I’ve always thought Pascal’s Wager was bunk as well, for this reason and another. The other is this – I don’t actually choose any beliefs – I believe what I believe based on my experiences and judgement, not because I’ve chosen to be an atheist/agnostic. If someone offered me 100 million bucks to believe in a certain god, I could fake it, but I couldn’t actually make myself believe without some sort of experience that showed me a deity existed. So even if I thought believing was the better gamble, I couldn’t actually believe anything unless I had some sort of experience that sealed it for me.
In a IMHO thread, a bunch of us discussed whether one could twist oneself around into a belief. Several of us held that, by using self-hypnosis and other techniques, one could persuade or convert oneself to hold an “alien” belief. For 100 million bucks? You bet I could! It might take some drugs and torture, but for that kinda money, I can be tortured a while!
In the ordinary course of events, you’re quite right. We come about our beliefs from our upbringing, observation, reasoning, etc. But even there, social pressure, family influence, and the persuasion of others – you might some day meet the most engaging Catholic priest, and next thing you know… All of these have outside influence on our beliefs.
(I actually have changed my mind on various matters, due to open debate of the SDMB variety. Now, imagine if this were contrived, with an artificially staged debate. It might go quite a way to shifting one’s opinion and beliefs…)
Anyway, can I get a small down payment on that 100 mill? I’ll need to hire a team of brainwashers…
I might choose to undergo hypnosis or brainwashing for a $100 million. But in that case, I’m not choosing to believe. I’m choosing $100 million. And I don’t have any control over whether I’m the type of person who can be hypnotized or brainwashed. I imagine that I’m suggestible in some areas, but not suggestible in others. But how I’m wired is not under my control.
Well, this is another of those entire-books-have-been-written-about-it questions, so it’s probably impossible to give a good answer in just a couple of paragraphs; but you deserve an answer, so I’ll try to give you one (even if it’s not very good).
I’ve always been taught (and believed) that hell is a state of mind, so I tend to think of heaven and hell more as poles than bins. That is, heaven is perfect friendship with God; hell is perfect estrangement from God - and most relationships fall somewhere in the middle.
If Jesus is right about God being like a father, then determining his will is equivalent to figuring out what’s best for the human family - meaning that atheists (and people of non-Christian cultures) are not at a disadvantage in knowing right and wrong. Externally, a person’s code of conduct does not depend on whether it’s rooted in “love your neighbor as yourself” or “we didn’t get to the top of the food chain by turning on each other.” Internally, I don’t know… but in my experience, atheists have a passion for truth - and God is alleged to be The Truth; perhaps you are not rejecting God, only my inadequate description of him.
But if God “can neither deceive nor be deceived” then coming into his presence means being stripped of all the “I’m a good person (except …)” lies we all tell ourselves and clearly seeing the kind of life we really lived. I think hell is less like a Turkish prison and more like the time your favorite teacher said they were disappointed in you - and you knew they were in the right and felt that even the harshest, most extravagantly cruel punishment your worst enemy could dream up would have been easier to bear than hearing that one teeny tiny little word. Personally, I still cringe at the memory of some of the crappy things I’ve said and done; when I imagine the possibility of facing all the times in my life when I could have - SHOULD HAVE! - done better… well, those are the times when I hope there really is no god - or at least no afterlife.
I’m not sure that answers your question, but I hope there was something helpful in there somewhere - maybe I should have just said “I’m not sure I’m going to have that problem.”:o
I’m not sure you’ve gone anywhere near the questions I’ve actually asked, which had very little to do with any extra-biblical visions of Hell, and more to do with how one would cope with the more traditional and/or Biblical concept if you were deemed worthy of entrance but your loved one(s) weren’t. In your “answer”, you pretty much Disneyfied Hell, and didn’t address the main issue at all.
