The person in question refused to accept that you must either believe God/s exist is more likely, or no God/s exist is more likely, or you believe that the likelihood of Gods existence is perfectly balanced. — Jon Sendama

Yeah, okay.

Here’s the thing: “... is God” just isn’t like any other predicate, and neither is “... exists”. If you’re hoping to deal with this situation by appealing to straightforward logic, you’re out of luck. That you can cast the issue in numerical terms makes no difference, I’m sorry.

Yes, for any two values between 0 and 1, they’re equal or one is greater than the other. It’s a ways from there to belief formation or belief attribution. It’s especially far if it’s not clear how anyone could derive the values to be compared. I just don’t think the usual ways of putting a number on it are much use here, so there’s no point to this analysis. (For instance, suppose you want to set your prior for God existing to the baseline, how commonly universes were created by God — how you gonna do that?)

Formal methods are swell where they apply. You don’t get to assume they apply always and everywhere.

Maybe google “false dichotomy” as that seems to be what the person who doesn’t want to choose is claiming to be a fallacy in the reasoning of the person offering a choice. Should be some discussion of when that particular claim doesn’t apply — which is what you seem to be looking for.

Surely it's their burden to demonstrate that their objection has grounds by showing that there could be other options, rather than just claiming — Jon Sendama

Shrug. I don’t think there’s much joy in obsessing over fallacies and certainly not this burden-of-proof thing people get exercised about when debating online. Most philosophical arguments are informal and persuasive. If I tell you there are only two options, I should want to persuade you I’m right about that. What’s the point of not doing so?

Since humans only live for a finite number of years (and can commit only a finite number of evils during this time), they can commit only a finite amount of evil.

Is that how that works? We count how many evil acts you’ve committed? More is worser?

God could have done a better job letting people know about it (for example, God could have given Hitler, Stalin, etc. a few more hints on what would happen if they continued on their evil path.)

So the argument goes like this:

1. It would be appallingly unfair of God to allow Hitler and Stalin to experience eternal damnation (in any of the several forms contemplated, including annihilation).
2. At most they should get a lot of damnation, but not an infinite amount.
3. Honestly, they probably shouldn’t even get that, because how could they possibly know — really know — there would be a price to pay in the afterlife.
4. The whole system was rigged against Hitler (and Stalin!) from the beginning.
5. Guy that would set up a system like this, basically to entrap Hitler (and Stalin!), that’s not a good guy.
6. Anyone who thinks it’s okay to treat Hitler (and Stalin!) so shabbily, is also morally suspect.

Because of the magnitude of knowledge that is needed to support our daily living, the power rests solely in the dictates, goals, etc. of the business overlords that horde and produce that technology. — schopenhauer1

Are you still talking about the same thing now? Aren’t the business overlords by and large just as ignorant of the workings of the technology on which their own fortune is based?

he shows the people how to defy the cruel overlord — Isaac

Well no -- the villain here is the Pharisees.

I'm not sure offering both problem and solution is better than offering only solution. — Isaac

And I would assume it is. If you show both, you show not just an answer (Rubric 15 in The Little Book of How to be Perfect — memorize by Wednesday), but how solution and problem fit — which is, what having a solution looks like, and what solving a problem looks like. Of course it’s better.

Maybe a kind of deep psychological game whereby we're shown the false way only the more to feel the redemption. God's a bastard so that his son can show us how not to be? — Isaac

The word ‘dialectic’ fair lunges to mind here.

I’m no Bible scholar, so I can’t tell you what’s really going on here. After the would-be stoners leave, Jesus also refuses to condemn the woman — is Jesus not without sin? Couldn’t he have cast the first stone? But he never offered or agreed to; the first stoner was to come from them. — All he says to her is, go and sin no more. He doesn’t deny that she has sinned. He denies only that men are to be enforcers of the law he acknowledges. Where is that in the law? Why are the Pharisees ashamed, instead of arguing that whether they’re also sinners has nothing to do with it? It feels like what Jesus pulls off here is not a reinterpretation of this particular edict, but of the sense in which the law is law: it’s not something we are to enforce, so that means it’s not other-facing; and that fits because he gets there by getting the would-be stoners to look inward, to look at themselves rather than the adulteress — and that makes the law a matter of what God expects of you, not what you are entitled to expect of others.

Which is somewhat curious, because the original problem is adultery, which is something of a threat to family and community stability, for which this religion offered a solution — tell them it’s forbidden, and if they keep at it, go nuclear on their ass. (These fuckin’ adulterers, man, it’s like talking to a wall, amirite?) Jesus calls bullshit on that, without saying that adultery is just fine. Right here, you can see a flip from a proscriptive scheme — these specific behaviors are forbidden — to a prescriptive scheme — here’s how you should live. That raises the troubling specter of human perfectibility, but you only get that idea, as here, by acknowledging human imperfection. There are some hints here about how to feel about that, but not everyone took the hint, so instead we have sometimes gotten a new, much more sweeping enforcement regime — because under a prescriptive model, any deviation is by definition forbidden.

