I voted all go to heaven. None of us deserve to, but if God truly loves each of us, how could he bear to send us to torment? And one who has infinite love also should be free of ego, so I don’t think he requires adulation. He’s like the parent who loves his children equally, even those who don’t remember his birthday. To send someone to infinite torment based on what was done on our brief lives seems quite disproportionate and quite ungodly.
I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you for the second item. That’s one of the most harrowing works of fiction I’ve read in a long time. Conversely I don’t mind “Your Pretty Face”; it’s just an extreme version of an office-based farce and so I don’t give it any serious consideration.
Scott Alexander is a really good author. One thing self-styled rationalists often have going for them is that their fiction is often really cool, because they pride themselves on breaking boundaries and thinking things through to their logical conclusions. Yudkowsky also pens a lot of really great literature. (Yes, I’m one of the people who legitimately likes Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Fight me. But even disregarding that, “Three Worlds Collide” is just incredibly cool, even if I fundamentally disagree with Yudkowsky on what constitutes the “good” ending.) All of Unsong is worth reading; the whole thing is super cool, and I will gladly also recommend this short story on the modern greek gods.
Ahem. Fanboying aside… Yeah. When you really think about what hell means, when you really consider the fire-and-brimstone conception of hell, when you really spend time contemplating what it means… Well, you end up in the place the author did. It’s not for nothing that the framing device here is two people arguing about theodicy.
“See, this is what I hate about theodicy!” said Ana. “Everyone just wants to dismiss it and say maybe God is weird. Like, of course God is weird! But it needs to be a kind of weird that makes sense. It has to have deeper patterns and be ultimately scrutable. I really don’t think that the same God who hath endowed us with reason intended us to forego its use.”
“The Universe sucks,” I said. “Deal with it.”
“The whole problem is that we can’t deal with it! If the universe just sucked a little, we could deal with it. But nobody can deal with the full extent of the universe’s suckiness. Not when it happens to them personally. Not even when they witness it first hand. The only reason anyone can deal with it at all is because they never really think about it, they keep it off in their peripheral vision where it never really shows up clearly. It’s like how everybody knew Hell existed, but nobody freaked out until they saw the Broadcast.”
But thinking about the fire and brimstone some preachers insist exists and which all sinners will spend eternity in, you end up with some really horrifying thoughts. The concept is fundamentally horrific. Eternal torture. Forever. No rest, no respite. Just horrific pain for the rest of eternity.
If that’s your conception of hell, and you think anyone, anyone at all, even Adolf Fuckin’ Hitler, deserves to go there? Yikes.
(Additionally, imagine teaching your children that if they do something wrong, that’s what will happen to them. Imagine the psychological damage this could cause long-term. There are a lot of people who have abandoned religion, who know for a fact that hell is a fantasy, and yet still wake up at night with nightmares about what might happen to them. When new atheists talk about religion being child abuse, this is definitely part of it.)
I agree… although I also think that he’s not above sending some of us “to our rooms to think about what we’ve done”, in a manner of speaking. Whether that takes the form of some sort of long-term torment a-la Hell, or whether it’s just being zapped with the full knowledge and understanding of what you’ve done and why it was bad/wrong (and the capacity to understand it), I don’t know.
If the Judge is just, almost everyone goes to Hell.
If the Judge is merciful, almost everyone goes to Heaven.
The (protestant) Christian view isn’t “If you do something wrong, you’ll go to Hell.” It’s, “You are born sinful by nature and therefore from birth your default destination is already Hell.” It’s not like you are born clean and remain clean until your “first sin.”
If we’re talking “shoulds”, then scripturally speaking everyone should go to hell.
If it were my call, most should go to heaven.
Some Christians believe this. Some others believe the first version, with the caveat that as a flawed human being, you will commit sins just as part of your nature.
…Is that supposed to make it better? “You’re so sinful and evil as your nature that you deserve to be tortured forever, and that decision was made by the all-powerful, perfectly just ruler of everything.” That’s fucking horrifying!
In what universe is hell “just”?
Either everyone or no one. But not some and not the others.
Why?
