An article in the October 10 New York Times, “Tormented in the afterlife, but not forever,” shows us how theology “progresses.” After thinking about the issue for a few millennia, some theologians have decided, based on rumination and judicious Biblical exegesis, that Hell might not consist of eternal immolation after all. Maybe you just fry for a while and are then extinguished:
[Minister and Christian publisher Edward] Fudge’s inquiry into the nature of damnation resulted in his seminal 1982 book, “The Fire That Consumes,” in which he argued that the suffering of the wicked in hell is finite, that after a time their souls are extinguished. This view, called “conditional immortality” or sometimes the more macabre “annihilationism,” is in direct opposition to the traditional Christian view that suffering in hell lasts forever.
Conditional immortality is not new — it has been proposed by Christian thinkers almost from the beginning — but it is having a moment in the (gentle, non-fiery) sun. Several new scholarly volumes about conditional immortality have been, or are about to be, published. In July, leading proponents of the theory gathered in Houston for Rethinking Hell, a conference in honor of Mr. Fudge. The group that produced the conference maintains a website, rethinkinghell.com, dedicated to its theology.
And in 2012, Mr. Fudge achieved the ultimate mark of American celebrity, the biopic. “Hell and Mr. Fudge” can be streamed in its entirety on the web, allowing one to see Mr. Fudge — played by Mackenzie Astin, best known for his childhood role on the 1980s TV series “The Facts of Life” — first as a boy, then in his college days, courting his wife, and, as an adult, doing the research that led him to renounce the traditional view of hell.
Click on the screenshot below to see the hilarious trailer for “Hell and Mr. Fudge” (you’ll have to pay to see the whole thing):
What is obvious from this trailer, and the paragraph below, is that theological “progress”, at least in this case, came simply from pondering how unjust it seems for a loving God to torment someone forever for, say, homosexuality. And indeed it would be, so advocates of this Hell Lite simply decided that Hell wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. And, of course, they could find Biblical support for their revised theology:
Advocates of conditional immortality say that their view reflects a common-sense reading of the Bible. They point to passages like Romans 6, where Paul says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The “eternal life” of the saved is contrasted with the ultimate “death” of the unsaved. And in the Book of Revelation, Jesus refers to a “second death,” which these theologians say means the dying-again of the resurrected wicked. Their final, irreversible punishment may involve torment, but it will come to an end.
There is no limit to how these people’s ability to hang their “truths” on the thinnest string of words in scripture. And then, like good theologians, they pretend their view of Hell was actually the traditional one all along!:
“I don’t think the traditional view became popular among Christians until the late second and early third centuries,” said Christopher M. Date, a software engineer and independent theologian who helped organize the recent conference. He believes that conditionalism was the rule for early thinkers like the second-century bishop Irenaeus, who wrote that God “imparts continuance for ever and ever on those who are saved,” while denying that same continuance to the unsaved.
And it really take theologians two millennia to realize this:
If you stop and think about it, some conditionalists say, theirs is a compassionate theology. Which is the kinder God, they ask, one who lets sinners suffer forever, or one who gives them, say, a few decades of hellfire, then administers “capital punishment” (to use Mr. Date’s matter-of-fact term)?
Well, the most compassionate God is one who doesn’t let anybody burn in hell (imagine being licked for flames for only a few minutes, much less a few decades) and then wipes them out forever. Is that compassionate? No forgiveness, no chance for rehabilitation, just some fire and then extinction?
Any hell that includes fire is incompatible with a compassionate god. And could these “compassionate” theologians tell us exactly how long God lets the miscreants suffer before he snuffs out their souls?
The article continues by saying that many “compassionate” Christians aren’t buying this: for them, hell is, as always, forever. As the piece notes, “Many Christian churches and organizations have statements of faith, which members must sign, attesting to a belief in eternal torture for the unsaved.” Yep, that’s the way to settle issues. If science were done like this, we’d all sign statements saying that everything in the Origin of Species was literally true.
What a contrast with science, where such disputes are settled either with evidence or, if evidence is lacking, a statement that “we don’t know the answer.” Christians, however, settle the issue based on whatever seems most congenial to them, or what comports with the kind of God they imagine. In other words, theology advances by “wish thinking”: in this case, the realization that maybe a good God wouldn’t sent people to hell forever. But maybe he would. For centuries theologians have thought that, and you can support the “eternal hell” view with scripture, too.
But maybe before they start arguing about how long Hell lasts, they should look for evidence that there’s a hell in the first place. You’ll find such evidence only in the Bible, for no scorched sinners have returned to tell us of their travails. And then these revisionists might contemplate if a “good” God would even practice “conditional immortality.”
It is issues like this that makes me realize the total intellectual vacuity of theology, as well as how strongly it contrasts with science in the way it settles issues about reality.
h/t: Barry
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I asked a Catholic friend how it was fair that Hitler is in heaven because he was a Catholic while I would burn for eternity because I am an atheist.
She told me that no one knows if Hitler is in heaven because that is up to God and that I’d have a chance to accept Jesus when he came to me upon death. When I pressed her further, she said that hell could just be in your mind since no one knows what happens after you die. I told her that it is suffering regardless as the mind makes our reality to which she had no explanation.
I told her that her views are closer to liberal Christians so why did she stay Catholic and her answer was just that Catholic Churches were the most prolific around the world so she’d always have one to go to.
Even though I see it all the time, I’m still startled when someone reveals – again – that they basically just believe what they want to believe. Evidence plays no role whatsoever.
I’ve said this to pseudo science believing friends. I refute their claims with evidence, then end it with “people will believe what they want to believe” because I know they will ignore my evidence in favour of whatever foolish belief they prefer.
