Archeological evidence of spirituality goes back tens of thousands of years or maybe more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions#Prehistoric_evidence_of_religion

My reading of cognitive science suggests to me that spirituality is hard wired, but how that wiring manifests itself varies from person to person. As this discussion points out, listening to music is spiritual for some people. But, for millions of Christian Americans spirituality manifests as a deeply held belief that the bible is to be taken literally and, e.g., the Earth is less than about 10,000 years old.

I used to believe that it was a waste of time to logically argue against religion because "fact-based" logic and "spiritual-based" arguments are completely different things. One observer sees secular vs. religion debates as comparing Oranges to France: http://ivn.us/2014/02/06/creation-vs-evolution-debate-two/

But now, I'm not so sure. Assuming that American society is better off with less religion in the formal Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc., sense, there is a tangible upside to simply engaging in the debate. One person pointed out to me that unless the debate is engaged people are simply not hearing the other side. Cognitive science says that repeated exposure to the same thing tends to make it more familiar and that tends to make it more believable. It may be the case that religious people who defend religion in debates will never change their mind, but that says nothing about the minds of the people listening to the debate. A debate heard years before coupled with current circumstances can lead to a change of heart for some people. It is a fact that some religious people become atheists and some atheists sometimes become religious. Minds sometimes do change.

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.

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.

According to official Catholic doctrine:

Every man 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, can be saved.

In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.

a lot of those "other crimes" are thought crimes too

Oh yes. I wasn't saying "Christianity is much less horrible than you think", just disagreeing with one particular instance of alleged horribilitude.

Jesus was pretty clear about this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:

"Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him."

That wasn't a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we're given here is an if-then - if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the "if" is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain's irrational fear of the "if" part happening.

(I also can't help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)

I think it's "kill them and six members of their clan/family", but I'm not sure.

You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:

I'd always understood the Flood story as they weren't just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff.

Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from "continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren't even considering doing non-evil stuff" to "doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time".

In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5:

When the Lord saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time,

...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the "and").

You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God's Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, "Whoa, that doesn't seem right to me." At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions.

But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God's Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture.

And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on - things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.

Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, "Wow, Cain, you're right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I'd better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you." (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)

I read it as more along the lines of "No, nobody's going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down."

How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn't last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.

...fair enough. Doesn't mean they weren't doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.

(This comment is a reply to another branch of this discussion as well.)

Yes, God will be able to see that there is a you that survived the process and went on to live the life of Riley. But whether or not you will be able to see that is a very open question

I disagree. To keep things simple, let's suppose that the bullet, if it hits, really will kill the participant with practically 100% certainty and will do so practically immediately (I'll come to this a bit later). In that case the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty, is that the gun didn't fire. This is exactly what happens if you take the mortal's-eye-view; God, as you mentioned, will notice that elsewhere in the multiverse, the participant did get hit. Now, whether the participant cares about their loved ones or the copies that die in the attempt is a matter of preferences, but if we're simply talking about which outcome to experience, this is how it goes, I think.

Note that playing quantum roulette successfully depends crucially on the speed with which you can kill yourself. Trying to play by slitting your wrists, for example, doesn't work because once you see that your wrists are slit you can't roll that back. So the success of the enterprise depends entirely on killing yourself fast enough that you don't become aware of your imminent and (in the relevant branches of the multiverse) unavoidable death. How fast is fast enough? Well, that is (literally!) the sixty-four-million-dollar question. Unless you have an answer that you are very confident is the correct one, it seems to me like an imprudent risk to take.

With this I agree, which is why I think the quantum Russian roulette or quantum suicide scenarios are mostly interesting as a thought experiment, as they're intended to be. But there are practical situations that are somewhat analogous: think, for example, about a terminally ill patient who faces an almost certain death within several days. Should they expect to survive or continue to experience things, and if so, in what way? My understanding is that according to quantum mechanics, there are all kinds of weird scenarios with non-zero probability that make "survival" possible, such as simply surviving one more day indefinitely despite all odds, being miraculously cured, or maybe being resurrected by a hyper-advanced future civilization in a simulation. Note that, in principle, this probably applies to any possible life-and-death situation.

I used the word "experience" a number of times there, which brings me to a point you made in another comment:

Notice (!) that when you start to talk about "noticing" things you are tacitly bringing consciousness into the discussion, which is a whole 'nuther can o' philosophical worms.

I don't think this can of worms is that bad. We have a pretty good grasp of what it means to be conscious, even if we can't define it exactly; and also we're (at least I am) pretty confident that it's a purely physical phenomenon with nothing supernatural and thus subject to the laws of QM. I think that's enough. Where it does get a bit problematic is when we're talking about scenarios like the one with the terminally ill patient; presumably there's also a possibility that the patient's consciousness degrades until it no longer makes sense to call them conscious, since there's probably no clear line anywhere separating conscious and non-conscious in this way. (This might also imply that if we should expect to die, we should expect to do so by very slow decay, like patients with Alzheimer's, which doesn't sound too good to me.)

Yeah. I meant that I don't find the roulette scenario very relevant since I believe that we're much more likely to experience some other scenario where this property of the quantum multiverse becomes relevant, like the terminal illness one I described. Most of us won't play the roulette.

Anyways, there's a flaw in lisper's original argument: death is not unavoidable even after wrists have been slit.

I think what I said applies when you take a first-person point of view. If you're a participant in a quantum suicide experiment, then if you expect a collapse interpretation to be an accurate description of reality, you should expect to eventually be hit by a bullet and die. But both MWI and QIT predict that you will continuously notice that the gun doesn't fire. The difference is not in the point of view taken, it's in the fact that the parts of the wavefunction that contain a (from first-person eye-view) future version of the participant actually are there.