Seconded: why? If we presume that the judge has even the tiniest whit of mercy then nobody would get eternal hellfire, obviously, but if it’s presumed they have no mercy whatsoever then they could, in theory, decide to filter people based on an arbitrary form of ‘justice’ that makes absolutely no effort to make the punishment a reasonable response to the ‘crime’.
For an arbitrary example, everybody could wake up and be informed that the Mormons were right, and be informed that to get to the good heaven you absolutely had to get married the mormon way in a mormon temple. No mormon temple marriage = you’re screwed, period. Under such a system it would be entirely consistent with the rules that some but not all people could get in.
One of the many people to whom “speaking the word of God” has been widely attributed said “forgive those who do you wrong, do not judge; share what you have, if they want your coat, give them your cloak as well; do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
Point A: Heaven does not consist of some of the people doing that while most of the people do not. That’s not so heavenly, actually. Heaven consists of us, collectively, in general, doing that, to the point that that is a decently accurate description of the everyday status quo.
Point B: We have social structures that formally shape how we treat each other, and as it so happens, they are not geared towards open-ended forgiveness of any and all behavior, unlimited sharing of all that we have. I know it’s something of a chicken vs egg argument as to whether the individual behaviors necessarily must change before we can dispense with the criminal justice system and the money system or if instead the systems should be eliminated first, but at a minimum it seems obvious that when the situation described is attained there would be no purpose for any such structures; and that up until that happens we will continue to live lives where misdeeds are punished and where there is competition over goods and resources and where there is poverty and want in the world.
Point C: A large amount of intent and energy that purports to be “religious” in nature seems geared towards getting the faithful or the elect or the chosen or the meek or the good, etc etc, into heaven, and that religious endeavor seems most often to set us against each other and to condemn people for not being right in the eyes of god and to work towards treating the so-called wicked in various ways that constitute judging and depriving them of as many goods and resources as possible, along with blaming them for the overall unHeavenly state of affairs that we all live in.
Point D: It ain’t someplace else folks. Yeah, here. And you’re gonna get your ass reincarnated over and over and over again until we all get it right, and then continue to be reincarnated over and over once we finally do. It’s everyone or no one.
I’m not really following, but if I’m reading point D correctly you’re saying that whichever one it is, it’s going to be right here, and I suppose that follows - if everybody ends up right here, we must all thus be going to the same place. QED, and all. I guess.
That said, I’m not sure that you and I are using our terms the same way.
It’s not just that no one deserves the usual Christian conception of Hell. No one deserves (for whatever that word really means) anything less than an extremely well-designed Heaven. As said, eternity is an extremely long time. You can explore not just every little corner of our universe, but every corner of every possible permutation of the matter in a universe, in perhaps a googleplex years. But still you haven’t even scratched the surface of eternity.
As soon as you get a little bored, you suffer. And then you suffer more and more for infinite time. So even a Heaven that gets just a little dull after the first googleplex years, or Graham’s Number years, or TREE(3) years, still represents infinite suffering, which even Hitler doesn’t deserve.
If annihilation is an option, then there’s an argument. But if we’re talking eternity, then anything less than a perfect existence is the same as infinite torture.
Well, I was asked how i thought it should be set up, right?
If you put me in charge, this is totally how it’s gonna go down.
Could a truly good person enjoy eternal bliss, knowing there are others being most gruesomely tortured? Or is eternal bliss supposed to be based on ignorance?
There is no heaven; there is no hell. I haven’t read through the entire thread but really?
When we die, we die. Sorry. Game over. Bag of fertilizer. Done.
This looks like Fighting the Hypothetical. You can answer the OP’s question without believing (or without knowing) that Heaven and Hell actually exist—I think this is true of quite a few of the people who have answered.
Furthermore, [sarcasm] thanks for clearing that up for us. [/sarcasm]
Well, there’s “Not getting bogged down in detailed definitions of Heaven/Hell here - just go fast and loose with the definitions”, and then there’s “Throw out the definitions entirely and talk about other things that ain’t heaven and hell at all”. Going from the former to the latter threw me. 