This imo is related to the invention of Purgatory in the Middle Ages – a place where people burned until they had suffered sufficiently related to the sins they’d committed, then move onto heaven. It was a great money spinner. The wealthy could buy prayers, pardons and indulgences to lessen their time in purgatory. They also built chantry chapels and even whole churches to this end. Purgatory was used to justify the lengthy punishments meted out for sin too – a year of suffering on earth reduced one’s suffering in purgatory by a day. The whole medieval pilgrimage industry was also built around reducing time in purgatory.
“The wealthy could buy prayers, pardons and indulgences to lessen their time in purgatory.”
And they can again. Pope Benedict brought back indulgences, one of the most corrupt practices of the Medieval Holy Roman Catholic Church.
And, in the yakamatsu department, his radically hip successor is offering Twitter indulgences.
Seriously.
We need some sort of retronym for that one, but nothing springs to mind….
b&
“UPDATE: A previous version of this story said Pope Francis will pardon sins via Twitter, but plenary indulgences grant pardon from punishment due to sins which have already been absolved. We regret the error.”
The last sentence says it all…
On last night’s Daily Show there was a segment on exorcism. It was hilarious (and exasperating, and a little scary). One of the featured “exorcisers,” a rough looking Catholic priest, specialized in exorcisms via Skype.
Could not make up better shit than that. At the end, after a demonstration, he revealed that the church “suggested a donation of $269” for his Skype exorcisms.
And there was, of course, another more traditional “exorciser” who said exorcisms via Skype were bullshit. This one had also “seen a youtube” of Beyoncé in which he saw clear signs of demonic possesion and was able to determine from her finger movements and other cues that she had made a deal with a demon in order to achieve her successful career.
This Daily Show segment should be required viewing for everyone. It should be aired on all the major networks five times a day.
My own pseudoscience believing friends refute my evidence with “truth is what we believe it to be.” That’s because they bolster up pseudoscience with New Thought/New Age assumptions regarding the magical power of preference. If you believe something nice because this is what you prefer, then you discovered absolute truth by letting your heart guide you straight. Skepticism and reason lead people astray. Reality is ultimately satisfying.
Lest anyone assume this is something relatively new and marginal, keep in mind that most traditional religions consider God to be a “still small voice inside of you.”
so, if I ask your friends to hold a bar of white hot iron, this ““truth is what we believe it to be.” applies? 🙂
Then there’s that wonderful term, “resonate”: if something “resonates” with me (which I assume to means feels good), then it must be true; the more it resonates, the truer it must be!
or it could be “resonate”: that which seems to confirm what I want to pretend is true.
When I hear the “R” word, I worry that the person using it is going to shatter like a wine glass in front of a loudspeaker playing Ella Fitzgerald’s voice on Memorex.
“Pain is to the mind as light is to the eye.”
(Can’t remember who or what from, a cheesey movie, TV show or book from decades ago I think. Maybe Kung Fu?)
and having bone deep burns is?
Extremely bright?
“The Future’s so bright I gotta wear shades.”
(Timbuk 3)
Very well put, Sastra, I hear the same thing from members of my family who are religious and pseudoscientific. This same wishful thinking–“I want it to be true, so it is true”–is at the heart of so-called “ontological proofs of God” as taken apart beautifully by J.L. Mackie in “The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against The Existence of God.” Seemingly powerful arguments for the existence of “God” boil down to wishful thinking. Theologians want something (the existence of God) to be true so badly that they really think just saying it is true is enough to make it true! They leap from “it is possibly true” to “it is actually true” so quickly and glibly that it makes you wonder if it is just a con job, a trick. But they are very likely fooling themselves too.
In the case of modern day apologists like Plantinga, he’s good enough with modal logic to know that using the system he does is contentious, to say the least. He also knows his audience (generally) doesn’t know any systems of modal logic at all. So he’s *dishonest*. Likely he thinks it is all ok, because it is all for the greater glory etc., but …
Sure it does. It plays a back-up role.
Evidence also get to be considered the “spark’ that sets off the true process of discovery. The right evidence, that is. Meaning theirs, not yours. What they had would have been enough for you, too – should have been — if you hadn’t gotten so over-particular out of spite.
From the very outset they have been taught to discount evidence – that believing is not conditional on it – so we should hardly be surprised when they go on doing so.
Perhaps we should enquire more into the people who have broken away from this mindset, and find out what kinds of failure of belief to square with facts convinces them that evidence is a sounder basis for belief than “faith” or “the Church’s Magisterium”?
sub
I hope you were joking when you said that – I’d got my sock off and was reaching for my “reality exists outside of your mind” rock before I noticed that it’s Canada’s toilet-roll re-arranger writing.
Whilst, of course, reality exists outside the mind, it’s also fair to note that perception of reality only exists within the mind, and thus the mind is its own self-contained virtual universe — albeit one that receives frequent input from the outside world. But if you control the perception of reality, for the mind, that illusion might as well be reality for all it’s even theoretically capable of distinguishing.
I’ll hold the toilet paper thing against Diana, but I think I can forgive her this one….
b&
Yes, I had to let her go with the idea that they mind persists after death since Catholics are horribly dualistic. I instead went with the pain that our mind makes real is pain nevertheless (since that is easier to grasp, even for a dualist) with the hope that I’ve planted a seed. I’m in this conversion for the long haul.
If the long haul…there’re some subtle-yet-deadly delayed-action logic bombs you might want to try. Like, what’s the cellphone coverage like in Heaven these days?
b&
Granted, but …
Oh, my toes are feeling a non-metaphorical breeze again …
Rock tends towards sock, in a very non-metaphorical way.
I’ve spent too much time talking to (kilovolt, DC) electricians ; I have a rather un-metaphorical understanding of the word “grounded”.
Can I haz “sophisticated theologian” wit mai cheeze burger? Dessert order of “new age fruitloopery”.
