Usually, Christians aren’t Utilitarians, though.
Well, if you are religious, then the odds are good that whatever flavor of God you prefer doesn’t want you to. If you believe in property rights, then killing people is theft, a no-no.
Gratifying to know that YOU doing good deeds will get ME into Heaven!
Seriously , though , Christianity places faith above doing good deeds.
Best Evidence : Jesus telling the thief on the cross that he would be with Him in Paradise that day.
Otherwise , there really isn’t much by way of promises that good deeds - or even faith - will book you a place in Heaven:
Revelations suggest the stadium capacity is 144,000.
And he also said you should kill any persons who dare to work on Sabbath Day (which is saturday).
So will it be fine if I limit myself to killing Christians who work on saturdays?
Are you saying that it is not good enough to believe in Jesus?
I think Jack D hit the nail on the head. Irrespective of the soundness, or lack thereof, of your logic, it isn’t up to you to decide whether or not someone else would be better off dead.
I will say that, to me, suicide seems to be perfectly reasonable for the Christian. The early Christian sages probably recognized this and so made suicide a sin even if it presumably does get you closer to God in a hurry.
He didn’t say you should kill persons who dare to work on the Sabbath Day. He said the Jewish nation should apply the death penalty to anyone who is convicted in a court of law of working on the Sabbath Day - that doesn’t mean he approves of vigilante justice. There are lots of people who favor the death penalty for murderers, but they don’t necessarily think you should go out and kill anyone who you think is a murderer. (And that’s leaving aside all the stuff over whether that part of the Mt. Sinai covenant still applies now that Christ’s New Covenant is in effect, and whether it was ever intended to apply to non-Jews, and so on.)
Of course I am, if by “believe in Jesus” you mean “hold the intellectual belief that Jesus existed, was the Son of God, died for our sins and rose, etc. etc.” I’ve never heard of any Christian denomination that said that by itself was enough. It’s required that you “accept Christ into your heart” and ask him to help you not sin any longer and so on.
And even if that was enough, just because someone goes to church and calls themself a Christian, unless you can read minds you can’t be certain that they really do sincerely believe. Jesus said somewhere in the Gospels - I’m too lazy to look up the cite - but he did say something like, “Many who say to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will never see the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Even if you send the Christian on a direct flight to heaven, you leave behind family and friends, Christian or non-Christian, who are grieving. You may have increased the pleasure of the victim, but you’ve caused pain to an unknown number of surrounding individuals. Since you can’t know their faith or lack of it, you can’t console them with the “Gone to heaven” theory. Unless you know how to console all the mourners, you’ve unbalanced the pain/pleasure scales.
Premise 1 and 2 do not represent the Biblical message. The Biblical message as a whole displays a God who asks his followers to lie and kill, and then rewards them with his blessings and eternal life in his presence. I believe the ultimate Biblical message is: “Believe that I am perfect, and that you are not, and you will go to heaven.”
Clearly, any God who asks you to murder someone or to lie, must be an Idol by default. However, the Bible describes instances of the real God making these requests and rewarding people for honoring them. He then claims to be perfect, and that we are imperfect and cannot understand his ways through reason or integrity or principle; but ultimately through faith. Faith that he is perfect, and that anybody who actually asks you to kill someone else must be an idol, but that Idols do not really exist; as claiming such would cancel out the Idol clause in the ten commandments.
Therefor, any voice which asks you to kill someone claiming to be God, must of necessity be God, unless it is the Devil. For God, the judgement rests soley on “For me to know and for you to find out”
We do however know that all of these rules can be bypassed, including six; by baptzing a baby and murdering it. The economics then boils down to how many more babies we can produce then people being sent to hell. Eventually, a society will reach a critical mass of perpetual motion in this regards; and be the most efficient heaven senders for that specific planet. Eventually, the universe itself would be composed of every planet reaching this critical mass, until Judgement day; where all the babies must be accepted and all the participating adults must be denied.
