I’m thinking of a real-life version of the cult of Cthulhu, where believers will simply be eaten first and the rest of us will suffer.
Of course, that begs the question why anyone would follow such a religion. I’d answer that with it doesn’t matter about followers, what’s fact is fact, and if someone believes there’s no way to stave off annihilation or punishment, then they might as well join and hope for the best. Surely there must be some religion out there that says mankind cannot avoid a horrible fate, that belief is useless to stop the inevitable punishment, but is so convincing that people join the religion simply because they think its true, rather than a projection of how they wished universal morals worked
As a long-time worshipper of Ancient and Squamous Cthulhu, I should ask why someone would not worship He/It. If all mortals are equally insignificant and equally doomed, then why not embrace the madness that comes with revelation?
But to answer the actual question, Yes. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, believe that exactly 144,000 “anointed” will actually go to heaven. The vast majority of Christians (even devoutly faithful ones) will be resurrected but will never ascend.
There are a number of more ancient religions in which belief was basically irrelevant. The early Greeks, for example, imagined an underworld in which everyone was equally miserable. IIRC, the Sumerians had a similar system. Likewise, some other pre-Christian religions like the pagan Norse held that arriving at the most desirable afterlife was contingent on first living a life of valor in battle. A person could believe in the deities all day long, but if they did not match this belief with a glorious battlefield death, it made no difference.
The other part of the question, as to why anyone would follow such a religion, goes back to the point I made in my first paragraph. Throughout most of human history religions did not compete with each other. (1) Most people were born, lived, and died in a single location and were never exposed to other religions nor given the opportunity to choose which one they preferred. (2) Most religions are not mutually exclusive. The idea of forcing people to choose only one exclusively true religion is a very Christian idea.
Finally, I think it is still true that most people adopt the religion of their parents and keep it as a default, without ever critically comparing the pros and cons of alternative religions.
The ‘get eaten first’ business is a fun meme and a great tract, but it has NO basis in the Mythos. Canonically speaking, all pure strain humans are equally doomed when the Old Ones return. BUT, nobody knows when that will be. It could be tomorrow. It could be in a few billion years. Those who worship Cthulhu etc are rewarded NOW. The get material wealth. they get power. Those humans whose heritage includes certain other beings (humans can interbreed with Deep Ones for instance) generally get other physical powers, and physical immortality. When the Old Ones return, these hybrid beings will not die. They will become wholly inhuman and go on about their business.’
Re Actual Religions
I’ll stick to Judaism, where I can speak with the most authority. The Talmud teaches that all the righteous shall have their reward. A few milennia of debate have yet to make clear what that reward is. The great sages also agree that it’s ,much harder for a Jew to be righteous than a gentile. Jews have to follow 613 commandments. Gentiles only have to abide by the seven laws of Noah. So not only don’t the goyim necessarily suffer, they have an easier time of it than we do.
Well, yes, but that’s not exactly punishment; they’re going to live in a “paradise earth” which by all accounts will be fairly pleasant.
Even the wicked, SFAIK, are not going to be “punished” in the JW eschatology. They will simply cease to exist, but there is no hell for them.
On the wider question of whether there is a religion in which believers suffer and are punished; yes, Christianity. Even the Devil, as lots of medieval theologians point out, believes in God, and while Protestant Christians are very strong on justification through faith, the Catholic and Orthodox traditions asserts that those who die in a state of mortal sin will suffer in hell, regardless of what they believe or don’t believe, and those who die in a state of lesser sin will also go through an experience of suffering, albeit their ultimate destiny is salvation.
Well, to some extent this might be claimed for the doctrine of unconditional election in Calvinist Protestantism. Believers hold that God predestines some souls to salvation and the rest of mankind is doomed to eternal punishment, no matter how strong their faith or how admirable their deeds.
So in this form of Calvinism, the promise of salvation for believers has been transformed into a sort of lottery ticket: you might turn out to be one of the lucky ones who will be saved from damnation, but you probably won’t, and in any case the outcome was foreordained long ago and there’s nothing you can do to affect it either way.
This fairly Eeyoreish doctrine has had a surprisingly large contingent of believers in the days since Calvin.
Baptists in the south. Not quite the same as Calvinism with all that predestination and stuff— more like “you could theoretically go to heaven, insofar as you’ve embraced the Baptist doctrine and the good Bible, but in real life we sinners are so bloody awful about keeping our nose clean and our soul uncontaminated that we’re all doomed unless Jesus is in a really soft and gentle mood and decides to rescue our wretched pathetic unworthy asses. But you know he can’t really afford to be that way with everyone, the wicked gotta go to hell, and none of us deserve it. Most likely he just sheds a tear of disappointment to see what you’ve done with yourself and watches you slide down the chute to eternal damnation”.