What I mean is, if I could use some fancy SF electromagnetic induction techniques to fire the neurons in your brain in the same pattern as they would if I were the one wielding the rock sock, I wouldn’t need an actual rock sock. Same deal if I made an even more fanciful computer simulation of you; the “you” in the computer wouldn’t even be aware it wasn’t you, and could be even more thoroughly controlled.
So, external reality is very much the real reality…but you never actually get to experience it; you only ever experience the simulacrum of reality that exists only within your mind.
If you could uncouple your mind’s model of reality from the rest of reality, the sophisticated fruitloops would have a more practically useful model — but, of course, for all praxiological porpoises, such uncoupling inevitably leads to close encounters with rock socks in one form or another.
b&
Yeah, I thought you were going down that line. But it does get close to “reality isn’t” territory. When you’re out in the trenches on the Creationist Containment Front, that’s like walking around with your hand grenade in one hand and the pin in your pocket.
I’m getting to like my rock-in-a-sock ; it’s a comforting presence.
Yes, but you can pull the pin on this grenade, calmly hand it to the Cretinist, and walk to safety before it assplodes.
You see, first of all, you have no way of eliminating the possibility that you yourself are a brain in a vat, or that your tinfoil hat has slipped and aliens are controlling your thoughts with their mind rays, or that you’re a subroutine in the matrix, or any of an infinite number of other such conspiracy theories, including, yes, the ever-popular theological one that you’re a thought in the mind of Jesus.
But, here’s the thing. Let’s grant the last one for the sake of argument.
Jesus himself, even though he’s imagining you into existence, himself has no way of ruling out whether or not he’s a brain in a (really big) vat, or his ectoplasmic cap has slipped and hyperintelligent shades of the color blue are controlling his thoughts, or that he’s a minor character in Alice’s Red King’s Dream, and so on.
The way sane people deal with this is to not hold to ideas merely because they can’t be disproven. Rather, it’s to discard ideas until there’s compelling reason to hold to them. All those conspiracy theories, after all, are equally possible, equally un-disprovable, and equally poorly evidenced; even if you’re going to pick one of them, you have no means to differentiate the one you pick from the ones you leave on the table. Much easier to just leave them all on the table.
Or, “Some of us just go one god further….”
b&
Yeah. But I still need to go to the bank and do my daily swim. L8R
Must be nice!
b&
I always watch with some amusement the halting steps toward the 21st century in religion followed by the inevitable resulting paroxysm toward fundamentalism and “ptooey a pox on your house” from the frightened.
…when will people learn to stop lying to one another….
When options for ‘make-believe’ are no longer for sale…which is never.
When they stop receiving rewards for doing so. (Such as people following them, buying their books, giving them attention, fawning, etc.)
Lying evolved because it allows certain individuals to gain an advantage.
Yes. And telling lies is very easy, while exposing a lie is much more involved. A large percentage of people don’t have the attention span.
And, in addition to that, a large percentage of people also want to believe the lie for reasons that have nothing to do with valuing the truth.
“Any hell that includes fire is incompatible with a compassionate god.”
It’s incompatible with a rational god. What purpose could a hell serve? Particularly if a soul is tortured then extinguished. What a waste of time for everyone.
Indeed.
Why not simply extinguish the soul of the sinner immediately upon death? The only reason would be petty vindictiveness: “No, no, god needs to get his torture on at least a little bit. For cosmic balance or something”.
Even we mortals (well, some of us) recognize that pure retribution is not the foundation on which you want to build your justice system.
But if God were to extinguish naughty souls immediately upon death, how could the good souls experience the pleasure of watching the naughty souls get their comemuppance? Atheists are so unSophisticated™.
…or even their comeuppance, for that matter…
Is that other one what naughty Muppets get?
Are you sure it isn’t commentuppence?
It’s true. I just never invested time in cultivating a refined enough palate to be able to appreciate the finer things: caviar, old liquor, the agony of the damned, etc.
I’ve always found this one of the more revolting aspects of hell. How can any person, let alone one supposedly good enough to make it to heaven, enjoy their eternity knowing there are billions being constantly tortured?
Me, too.
I think it goes to show a couple of things:
1) How shallow theistic thinking is. They don’t follow their own propositions to their logical conclusions; or/and
2) How self-centered theistic thinking is. They’re too focused on their own reward to worry about the plights of others.
There’s a lot of that sort of thinking. You live a moral existence, die by blowing yourself and other people to smithereens, and your reward? Seventy-two virgins, of course. If screwing seventy-two virgins is OK in heaven, why isn’t it OK on earth?
I’ve never understood the appeal of virgins.
Bronze / Iron Age values. Ownership as opposed to partnership (used means you are lacking in means, status), and virgin means you are more likely to get more offspring out or her before she dies prematurely.
I’m with you, Mr. Esres. A couple of virgins into that run of 72 and I’d be begging for a weekend pass to Vegas to go visit a pro.
There is a fundamental logistical problem with those 72 virgins. (Aside from the fact that once they’ve done the naughty they’re not virgins any more). So (and leaving aside Greg and Ken’s very valid view that experienced women are much more fun) – does one get to make hay with each virgin once only? If so, one would run out of them in six months, tops, and then what does one do for the rest of eternity?
Or is one required to satisfy all 72 of them forever more – which is an even more alarming prospect?
I’m just taking it literally, is all. And taken literally it’s self-evidently absurd. Does that mean that the idiots who claim to believe this stuff have never really thought about it?
It’s even worse.
We are told that it is the righteous, compassionate, courageous, selfless, loving, and generous who populate Heaven. So why wouldn’t their own hearts be moved at the sight of so much suffering, so often of their own family and friends? Will none of them sacrifice their own salvation in an attempt, even if vain, to rescue the damned?
And would not such an attempt clearly demonstrate the moral superiority of those in Heaven to the one who sorted the sheep from the goats in the first place?
That Christians are nearly uniformly far better people than their gods is, I think, the only saving grace of the religion and the only reason why our own civilization isn’t ripping itself to shreds. But we’ll all sleep better, I think, when this whole childish nonsense is finally left behind.
b&
Very well said.
