So all you people saying “no way”, how would your significant other feel if s/he found out you made that choice. That keeping their trust was worth letting 10,000 people die? Would they smother you in kisses or think “hmmm, maybe he’s a little too crazy about me?”
No.
Irrational rationale: They already have cancer. They expect to die more than the person I love expects to be betrayed by me. And what can I say? An extra 10k people dying in a day isn’t going to make a dent in the species. The only way my answer *might *be different is if, in so doing, I could save our entire species.
And even then, I’m *still *not sure.
Qin, I want you to return to this thread when you have a wife and kids 10+ years from now. If your answer hasn’t changed, I will eat my hat.
I think it’s important to realize that practically all of us make that choice, or a closely similar one, every day, by choosing to, say, dine out in a fancy restaurant with our beloved rather than donating the money spent there to charity, where it probably would have fed a family in a poor country for a month – this may not be the same scale, but there also isn’t as much at stake; you wouldn’t loose your love, maybe just have to eat a microwave dinner instead. If we were to truly value the life and well-being of random strangers as much as our own and that of our loved ones, we’d basically have to give away every buck earned that isn’t necessary to our own survival, live at the bare minimum of comfort, etc. But we don’t: we buy stuff we don’t need, live in comfort and luxury, get the ones we love expensive gifts, and so on. And that’s probably a good thing – if we weren’t able to focus our attention on those around us, we’d probably go insane. Think about what it would mean to feel the suffering of everyone around the world as you would feel the suffering of your child or partner.
So now you have conclusive proof of the devil, which means God exists. So I’d say ‘no, foul fiend, this is in God’s hands, not ours.’ And the dead people would go to heaven anyway, unless they were evil of course.
Fuck 'em. All of them. Don’t know 'em, don’t like them, ain’t my problem. Let them make their own infernal pacts.
Besides, I’m not that schmuck Spider-Man: I don’t negotiate with supernatural terrorists. Knowing Old Scratch, he’d only heal them so they could die in car crashes or convoluted but very painful accidents the day after anyway. Fuck him too.
This right here. You know you’d end up with a demon bound to your soul anyway.
Seriously? 200,000 people died a few years back because of that tsunami, and a similar number bought the farm in Haiti with that earthquake, and other than having seen a bunch of news stories about it for a while, it doesn’t matter to me in the least.
10,000 more for whatever reason wouldn’t bother me much at all, especially if it was some supernatural being claiming that he could save them at my whim from their certain, natural death. What proof do I have that they wouldn’t have died anyway from those cancers, or get hit by buses or whatever?
If I choose my spouse, the downside isn’t so clear, but the upside is, but if I choose the 10,000, the downside’s clear, and the up-side is not so clear.
Qin, does it not bother you that the Carpenter – i.e., Jesus – is clearly allowing these people to die? Why on Earth are you willing to trust Mephistopheles’ judgment and motives over JC’s?
The way I see it, the 10,000 aren’t in my monkeysphere. My spouse is. There aren’t very many people in this world who give a damn about me in a serious way (that’s not a complaint–I’m pretty introverted and prefer a few close friends to a bunch of acquaintances), and I’m not losing the best of them (even if it means he just hates me forever) to save a bunch of strangers who are going to die anyway.
So most of you say you’d never give up your relationship with your beloved to save 10,000. That’s what you tell the devil. And the Devil smiles.
“A fine choice. Thank you for playing my little game. And just to show you I’m not as bad as some say, I’m going to throw in a little present for you. Instead of your relationship withering and dying, as would have happened if you’d chosen otherwise, I’m going to make it grow ever stronger. You truly will become ‘one soul in two bodies’ as they say. However you will be going to truly depressing funerals, as you agreed.”
So you go a a bunch of funerals. And they are horrible. The ones where the deceased was old anyway aren’t too bad, sometimes the family expresses relief that their grandfather’s suffering is at an end. But the funerals of the young are a symphony of pain and grief. One in particular stands out as a local maximum of human misery. A single father, whose wife died of an aneurism a decade ago has just lost his only child, a fifteen year old girl. He sits at the funeral, his face dead, oblivious to the attempts of friends and relatives to comfort him.
Two years later you sit at home waiting for your beloved to return from an errand. The doorbell rings. It’s the police, their faces grave. your beloved has been struck by a drunk driver. Death was instantaneous.
At trial, you see the driver. It is the same father whose daughters funeral you attended. His sister takes the stand to argue for mitigation. “He never used to drink, not a drop. But when Julie died, he just, I don’t know, lost it. he’s not a bad man, he just couldn’t bear his grief.”