Obviously the Bible itself doeesn’t correlate to real life, as it almost completely ignores the supreme issue of suicide in regards to ethical formulations. The very idea that God has the choice to commit suicide is not discussed, nor is the morality of those who sacrifice themselves to eternal damnation for the most efficient means to create holy individuals. It also doesn’t address the choice to not play in the life or eternal hell or eternal heaven game at all; but rather forces the issue. It does not address the ethical decision of having a child who you will not kill, thus creating the great probability that they will have never wanted to have been born at all; as they will most likely be born for the sole purpose of eternal damnation. The Bible ignores behavioral integrity in association with a designated standard. The Bible ignores logical consistency, and the concept of evidence necessary to evaluate deception or lack there-of. In fact, it takes a dump on all these things.
The Bible represents IMO, the musings of the human Ego looking for absolute glory regardless of any evidence to the contrary. That one person is to be elected by natural tradition to be a perfect being, and anything they do to contradict anything and or everything is to be disregarded. That without this condition, society and existence could not function. Considering the luxuries of non-transparency afforded to those in power through the sheer divide of education levels; this book seems like an effective means to assure that certain perspectives are not allowed to enter the minds of others. If they begin to, kill them.
-Justhink
reply didn’t bump and shows kaiju as making the last response ~ three-and-a-half hours after my reply was made.
shrug at least it’s not a double post
-Justhink
No one’s pointed it out yet, but this is also incompatible with orthodox (small ‘o’) Christianity. Christians are not judged based on their worthiness for heaven (and thank God for that).
Christianity (by and large) teaches just the opposite – that no one is worthy, and all require redemption through Jesus.
Judging from the other responses, it looks like your argument sits on a foundation of sand.
Like Duck Duck Goose, I think there’s a problem with mixing Xtianity & Bentham’s brand of Hedonistic Utilitarianism. But it’s not so much whether Utilitarians believe in God–it’s a philosophy, not a dogma, & they can if they so choose.
The point, rather, is that Christians aren’t really supposed to subscribe to Bentham’s utilitarianism. The whole idea of Hell is pretty un-Bentham, after all.
That said, given your premises, I would tend to agree that you ought to kill true Christians in the name of utility, but for the points made by TheJackOfHearts and Tinker Grey–points which had not occurred to me.
Of course, as an Animist, I favor killing those Christians who think heaven is the whole point. This world should be for those who love & appreciate it, not the “It will all be cast into fire” crowd. This undoubtedly tainted my analysis.
P. S.: Loved Justhink’s rant.
You asked which of your premises may be attacked, and the answer is all of them.
Silly Shalmanese: the question is not whether to kill adult Christians, but rather babies. That raises far more interesting questions, since the fate of babies calls into question all sorts of dicey theological moral monstrosities. When the Catholic Church taught that babies who died before they could be baptized went to hell, disraught mothers committed suicide so that they could comfort their babies in hell. Not exactly the act of a truly rational person: but certainly far braver and more self-sacrificing, in their minds, than anything, say, Jesus, was said to have done. The Church changed that teaching right quick.
Beliefs do matter to the moral chocies people make. But you’ve been pretty sloppy in this particular usage (although some of the are equally sloppy, uncovering flaws which even they should be able to see are easily correctable).
I believe they go to purgatory… at least for a while. Not having any other place to go - no sin, no hell, no good works, no heaven.
After a while they are supposed to be released into bliss, after recieving the required purification. Of course, if old Adam and Eve been a bit more prudent, they’d be able to go straight up, except that they wouldn’t have been born, because…
I hardly think a distraught mom killing herself qualifies as either
A) Sane, or
B) Better than the “I AM” allowing us to killl him so we could be redeemed. An di don’t think the moms themselves would have said so.
Anyway, I’m going to bring up the notion of rights:
Essentially, God has the moral; right to blow into atomic paste anyone on earth. He created our body, mind, and soul. He does not do this, despite repeated provocation, more or less because he loves us. You, however, do not, in any, shape, or form, have the right to sin against another human being, regardless of their “benefit” from it.
You may not agree, but that, at it core, is my belief.
I always wondered whether being smited by God, so he could show some other dimwit the “true path,” would be quite pleasant. It seemed like a really manly way to die.
Me:“So… uh… how did you die?”
Random Girl:“Sucked up by my vaccum cleaner. You?”
Me:“Err… God dropped a meteor on my head. very pretty colors up until I was blasted into tiny chunks of flesh and blood.”
Random Girl:“Really? You’re so lucky! I heard they have an express purification for that!”