“See you in hell!!
…
From heaven.”
– Reverend Lovejoy.
(Fictional, but it does seem to be how people behave.)
Yep, the whole concept of Hell is incoherent. The only one worse is Heaven.
I worry about the souls of all those fertilized eggs a woman may have flushed out with her menses between menarche and menopause, without ever knowing she was in a family way. Won’t those kids (maybe dozens of ’em) want to get to know Mom in the hereafter?
Worse, what about a rapist who gets his victim pregnant, but embraces the one true religion before he croaks, then decides he wants to reconcile with “the family” on the other side?
The holiday seating charts inside of the Pearly Gates must be more complicated than a Gabor Sisters’ wedding.
(Christ, I’m ancient; even my punch lines — Gabor Sisters? Ella Fitzgerald? freakin’ Memorex? — are decades old.)
I call your “rational god” and raise you a Sithrak.
‘But maybe before they start arguing about how long Hell lasts, they should look for evidence that there’s a hell in the first place.”
I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
I wonder if these theologians could come up with a tariff listing how long a dead person gets in hell before they’re properly extinguished? I don’t see why not.
e.g.
Mild cussing = 1 earth day
Petty thieving = one earth month (but not February)
Insurance fraud = 1 earth year
That sort of thing.
The Holy Spirit is a rapist!!
Okay, I’ve just committed the one unforgivable sin in christianity, blaspheming against the holy ghost dude. It’s worse than anything Hitler did, so I have to fry forever, I suppose.
As I’ve heard it, it’s not enough to merely say nasty things about the Holy Spirit; rather, you have to somehow conflate the Holy Spirit and Satan — attributing the misdeeds of the one with the other.
So, for example, remember that whole scene with Jesus driving the pigs off a cliff? The Gospels say it was the power of the Holy Spirit that let him do that, but that’s clearly bullshit. What demons would even notice a limp dick ghost like the Holy Spirit, let alone obey its orders? Clearly, Satan stepped in and took possession of Jesus for that routine, and it was the power of Satan that compelled the demons, not the “power” of the Holy Spirit. No other interpretation even makes logical sense.
I think that should take care of it, but that whole demonology thing can get confusing. Anybody has a better idea, I’m all ears. Eyes. Whatever….
Cheers,
b&
You’ve done it now, Ben!
I’ll bet you think you’re all accustomed to heat, living in the desert and all, but I have it on good authority that Hell is also very…HUMID! (Insert dramatic chipmunk music here.)
Just like South Florida right now?
You mean, like a sauna? I like saunas!
b&
The Holy Spirit/Ghost was tougher than you let on. After all, he kept hardening Pharaoh’s heart every time Ramses figured out that he should let those troublesome people go. If HS hadn’t, there would have been fewer theatrics in Exodus. The first born would have survived as well as all his charioteers for example. But I guess passover is more impressive than the feast of better judgement or wimping out.
then I can say that it was the good ol’ HS that made Judas do what he did since JC needed to be betrayed, even though Satan supposedly did it, per the storybook?
Could well be. There is, after all, that obsession that the Christian gods have with guts and gory, and we all know how Judas met his end, right?
b&
I either don’t recall that from my childhood spent in the Baptist and Church of Christ churches or no one ever pointed it out. Thank you for the enlightenment. So, was it suicide or a slip of the sandal? Or did the Holy Ghostly give him a push?
With the gods, who can say? They have the knowledge of whether or not their will be effected without their intervention, and the power to intervene without detection when they deem it necessary. Whether pushed or not, it clearly pleased the Holy Spirit for Judas to spill his guts like that.
Come to think of it…that’s probably the real unforgivable sin: invoking Epicurus….
b&
And this should be a *good* thing. Christians should revere Judas as a saint, since he did something awful and necessary for the story.
(Cf. MASH: “Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler”)
Yes. Also the Jews who called for Christ’s crucifixion, who were reviled in the Middle Ages as “Christ Killers”; surely they should have been lauded for furthering God’s plan?
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Catholics were taught this as late as my dad’s generation as well and it resulted in anti-Semitic attitudes among people who never even met a Jew in their lives.
My grandmother, who emigrated to the United States from Poland in the 1910s, held many of these views. I remember her making comments all the time such as, “She was really pretty for a Jewish girl.” Of course, for half her life they still said the perfidious Jew prayer in church, so the fact that she was a devout Catholic and held these types of views shouldn’t come as a surprise.
b&
I could never see why the Jews (or Judas) were blamed for doing what G*d wanted them to do. It’s not like they had a choice.
What did generate a certain amount of anti-semitism in teenage me was a reaction to having to learn all this rubbish about a lot of foreigners. Like, it’s *their* story, not ours, and a right gang of thugs they were, why should we waste our time on it? I’d much rather hear about King Arthur…
Besides which, since it came from the Bible, I didn’t believe any of it anyway…
yes, indeed. it always confused me when people vilified Judas for doing *exactly* what this god wanted.
I thought the sin was to “deny” the Holy Spirit, which I interpret as saying that it doesn’t exist. Which means we’re all screwed, because as atheists none of us think the Holy Spirit is a thing. I figure the reason for this is that the early apostles (before the gospels were written) all claimed their knowledge of God and Jesus by the grace of the Holy Spirit, (hallucination) without which they were all totally washed up. Hence the prohibition on denying said Spirit. “Commit any sin you like, but don’t you dare suggest we’ve not be visited by the Holy Spirit!”.
You might have something there. It’s the sort of question that somebody like Richard Carrier would be well suited to answer….
b&
One of them impregnated a teenage virgin, by proxy. The other one’s Satan.