I didn’t say it was exactly the same argument, just a similar one. One common response to the question of why God has provided no solid evidence of his existence in modern times is that faith is important, and God showing up eliminates the need for faith in God’s existence. Thus people would be constrained to believe due to the evidence. That is similar to being constrained by knowledge of hell. Whether God is scary or not, we’d be a lot more likely to live by the rules if we knew he existed. Fear might or might not be involved - but fear is not important to my point. The availability of information is. After all, God might show us a hell where we just cooled our heels and weren’t tortured. It would still be worse than heaven, but not to be feared.
Whew. I’m not the only one who noticed this. For a moment there, I thought I’d suffered a stroke.
Lewis was being quite the smug asshole in this book (not in the other ones in the series.) How easy it is to say atheists are atheists because we are blind - and then not giving any solid evidence.
Noted. You and the theologians you like are somehow more correct than the equally credentialed theologians who disagree. The rest of us might as well flip a coin.
I’ll readily admit my post was unfocused, and I think the unbiblical thing is a fair (if somewhat ironic) criticism; but I’m going to object to “Disneyfied”
The bible uses the image of fire to indicate the worst experience possible. Now, I’ve never experienced torture, but John McCain has; and not long after the September 11th attacks (when “enhanced interrogation” was getting a lot of popular support), he wrote an op ed piece for Newsweek in which he claimed that psychological torture was worse than physical torture…
I think the worst state of mind of all is guilt - it’s not just feeling terrible but feeling that you deserve to feel terrible. I think that if it were really brought home to us Americans how hardhearted it is to spend the kind of money we spend on frivolities while people elsewhere in the world are starving, we might BEG to be thrown into a nice pool of lava.
And that’s just Judgment for you.
As you’ve no doubt heard, no one is righteous, not one - all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god. No one is going to be “deemed worthy of entrance.”
The good news (if you can trust that Jesus guy) is we can ask for a second chance: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. The way out of hell is forgiving others, meaning that the people who go to hell are the ones who would rather endure unimaginable agony than let go of a few petty grudges. Do you want to spend eternity with people like that?
I hope that’s a bit better than the first time. I don’t usually think about questions like this (I figure that if my duty is the same whether god exists or not, then it’s best to focus on duty and let eternity take care of itself), and I’m not sure why you’re so interested in it. I mean, if there’s no god, no afterlife, no supernatural anything… then… isn’t that whole heaven/hell thing kind of moot?
I might beg for the power to make restitution. I might beg for the power to ensure the crime is never repeated. I might beg for forgiveness.
To be thrown into lava? WTF? Why? How is that going to make the world any better?
It’s not “just judgment.” It’s disproportionate, and, worse, it’s completely pointless. It’s like the old English deal of hanging, drawing, quartering, burning, and then decapitation. The guy was dead long before the end of the process; after that, it’s just desecrating the corpse.
If someone is so irredeemably evil that he can be put on fire forever…it makes more sense to annihilate him entirely. Judge him, scorn him, even scourge him – and then extinguish his personality, once and for all. There can be no rational point in keeping him alive and suffering, if there is to be no hope at all, ever, for his redemption.
Hell only makes sense if there is a way out of it.
Jesus’ dad is a dick works too. 
CMC fnord!
Ironically, I’m pretty much certain that John McCain would disagree with you here. Not only that, but it’s virtually impossible to make someone guilty for something if they don’t want to be; if they don’t agree that they fucked up. And I don’t know about you, but most of us atheists aren’t going to feel guilty that we didn’t ask for forgiveness from a being that ostensibly refused to provide any tangible proof that he exists in the first place.
(Although, perhaps a bit of irony, if this truly is so infinitely torturous as you claim, and only those who believe in it get to experience it, we may indeed face the same paradox (and solution) as the people of Discworld face with regard to missionaries. 
)
I don’t know if you’ve ever actually felt truly guilty, or if you’ve ever actually suffered intense, persistent physical pain, but I have. And I’d trade the pain for guilt any day of the week. When people talk about the psychological effects being the worst torture, they don’t mean guilt. They mean the shock and terror and anticipation of horrific events.