Now in your empty home you sometimes think you hear the faint peals of diabolic laughter. It could be real or you could be going mad. Does it really make a difference?
Never make a deal with the devil. Just say “get behind me Satan” and walk away. He only has the power you give him, and he will always fuck with you. It’s probably good that he is a fictional character.
But agreeing to give up your relationship for saving 10K people who were going to die anyway IS taking the deal. Otherwise, nothing changes. If you say, “I’m not taking your deal, Devil,” things would be the way they were. Your relationship is there, the cancer patients still die.
In your post, the Devil’s just being a dick, but he would do that no matter what you picked.
Sucks to be them, I reckon. I wouldn’t strike 100K people with cancer to maintain my relationship because that would obviously be evil. But I’m not going to sacrifice it to save people who are stricken through no fault of mine or his.
Besides, whenever anything shitty happens in my life, churchy folks assure me it’s all part of Og’s plan. When shitty things like cancer happen in someone else’s life, I can only presume this must also be part of the plan. And who the hell am I to be interfering in divine plans?
In the sense that there’s a person whose joy is your joy, whose pain is your pain, who is as or more important to you than you are to yourself, whose presence makes you feel like you’re home no matter where you are. If you had ever experienced that, you wouldn’t be able to dismiss losing it as “just” anything.
And if you don’t know what I’m being asked to sacrifice, you can’t accurately weigh the costs of each choice against each other and have no right to make any judgments about my decision. (Besides, if we’re in a world where Christianity is provably true, being all judgmental is a bad, bad move regardless. The Carpenter no likey the judgey.)
I don’t know how he’d feel, and ultimately it doesn’t matter. If he decided I was an obsessive asshole and he needed to split, so be it. At least he would be leaving me for something I actually did and knowing that I love him.
Yep. For what the Dope collectively spends just on premium packages for their cable/satellite in a year, we could build any number of wells in places that have limited or no access to clean water and save more than 100,000 who die from lack of access to clean water. But we don’t. We could do incredible things with the money we spend on high-speed internet and Starbucks, but instead we sit around sipping coffee and watching porn or arguing about why someone is wrong, WRONG I SAY, to choose their spouse over people who are dying of cancer.
Fair point, I’ll have to re-think the ending.
In this particular scenario I’m a little diverted. If this did happen to me and Mephi has proven himself to me beyond all doubt (or capacity for doubt), and he has mentioned the Carpenter, I would assume that Christianity (in some form) is correct.
If Christianity is correct, then I’m not playing under the rules I would normally work under. If Christianity is correct, this life has little meaning. Since it is the blink of an eye when compared to eternity. So why bother to save any of the sick when they will simply be with God, or punished by Him, sooner?
I can’t see how making a deal with the Mephi is something that God wanted me to do, since he gave them Cancer in the first place. Also, I have to think in light of the soul, I’d now believe that I possess. I’d want to spend the rest of eternity with my wife if possible, so ending our relationship now would have consequences beyond what I’m willing to pay. I suppose I’d convert to Christianity and ask forgiveness, since they do that.
Now if Mephi were an alien or a nanite robot and there were no Christianity-is-true angle, I’d probably save those lives. I love my wife, but I can’t let so much suffering happen when it’s in my power to stop it.
What, something like, “I’ll make her love you, if you agree these 10,000 should die”?
That’s actually an even easier decision. 10,000 dead and the woman I love gets brainwashed? Screw that - hell no.
Actually, this touches upon another “problem” with Mephisto’s little charade: for all I know Gramps here in bed 221 is an ex-SS. Georges in 1.587 is a pedophile rapist. Cute little Kevin with the googly eyes ate his sister and so on and so forth. Hell, if I was Mephistopheles I’d totally rig it that way, are you kidding ? That’d be *hilarious *!
The Devil is the original troll, is what I’m saying.
I was going to link to the monkeysphere, too - I think it is a great description of why most people wouldn’t lose their loved one to save 10,000 strangers. Besides, I’m not the one who created death and misery and love - I’m just a passenger on this ball of mud, trying to make my way the best I can.
Yeah, come back when you are a forty year old virgin.
As to the question, well, its no question at all. 10,000 people have probably died since I left work this evening, whats another 10,000 in the greater scheme of things? I’ll look out for me and mine, Curtis can worry about all the rest.
This type of bargain is a fool’s one, but I’m really not with the people who say they would sacrifice everyone and everything for their beloved.
While you may not love them, wouldn’t most people at least feel a little bit of sympathy for the 100,000 dead of Haiti or the many others of various other natural disasters?
In this case God has allowed a choice to be made however/-obviously the daemon can be lying. In this case he/she/it may decide to kill both the 10,000 and the loved one no matter what you do