Not really. What you have described is a caricature of what Calvinists believe. Yes, Calvinists do believe that God foreordains some for salvation and leaves the rest in their sins. But this is not done “no matter how strong their faith or how admirable their deeds.” The teaching of Calvinism is that all of humanity is “dead in sins and trespasses” before God (Ephesians 2:1,2). Without God bringing the dead person to spiritual life, they will never attain to faith, but will always reject God. "As it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10-12).
While man has a free will that allows him to do as he wishes according to his nature, that nature is dominated by sin, and the sinner will never turn to God unless he has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. When God has elected someone for salvation, that person is first regenerated (“born again”) by the Holy Spirit and then is able to come to faith (which, biblically, means trust for salvation, not mere intellectual assent). Therefore, nobody who has true faith will fail to find himself among the elect.
The non-elect person will either have no interest in spiritual things at all, or else may be religious, even claiming to be Christian, but fail to trust in Christ alone for salvation, either living as a hypocrite or living in self-righteousness, trusting his own goodness to save him. That is why Christ indicated that some who claimed his name would nonetheless be rejected: "“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness’” (Matthew 7:21-23).
The point is that there is no “lottery ticket.” Those not saved will be lost because they rejected Christ in one way or another; all who come to actual trust in Christ will be saved.
I can understand your not agreeing with Calvinism; even lots of Christians don’t. But I’d encourage you to understand the doctrine correctly before rejecting it.
If it’s late enough to mention imaginary religions in sometimes-pornographic fantasy-world comics, you could look at the worshippers of Sithrak in the Oglaf on-line comic.
No links, because of occasional visible unrealistically-drawn reproductive organs, and episodes of non-reproductive sexual contact between humans (and, uh, non-humans).
If you consider certain parts of the Transhumanist/AI Singularity belief system religious (and I think it’s reasonable to do so), then Roko’s Basilisk probably qualifies.
And, before you go search for it, or follow my link below, be aware that most believers in it believe that learning about Roko’s Basilisk makes you more likely to be punished. So following the link might doom you to endless multiverses of torment, while ignoring it will leave you unharmed. So, it’s even stronger than believers also being punished. Believers are the only ones punished.
One of the several religions I’ve made up is Manifold Immortality. The creed of this religion states that in an infinite universe there exists an infinite number of exact copies of yourself, at vast distances from one another; if one copy dies somewhere, there are others to carry on. This idea is similar to the idea of ‘quantum immortality’ which requires infinite copies of yourself in a many-worlds universe. No matter how many of these identical mind-states cease to exist there will always be others.
Some of these copies could be simulations made by Roko’s Basilisks or by more benign entities, others could be Boltzmann Brains appearing at random in the quantum foam. Note that even though Manifold Immortality, as a belief system, ensures the eternal prolongation of life, it does not guarantee happiness - a significant fraction of these future instances of the believer’s mind-state will be in agony, or in a condition that is undesirable for other reasons.
Yes, but that doesn’t really contradict what I said. According to the unconditional-election form of Calvinist doctrine, sinners can have what they believe to be unshakeable faith in God and lead what they believe to be a perfectly Christian life, and still be damned. In other words, there is no guaranteed way to distinguish between an elect recipient of salvation and a sinner doomed to damnation, not even in the believer’s own consciousness.
That’s what makes salvation a “lottery ticket” from the believer’s point of view: everybody’s bought in, but nobody has any way of determining who will gain the prize that’s any better than mere random guessing.
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Those not saved will be lost because they rejected Christ in one way or another; all who come to actual trust in Christ will be saved.
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Sounds like what you’ve got there is the doctrine of conditional election, not unconditional. Calvinism isn’t one single monolithic belief system, you know.
[QUOTE=NeonMadman]
But I’d encourage you to understand the doctrine correctly before rejecting it.
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Well, religious doctrines are indeed often more complex than the people discussing them realize.
The only “lottery ticket” aspect of it, then, is whether one is being honest with oneself. The Bible says we can know that we have eternal life; if we think we have it but don’t, then it’s because we are actively deceiving ourselves.