Amongst civilized peoples, child rapists normally aren’t hailed as the utmost examples of virtue and morality. Except, of course, amongst Jews (Moses), Christians (Holy Spirit), and Muslims (Muhammad)….
b&
Don’t forget priests…
You know exactly what was said every time Hitler hung a picture on the wall, or spilled his brush cleaner on his just-completed painting?
Not a bad idea, but it would be much better for the theologians employers if the churches could levy the tariff – you know, cash, either before the sinner shuffles off this mortal coil – or from sinner’s estate. I’m sure God will take this into account when deciding when end the torture.
Such lists did exist in the Middle Ages – books of sins and their proscribed punishments. Several still exist and they make fascinating reading.
That was the major element of the “plot” of Dante’s Inferno. He traveled through Hell describing the tortures assigned to every one who disagreed with him. I have no idea why it is considered a great book, it reads like revenge pR0N.
Maybe you’ve just identified the genre preferences of literary types … 😲
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If you actually read Dante, Ant, you would discover that he also put people he liked and respected in life in Hell. There are anyway many literary types other than Dante.
The comment wasn’t about Dante; it was those who like Dante.
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Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse all creative spellings.
>
Ah, what a wonderful way out! You know, as William Empsom showed in his book about Milton, it is possible to have great admiration for certain poets or composers (Bach, say) without accepting or even liking their ideas. And if, as I suspect (please correct me if I am wrong), you haven’t read Dante, how do you know whether you like him or not?
But I am not interested in scoring points here. Doubtless I lost my sense of humour at birth (I knew what I was in for!), but I have grown rather tired of silly quips about the arts and artists of a kind that were I make them about scientists would rightly bring upon upon my head a heap of invective, particularly in this forum. If one is going to dislike silly quips in the one context, then one should have the consistency of mind to dislike them other contexts, too.
A way out? Why should I need “a way out”?
Whether or not I’ve read Dante or like Dante is beside the point. Fine if you don’t like silly quips, but your reply to mine was a non sequitur (the first sentence might have worked better as a reply to Reginald).
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Tim,
I am not sure of course, but I think you may have misunderstood Ant.
I’m pretty sure his comment was not about Dante or your opinion about Dante.
I’m pretty sure he was simply making a joke about the tastes of “literary types,” as in people who are considered to be, or consider themselves to be, experts and or aficionados of literature.
To rephrase the joke, “Perhaps a liking for revenge pr0n is common among experts and aficionados of literature.”
If I am completely wrong here, Ant and Tim, please accept my apologies.
Spot on, darrelle.
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Yes, I think I’m being overly touchy and consequently unfair, so apologies all round and especially to Ant.
Happily accepted.
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Abandon all hope, ye who enter here?
LOL
I’ll take appropriate quotations for 500, Alex.
You can’t just be killed, you have to be tortured then killed. I suppose that’s what’s required to elevate one from simple serial killer to cosmic monster.
perfectly said.
Have you ever listened to Patrick Madrid or Patrick Coffin? They are such a hoot! Madrid recently made an analogy comparing homosexuals wanting to pay someone to get married at their place of business to the KKK forcing a black dry cleaner to wash their sheets. I clear my head by visiting your website. Thanks!
But maybe before they start arguing about how long Hell lasts, they should look for evidence that there’s a hell in the first place.
Or back up a step before that and explain how something with no mass can burn in the first place, as it has clearly been established that the body loses no mass at death.
Verily, Man is always remaking god in His own image.
And a scary picture it is!
See Sithrak comment above.
and I thought purgatory was the name for time served.
Fried for a while, then flipped over “easy”.
Better than scrambled!
Prelude to being scrambled. Then put back together.
To mis-quote Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent :
FP : It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.
AD : What’s wrong with being drunk? I rather like it.
FP : Have you ever talked to a glass of water?
What could possibly be the purpose torturing for a certain length of time and then extinguishing a soul. Would it be to teach the soul lesson? Do these people have any rational thoughts at all?
Religion has turned into a whack-a-mole. Don’t like what God does over here? Go over there.
The concept that punishment entails reform and lesson-teaching come from a more advanced, humanist mindset. The belief that retribution is valuable for its own sake is embedded in the idea that honor and harmony entail some sort of balancing act.
You see it when people explain that insulting a PERFECT Being who is immortal requires an EXTREME punishment which never ends. Right? It’s just common sense.
If you start from “Essences.”
Superficially, that’s perhaps a true statement. Records of the history of the church go back to the Pauline Epistles of the middle of the first century, and those make clear that there was already a great deal of lack of consensus — though, to be fair, the one thing there was consensus on was that Jesus wasn’t a terrestrial entity.
That diversity continued at least through the internecine fights from which the ancestor of today’s Catholic Church emerged, and the Church traces its theological roots mostly to the theologians of the second and third centuries. There wasn’t much in the way of consensus at that time, but the consensus that emerged later first came to prominence then.
(Of course, I use, “emerged,” reservedly: it was a matter of lethal dispute.)
Yes, just how much crunchy frog would you like in your chocolates?
One must admit, it is a fair cop!
b&
The stand out most ridiculous thing about this is that the “conditional immortality” hypothesis is supposed to somehow be significantly less monstrous than the standard “eternal hellfire.” These people obviously have no idea what “compassionate” means.
Any person who adored another person who was even remotely as monstrous as their god, either version, would be rightfully identified as needing serious therapy and counseling. But, somehow, if the monstrous worshipee is a god we are supposed to admire and respect that.
“I was going the beat my kid with a tire iron every day for ten years, but in the interests of compassion I think I’ll only beat him every day for a couple of months.”
“Wow! That really is so surpassingly compassionate! I wish I could be more like you!”
“I’m going to beat you until you BEG for death! But I won’t ever stop!”
“Wait, come on over here. I’ll eventually slit your throat if you beg hard enough. No need for overkill.”
It don’t get no more merciful than that!
God is a giant Jupiter-Sized blind spot in human reasoning, the Black Hole into which all special pleading flows.
