stolen by ghostists and that ghostists fly planes into buildings and ghostists are the ones who are responsible for all kind of violence and human suffering and etc... etc... etc...

EDIT: Consider this slogan: "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings." It was suggested to be used at the Bus campaign. There is just so much wrong with this, well I hope I don't have to explain what and you can figure this out by yourself.

I was practically born into this culture, so I get worried about this on occasion.

Upvote for this. I get really annoyed by atheists that keep criticizing religious people without being aware of their own irrationality.

Speaking of thinking Christians makes me think of Fred Clark: some clue might be found in his interpretation of Genesis 6-9.

What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.

Many doctrines are collected here. Not all have the damned eternally waterboarded with boiling lead. For example, the Orthodox churches teach that hell is the response to the direct presence of God by the soul which has rejected Him. It is no more a punishment than the pain you feel if you cut a finger.

And then, whatever hell is, who goes there, and do they stay there for eternity? Doctrines differ on this as well -- the issue of works vs. faith, or the issue of those who have never encountered the Word and have not been in a position to accept or reject it.

How do they explain Biblical passages? By interpreting them (as they would say) correctly. Unless you look to extreme fringe groups who think that the King James Bible was a new revelation whose every letter is to be as meticulously preserved and revered as Moslems do the Koran, every Christian doctrine allows that the text needs interpretation. As well, the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not regard the Bible as the sole source of the Word, regarding the settled doctrine of the church as another source of divine revelation. There is also the Book of Nature, which God also wrote.

With multiple sources of divine revelation, but an axiomatic unity of that revelation, any conflicts must result from imperfect human understanding. Given the axiom, it is really not difficult to come up with resolutions of apparent conflicts. Confabulating stories in order to maintain an immovable idea is something the brain is very good at. Watch me confabulate a Bayesian justification of confabulation! Strong evidence can always defeat strong priors, and vice versa. So if the unity of God's Word is as unshakeable as 2+2=4, a mere difficult passage is less than a feather on the scales.

I say this not to teach Christian doctrines (I'm as atheist as anyone, and my Church of Scotland upbringing was as unzealous as it could possibly be and still be called a religion), but to point out that Christians do actually have answers to these questions. Ok, bad answers if you like, but if you want to argue against them you need to either tackle those answers, or find a weapon so awesome it blows the entire religious enterprise out of the water. (I'm sure there's a perfect LW link for the latter, but I can't at the moment recall where. This is rather diffuse.) Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man. It's an exercise in pouring scorn on Them. You know, those Others, over There.

As Nick Tarleton warned, upthread.

Indeed, but I wonder how they deal with passages like Revelation 14:11, Matthew 25:41, or Mark 9:43.

If you really want to know, you could try asking them. Or reading their books, if you don't know any. You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.

I have no book recommendations. My point is that flaunting Biblical quotations and going "nyah! nyah!" does not make a good argument, even if the conclusion is correct. Zombie-hunting requires better instruments than that.

IAWYC, but to nitpick, not all Christians believe in an eternity of torture for nonbelievers. Though of course the conclusion follows for any belief in a substantially better afterlife for believers.

(I feel like this is important to point out, to avoid demonizing an outgroup, but don't trust that feeling very much. What do others think?)

My first recommendation here is always Iain M Banks, Player of Games.

That is pretty ridiculous - enough to make me want to check the original study for effect size and statistical significance. Writing newspaper articles on research without giving the original paper title ought to be outlawed.

If the player has the SPADE:

• 1/3 of the time, he also has the HEART.
• 2/3 of the time he doesn't, and so must choose the SPADE.
• 1/6 of the time he chooses the SPADE though he did have the HEART.

So 5/6 of the time he chooses the SPADE, but only 1/6 of the time does he choose the SPADE while having the HEART.

Thus, the chance of him having the HEART when he has chosen the SPADE is 1/5.