Of course, this runs into the typical problem of “why the hell did God set the system up like this?”
Question. You say this. Most of the pastors I’ve heard make it pretty clear that hell is inescapable - that any change in our opinion has to happen before we die, and that if we do not repent beforehand, we’re just going to hell forever. Why should I believe you over them? Can you provide any evidence for your position?
Nope. Because if guilt legitimately is the worst torture imaginable, then my loved ones in heaven still know that I’m undergoing the worst torture imaginable!
Which should make them feel guilty for not doing more to get you to heaven . . . where people feel guilt, the worst torture imaginable. :smack:
[DEL][COLOR=“Black”]Turtles[/DEL][/COLOR] Guilt all the way down, and up!
CMC fnord!
And just to emphasize this, it doesn’t matter what form the torture is in hell. You could claim that it’s simply detachment from god… But if that detachment hurts us, then guess what: our loved ones in heaven still know we’re suffering! It doesn’t matter whether it’s boiling in oil, stubbing your toe repeatedly, or guilt, or simply a disconnect from god, if it’s “the worst torture imaginable”, or even torture at all, then the problem simply is not resolved. You still have the same damn issue, regardless of how hard you try to make it seem palatable.
There are some logical and scripturally problems with people in eternal hell (the biggest one is God is Love, perfect, planed everything out and knew everyone before creation,and desires all to be saved), and I find that there are wiggle words used in the Bible when talking about hell. Hell seems scriptural eternal, but it does not say that anyone will be there eternally. The smoke of their (the people in hell) torment stays for ages of ages (sometimes translated for ever and ever), but it does not say that stay for that time. Likewise ‘their worm does not die’, but it does not again say that stay. etc.
The only 3 which one can make a case of is the Devil, Beast, and false prophet, for as the people’s ‘smoke of torment will be for ages of ages’, for these 3 the ‘torment will be for ages of ages’ (or sometimes translated: for ever and ever) . Revelation makes that distinction.
So the effect of a eternal hell is 1 to scare the living shit out of followers of the religion, most likely to increase compliance and dependance on the church. And 2, as the power of the church fell, to have people realize for themselves that the concept is not logical with a loving God and leave the church.
So…not forever, but just ages and ages.
Let’s see if we can get a sense of perspective when it comes to punishment, then.
Can someone come up with a sin that would justify setting a person on fire for ages and ages?
How about for one hundred years?
How about for twenty years?
How about for one year?
Can anyone justify setting a person a fire for an extended period of time as a punishment?
If they burn, but are not consumed, then, sure… The equivalent pain of a severe burn, with no permanent effects, could easily be substituted for caning, lashing, whipping, or other punishments that have been practiced (and still are.)
(ETA: I can justify it. I do not favor it!)
If you steal my wallet, you get set on fire for, say, four seconds. That would certainly deter me!
Of course, the industrialized westernized democracies have moved away from corporal punishment. But part of the reason for this is that whipping (etc.) leaves permanent physical damage. If you had a magical/science fictional “agonizer” that caused pain but did no damage, there would certainly be some who would suggest its use in criminal punishment.
Magical/Science fiction, eh. Yup. Maybe some day we’ll have a way to cause the sensation of burning without actually burning folks.
Whoo! But how do you cause pain by heating the skin of the victim without doing permanent harm to the skin and nerves and other tissue?
Still… I guess I’d rather be targeted by something like that than by an old-fashioned flamethrower…
Ah, yes, serves me right for trying to get clever. I meant “just” primarily in the sense of “merely” - that is, Judgment is scary enough without thinking about Hell. But I also think justice demands that we all at the very least acknowledge the wrong we’ve done - and if there’s any truth to the widely-held belief that crossing over into the spirit realm brings the capacity for increased intensity of experience, that reckoning will be more terrible than anything that could possibly happen to us here on earth. (However, it would be overshadowed by the ineffable joy of being welcomed like the prodigal son and finally - finally! - understanding what all the crap in our lives was all about.)