You can naver get consistency out of Christians because, well, “He’s GOD!” Different rules apply to a God…obviously!
What people fail to distinguish when the keep cutting God slack is that they have conflated “special reasons for God’s behavior” with “special REASONING (special pleading) for God’s behavior.”
It’s ok to come up with different justified reasons for how one being acts vs another (if the arguments are sound). But you can’t change the very form of reasoning itself to do so, where you just allow special rules for God. But…these types of fallacies are all sucked into the giant Special Case Of God.
The transcendent is, likewise, a special case of nature. The soul, a pristine and privileged special case of physics that trumps all of reality with cosmic specialness.
Superphysics.
The newest, or perhaps oldest, branch of physics.
Is this one of the — pardon the pun — burning questions that religion is supposed to answer, and the way in which it does so? It’s no answer at all. At best it’s an opinion, and at worst it’s a prejudice. The acceptance of such declarations without question is why I equate religion with ignorance.
Hell is perfectly explained in Old Harry’s Game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Harry's_Game
I agree: “the total intellectual vacuity of theology.” Let us add, too, that it is vacuous because it plays by no set rules of analysis or argumentation. And the sacred text of the Bible is not at all sacred to these exegetes: it can always be reinterpreted, using principles that are separate from, and fundamentally prior to, the Bible itself.
That is why I maintain that virtually all Christians recognize that the Bible is itself not a very good guide to moral behavior. Day in and day out, people turn to other moral and ethical principles to judge the moral principles set out in the Bible. We can see an example of that fact here.
And we can thus answer the question, “How can people be ‘good’ without religion?” The fact is that we are good, not because of the Bible, but because we as a society (or groups of societies) have developed moral and ethical principles, and ways of thinking about morality and ethics, that aid us in determining what is right or wrong. Religious texts contribute to those underlying moral and ethical principles, but they do not found them–and such texts often stand in the way of the consistent application of those moral and ethical principles.
Crapamoly. Give me a consistant lack of reason and logic any day. At least you can get some entertainment out of these folks. But the new stuff, this religion that is like smoke and blows in a different direction at any minute? To me it’s the death throes. When there’s no substance left and the emperor stands buck ass naked you just srart making crap up.
Two decades or an eternity, what does it matter? After two decades of being burned, you’d be insane.
The way I see this if you believe in the Christian God, humans have free will for perhaps a hundred years, until we die, then God takes over our brain, or ‘soul’, like it or not. For eternity.
As Matt Dillahunty says, if his mother goes to heaven and doesn’t care that her son is burning in hell for all eternity, did God over ride her mind so she can be happy? If so, then it’s really not her anymore. If she’s sad, she’s not really heaven.
Does God do the same to those in hell? Change their mind so they don’t go insane from being burned alive for two decades, or an eternity? If so, then it’s not really that person anymore. If he doesn’t and he makes them go insane, then it’s not that person anymore.
So it seems to me God doesn’t allow free will after we die, unless you freely accept him and ignore the suffering of others.
Is heaven a place where you can blithely ignore the suffering of others?
That sounds more like hell, or Wall street. It certainly doesn’t sound like a loving God to me.
I’ve had theists explain that the people suffering in Hell prefer it to the horrible pain their ego would suffer if they were to submit their will to a higher power. They’d rather have pain and hatred than peace and love … if the price is humility. Heaven would thus make them unhappier than hell… and this is why the saved aren’t suffering agonies when they remember the damned. They’re respecting choice.
This explanation will only seem plausible to believers who are willing, able, and even eager to invent straw-man versions of what the unsaved are like. And in my opinion it is in its own way just as creepy and inhumane as the belief that the damned don’t want to be in Hell.
Sastra,
That is by far the number one response I get from Christians on Hell, it’s the new prevailing choice of the “sophisticated” Christian. Various versions of ‘it’s your choice.”
My reaction is the same as yours.
I usually reply: “Look, stop dealing with some sort of cartoon version of a human being, the strange villain who is so intractable and so in love with himself he’ll choose eternal suffering over an eternity of bliss. I’m a real person, deal with ME. I can tell you for a fact that if I were given the choice between eternal suffering of ANY kind and bliss, I sure as hell wouldn’t choose the suffering. I do not believe in your God and if I perish tomorrow and find myself in a life of eternal suffering it wasn’t my choice. And if it was, that isn’t the “me” I know making it.”
They usually either don’t have a reply, or say “well I don’t know for sure what will happen.” Often enough though they stick to their guns, or to the caricature, and insist “Nah, you say that, but I think lots of people would choose to be separate from God due to their self-centered yearnings” or whatever.
Additionally, since when do we all feel ok about something bad that happened to someone simply because it was their choice?
If my daughter decides to become a meth junkie and live a life of poverty, poor health and fleeing from the police, it would still cause me anguish and I’d do everything I could to help her change. I wouldn’t shrug my shoulders and say “welp, her choice”.
This folds into my “dangers of dualism” theory. If you think everything is a choice and a matter of overcoming through sheer force of spirit, you tend to become dispassionate toward the suffering of others. It’s their fault, after all.
see The great Divorce by CS lewis.
A good book, but his Hell is nothing like Dante’s or the traditional Christian view. The major torment there seems to be boredom and an unfocused fear. I’ll take that over burning any day.
indeed. but heaven is not remembering what you had including any loved ones if they dare not to agree with you.
That sort of amnesia is much closer to my idea of hell….
b&
And is just another instance of “sorry, but that is not significantly less monstrous than the old god.”
And it is a clear indication that the god and his apologists are fully aware of how evil the god is.
The choices:
1.) Eternal torture in a literal hell for all nonbelievers, no exceptions.
2.) Eternal torture in a literal hell only for people who have been particularly bad.
3.) Eternal torture in a figurative hell for all nonbelievers, no exceptions.