I realize there are shades of grey (or is that gray? I can never remember), but I can’t imagine anyone who understands Calvinism at all disagreeing with my statement that “Those not saved will be lost because they rejected Christ in one way or another; all who come to actual trust in Christ will be saved.” Under Calvinism, people are not lost because God has not elected them; they are lost because they are sinners. To say otherwise is like looking at a convict being executed for murder and saying that he’s being executed because the governor didn’t pardon him. That’s wrong; he’s being executed for murder. The governor has no obligation to pardon anyone, and it’s not the governor’s fault that the convict murdered someone.
Now, that I can agree with. BTW, re-reading my earlier comment, I realized that it may have come off as somewhat strident in tone, which was not my intention. Sorry about that.
Well, when you are surprised by an outcome, you should alwasys ask yourself if your understanding is faulty.
In actual practice, (as well as in theory), Calvinism wasn’t like that.
In actual practice, Calvinism meant “Those people are pre-ordained to be Christian. It follows that we are pre-ordained to be evangalists, and that it would be un-Christian to fail in our clear duty to God”
That’s not Eeyoreish, and it’s not a lottery ticket: It presumes a successful outcome, and suggests work for results.
It’s also nothing like what actual Calvinist doctrine of the unconditional-election persuasion actually says. I refer you to the Confessio Belgica of 1618:
Emphasis added. “Work for results” is exactly what this doctrine identifies as irrelevant and beside the point when it comes to God’s salvation.
Like I said, Calvinist doctrine wasn’t monolithic even in the early modern period, and I can well believe that many Calvinist churches today, especially of the conditional-election persuasion, have a different take on salvation. But that doesn’t mean that what I said about this particular Calvinist take on salvation was wrong.
Again, you misunderstand. In biblical Christianity - not just Calvinism - salvation is by faith, not by works. The only way that God *could *elect humans for salvation is “without any consideration of their works,” because, *all *humans being sinners, any consideration of their works would only send them to hell. Those who are saved are saved by God’s grace through faith in Christ apart from any works they may have done, good or bad.
You seem to have the idea that, apart from election, God would look at everyone’s works, and judge some as good and some as bad, based on what they have done in life. But, because of election, He ignores their works and arbitrarily saves some, even though their works are bad, and rejects others, even though their works are good. That is a distortion, not only of Calvinism, but of biblical Christianity itself.
The Bible is quite clear that *nobody’s *works are good enough in God’s eyes - good works are what people *should *be doing, so if they do them, it’s not to their credit. It is, rather, their sins that condemn them. As a comparison, you might be a model citizen for all of your life, but that one day that you murder someone is going to send you to prison for a long time, and your law-abiding life up to that time probably isn’t going to help. You are *expected *to obey the law; you don’t get brownie points for all the times you obeyed it when you commit a crime.
Since nobody has works that are worthy of salvation but all are condemned by their sin, God elects some for salvation, purely by His grace, based on His own good reasons (which are not revealed to humans). Think of the governor walking through death row and pardoning, say, two of the twelve convicts imprisoned there waiting for execution. The governor doesn’t need to explain why he chose the two that he did, nor is it unfair that he didn’t pardon all of them. He didn’t have to pardon anyone; justice calls for all of them to be executed. The pardons are simply an act of grace on his part. Similarly with God; as the complete sovereign, He can pardon (i.e., elect for salvation) those whom He wishes and leave others to the consequences of their sins. The mechanism by which He saves them is faith in Christ, which faith is also a gift of God.
And that is what the basic idea behind Calvinism, and specifically the doctrine of unconditional election, is. You have continued to advance incorrect understandings of what Calvinism is, and you keep insisting that the notions you are offering are a particular version of Calvinism that is somehow different from what Calvinists believe. In fact, the ideas you have advanced are completely contrary to Calvinism. You can put lipstick and an evening gown on a pig and call it a supermodel, but saying it doesn’t make it so.
In quoting original sources, you also seem to misunderstand what they are saying, as I have just illustrated in the last few paragraphs. Your reference to Calvinist churches “of the conditional election persuasion” demonstrates again that you don’t understand the doctrines. One of the “five points” - the non-negotiable doctrines - of Calvinism is unconditional election. Any person or church that embraces conditional election is simply not Calvinist at all. Nothing says you have to believe in this doctrine, to be certain, but again, if you intend to criticize the doctrine, then you ought to represent it accurately; otherwise you are simply burning straw men.
Given the number of times that they have had to change their beliefs because their predictions of the future fell flat, I’d say the chances of that are slim to none.