4.) Eternal torture in a figurative hell only for people who have been particularly bad.
5.) Limited torture in a literal hell for all nonbelievers, no exceptions.
6.) Limited torture in a literal hell only for people who have been particularly bad.
7.) Limited torture in a figurative hell for all nonbelievers, no exceptions.
8.) Limited torture in a figurative hell only
for people who have been particularly bad.
9.) Death for all nonbelievers, no exceptions.
10.) Death only for people who have been really bad.
11. – 1,023.) Combinations.
1,024.) Universal salvation.
1,025.) Everyone dies.
It’s still important to argue against that penultimate one. Not only is it untrue, but there is still a moral onus on the fools who believe the last one.
(Yes, I’m probably off with my numbers.)
Which is the kinder God, they ask, one who lets sinners suffer forever, or one who gives them, say, a few decades of hellfire, then administers “capital punishment” (to use Mr. Date’s matter-of-fact term)?
What a come-down, from a ‘maximally good being’ to ‘not as nasty as most people imagine’.
Hmmmm, yeah would a maximally good being give no clear evidence about who suffers and for how long? Maybe they should tweak the argument to make him the maximally hidden being.
“Which is the kinder God, they ask…”
Careful there, how can one truly be certain that even rhetorical polytheism isn’t a mortal sin?
Better write out the 1st Commandment 100 times before the end of CCD class, just in case!
Theology: when it’s not pulling stuff out of its rear, it’s citing ancients who did it on their behalf.
The whole business is laughably pathetic to begin with, but it’s positively side-splitting when they cite Paul as some kind of ultimate authority on the matter. It should be clear to anyone who hasn’t got Christian-tinted eyes that Paul was either seriously deluded or exploiting the seriously deluded. Citing him as an authority is like referring to Jim Jones of Jonestown for ethics lessons, or Joseph Smith for American history.
What an embarrassing sideshow of dishonesty and nonsense. It’s saddening to watch potential fine minds frittered away on such garbage.
I am witnessing that more Christians in America are becoming slightly more embarrassed by un-modifiable ambiguity of religion.
the idea that this god has to get its jollies to torture people just for a while and then gets around to killing you is even more hilarious than just a god that torments you forever. This seems to try to quantify how much hellfire is required to punish for various “sins”. so how much of an aeon do folks get for picking up sticks on a special day? for committing genocide?
I read this yesterday and was going to do a blog post about it. Maybe I still will, but my take is to note how, even in the ‘minimized version of hell’, they just can’t let go of the torment. This is a group of people so intent on fooling themselves with the happy thoughts of living forever but they can’t imagine that just ‘not living infinitely’ ought to be enough justice for unbelievers? Of course you’ve picked up and highlighted the ease at which scripture can ‘evolve’ to suit the evolving morality of the primates who wrote it long ago. Enjoy.
To be fair, they can’t let go because it’s in the reported words of Jesus, i.e. God. “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'”
If they let go of those words, what happens to their Christian identity?
From what I’ve read, the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in “annihilationism”, where the evil simply cease to exist after judgement.
Let’s see- if you were a priest who molested a little boy, and you were sentenced to 100 years of torment before annihilation, would you be sentenced to 200 years, if you’d molested TWO boys?
If these morons ever allowed themselves to realize just how completely absurd this all is, they’d be ashamed to show their faces in public for the rest of their lives.
This particular modification has it’s proponents climbing over themselves to save god from embarrassment.
If you were to look at the illusory facts, by my count the number of souls hanging with the evil one far out the number the souls playing harps and dancing around the rose bush (my interpretation)
This cannot be tolerated, it looks more popular, they have a bigger football team, etc etc., therefore new rules apply, lets phase them out, first in, extinguished first.
Don’t be fooled by the new nice guy in town, the goal posts most certainly shift.
New, improved God. Now with 20% less evil!
A common sense reading of the Bible would indicate that it is a bunch of made up fairy tales combined with some bronze age moral codes sprinkled in, not the idea of conditional immortality.
I also like the software engineer who moonlights as a theologian ruminating about early thinkers. Imagine doing software that way, just thinking about what the specs say, but never actually having a way to implement or test them…
Thous shalt not unit test the Lard thy Gawd.
Matthew 4:7, Luke 4:12
The one thing that I regret is that I’ll never get an answer to this puzzle: if we could fast-forward time about another 5000 years, would Christianity still exist? Would it be stronger? Would religion still exist? I think religion would probably still exist if they haven’t somehow found some way to disprove an afterlife or the concept of God. But would we still have the same religions as we do now? Christians use the endurance of Christianity as an argument why they claim its true: no matter how much you oppress it, God makes sure it continues. Once heard a theologian say they will always be at least one Christian on earth. Wonder if somehow in the future concrete disprovement of some religions could be found that no organised religious body could argue against? Could the Catholic Church actually close one day in the future? Really wish I knew.
And how is it that people still write loads of volumes about the Bible? You’d have thought everything that could be said and thought about has been? Are they just wasting time or have nothing else to do? Aren’t all these different theological ideas just so weird? How many people thousands of years from now will still be wondering, calculating and trying to predict when Jesus is coming back, when Mohammed is going to come, when the Jews are waiting for their saviour, or trying to make other people believe it? Will all this last for the whole duration of humanity? Since it can’t be disproved as such, I am inclined to think so, but love to know the numbers of believers ages from now. Will Christianity and Islam believers just be seen as a few thousand fring people in a irreligious world, or a world with some new religion or something? Are people ever going to just get to a stage where these religions will just not play any part on earth anymore?
Religion? Hard to say. If human civilization survives that long, there’s good reason to think that the historical trend towards secularization will have diluted religion beyond detectable levels by then, and that we’ll destroy ourselves before then if not…but you can also construct reasonable scenarios with other outcomes — especially ones with extended Dark Ages.
Christianity? Very unlikely — at least, not as a significant force in the world and in a form recognizable to today’s Christians. There are far more dead religions than extant ones — though, to be sure, a superlative case can be made that Christianity is the offspring of and contiguous with both the Paganism and Judaism of the first century, in the same way that Moronism is a branch of Christianity — and, indeed, as is also the case with Muhammad and Islam as well. If there is any predominant religion amongst the inheritors (if any) of today’s Western civilization, chances are good it’ll be yet another branch from that same tree, but it won’t be Christianity itself.
Cheers,
b&
Really? If I could fast forward for only 24 hours, I’d be too busy drinking from the firehose of the latest discoveries in science and mathematics to spare a microsecond for the latest “developments” in religion.
“You’ll find such evidence only in the Bible, for no scorched sinners have returned to tell us of their travails.”
Yes it is fascinating is it not that all those who return from the dead to assure us of the reality of the afterlife return from Heaven. No one has ever landed up in Hell and come back to warn us of the terrible fate awaiting us. Funny that.
Anyone as a kid traumatised by that disgusting play heaven’s gates, hell’s flames? The scene where the mom and the child get separated and the mom goes to hell and the child goes to heaven’s disgusting. Only thing the mom did wrong was prioritising helping the poor instead of going to church. Scared me when I was small and raised in that sort of home. Look at http://www.divinerevelations.info and http://www.christian-faith.com/23hrs-dead-she-saw-famous-people-in-hell-michael-jackson-pope-john-paul-ii-others/ and http://www.chick.com/catalog/books/0204.asp Changing and modernising theology indeed!
Yes, very telling!
They don’t return from Heaven in the Bible – look at the Witch of Endor bringing up a Samuel from the Underworld – furious that he’s been woken from oblivious rest.
I would be furious too if I was woken by Ewoks.
This new move simply makes God look confused.
I can understand the motivation for almost anything else except this new compromise arrangement. Torturing sinners for eternity makes a kind of sense: it’s extreme sadism, but at least one knows where the extreme sadist is coming from. Once-and-for-all annihilation makes a kind of sense: it’s the way of the world as we know it. But an arbitrary finite period of torture followed by once-and-for-all annihilation is just silly. If God recognises he’ll have to kill these sinners in the end anyway, why not do so immediately? And if he can somehow construe the torture as a good thing – or if he gets sadistic pleasure out of it – why end it? A God who resurrects people after death in order to torture them, and then euthenases them because a life of torture isn’t worth living, makes no psychological sense.
Even the old “purgatory” arrangement was more coherent this. One could, perhaps, believe that a certain period of not-quite-hellish unpleasantness might serve a character-building purpose, or something; but there’s no point building character in people if you’re going to kill them the instant the character-building is over.
“Advocates of conditional immortality say that their view reflects a common-sense reading of the Bible.”
My nomination for the most self-contradictory statement of the year.
(You wouldn’t be a believer if you applied common sense to reading the bible!)
The Apocalypse of Peter was apparently a popular 2nd century text which also posited temporary punishment in Hell to be followed by eventual salvation in Heaaven.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_of_Peter
This was also the position taken by Origen, an early Christian leader. Hell was a place of torment, right enough, but you were being tormented by agonies of regret. After a period of time, you would come to accept Jay-EE-zuss! & you would be allowed to ascend to heaven. Of course, the early church councils declared this to be heresy.
It is also (somewhat modified) the view of the (original) Universalists, from what I understand.
I saw the trailer for the Fudge movie. The take away was how little variance from dogma is allowed in the fundamentalist community. Fudge is considered a radical – a dangerous free-thinker, threatening to “destroy the Church,” as his opponents claim.
How does one debate people this committed to suppression of the slightest doubt?
We tend to scoff
at the beliefs
of the ancients.
But we can’t scoff at them
personally,
to their faces,
and this
is what
annoys me.
– “Deep Thoughts”
by Jack Handy
I love Jack Handey. What about this one, not related to the OP but related to stupid, philosophical positions Deepak et al. take:
LOL!
Fudge – what a wonderful name for a theologian.
lol!
HELL REALLY EXISTS!
http://exviking.net/man/hell.htm
… and it could do with a bit of fire.
Two places on my bucket list: Fucking, Austria and Hell, Norway. Just to say I’ve been there…
P.S. Be careful how you Google the first one of those… 😉
“Siri, please show me pictures of Fucking in Austria!”
/@
There’s an Austrian beer, made in Fucking by, as I recall, a German brewer, and called ‘Fucking Hell’ – ‘hell’ being a light-coloured beer.
The Wikipedia contains some hilarity:
“The Fucking mayor objected…on the grounds that there was no Fucking brewery.”
On a frivolous note, I wonder if Mr Fudge is an example of what the UK’s New Scientist has christened “nominative determinism” (e.g. the physiotherapist called Mr Cramp).
If you DO find a beklief in a god how the hell are you supposed to know which one to follow???
Follow them all! Herd them to the ever-hating embrace of Sithrak!
Sadly, I can see how this view might be popular with some people. If some Governor proposed water-boarding death row inmates for a little while before killing them, 90% of people would probably recoil in horror…but I’m guessing 10% of our citizenry would not only support it, they’d ask “why aren’t we doing that already?”
“Advocates of conditional immortality say that their view reflects a common-sense reading of the Bible.”
Surely the only view a common sense reading of the bible could produce is one of a repulsive work of fiction. Maybe my sense is not that common.
Oh WOW! Theologians have found evidence that Hell is not eternal?
So is it like Hubble’s Law?
Hubble went to Hell and re-ran his experiment and came up with the same answer?
Amazing! How did he notify these particular theologians? Through a dream?
Souls are supposed to be immaterial. How can an immaterial thing be burned? Well, there’s the resurrection of the dead – so maybe the dead sinners have to be resurrected, along with the saints, so god can toss the resurrected sinners into hell?