But that’s a tangent. (He said, as if he had a point.) The question is what resources could Jesus draw upon in the existing Jewish tradition he was born into to pull off anything like this sort of reinterpretation? Because besides being, you know, God, he also looks a lot like a really interesting Jewish rabbi.

I think a book in which the main object of worship advocates stoning girls to death within the first 28% of the book (better Ennui Elucidator?), is laying the thorns on pretty thick, with the whole love and compassion redeeming theme makes a very late and understated entrance by comparison. — Isaac

I keep writing these posts that are somewhat complementary to yours — trying to add in whatever I feel you’ve left out that’s important — and I never really get around to trying to deal head-on with the arguments, such as they are. (And I’ve never given @fdrake that response to Mengele I promised.) Maybe it’s just my temperament, but when an argument is at loggerheads like this, I tend to think both sides are wrong (and right, in their own way) and try something else.

In this case, we might consider a claim like this: Christianity condones stoning. and is therefore bad. I am invited to defend the other side — either that stoning is actually okay, or that in fact Christianity does not condone stoning if you read the Bible with some special sophistication.

We know that Christianity, like other religions, does change over time — here taking “Christianity” to denote a sort of big tent that can hold people holding newer views, newer versions of older views, and people who hold to that old time religion. If we consider, rightly or wrongly, stoning to be a practice recommended in the scripture, and possibly also an element of the old time Christianity, then we might want to ask something like this: how does an individual Christian decide where to sit under the big tent? Why would an individual Christian choose to sit among stoners or non-stoners?

We can approach this in a slightly different way. If a Christian and his fellows do not practice stoning, despite whatever the Bible says and despite what their parents and grandparents (and so on) said about the virtue of stoning, why not? Why would any Christian not practice something condoned by scripture and their forebears? How do they come to think this is a possible way of being Christian, and how do they convince others to accept this as a kind of Christianity?

As it happens, stoning is a terrible example, and it’s odd that it’s come up here, because if you were to listicle the all-time top five quotes Jesus of Nazareth is famous for, one of those would be: “Let him that is among you without sin, cast the first stone at her.” So stoning’s not one of the interesting cases at all, because Jesus made it awfully clear where he stood, and he did so without giving the Pharisees reason to accuse him of going against the law. Christians are all set on this one.

On the other hand, we might look at what Jesus did here as an example of the technique. There’s the law that authorizes and even requires the stoning of the adulteress. Jesus does not question the law or those calling his attention to it. Elsewhere he even says that he comes not to destroy but to fulfill the law, so what’s the deal? Our question now might be, why doesn’t Jesus agree to join in an afternoon’s stoning? And further, how does he get away with it? That is, how does he not stone the adulteress and still manage not to be accused of impiety?

The question of Jesus’s piety is slightly odd. You could say the gospels assume it’s an impossibility, what with his being God and all; but then again, what with his being God and all, the idea of him being pious doesn’t quite make sense. Nevertheless, Jesus provides here an example of how religious practice can change without directly challenging existing doctrine. He just adds a little twist that makes it impossible for people of good conscience to engage in that practice.

Does he, in doing so, implicitly condemn any who, in the past, engaged in stoning in his father’s name? That strikes me as a prickly question. I expect he’d wriggle out of it somehow.

Should have also said that traditional realism clearly has issues, so I'm not really up for denouncing either in the name of the other.

Eh. Almost the whole discussion has been pretty far from Gettier, but still valuable.

"If a belief is false, then there's no way it can be justified," is a pretty common reaction to JTB theories, and it just happens that a lot of people don't even encounter JTB outside Gettier.

You've been arguing that we call beliefs 'true' when we have especially strong justification for believing them, perhaps even the strongest we can imagine.

Naturally then you'll equate 'false' with not or very poorly or weakly justified. It's consistent, but way off the reservation for talking about Gettier, which assumes you can have, in your circumstances, what anyone would consider very good reasons for your belief, which happens to be false. You have to keep track of everyone's perspective here, and you just take the extra step of saying that this last step is also perspective-bound.

You argue this position consistently, or at least as consistently as you can, because it sure looks like our ordinary ways of thinking and talking about the world have a built-in commitment to realism. (I know you describe your position as a kind of realism, but it's not a kind anyone wants.) That makes it hard even to state your position. Whether it makes it incoherent -- that's a tough one. I tend to think so, but I'm not sure it's a battle worth fighting. -- That is, the best way forward might be to pass right by this debate and try a different approach.

If a belief is false then it clearly was not well-justified. — Isaac

Have you read Gettier’s little paper?

Maybe it is better to learn from a book with some prickly parts and some rough edges.
— Srap Tasmaner

You might have to draw this out a bit for me. — Isaac

I think I really fell in love with Wittgenstein in the Preface to PI, where he says, “I should not wish to have spared anyone the trouble of thinking.”

If you want to help people develop a moral sense, and an understanding of their relationship to God, you need to give them stuff to really chew on, stuff that isn’t necessarily easy to understand or readily assent to. I remember being really impressed with the way Kierkegaard opens Fear and Trembling with four different versions of the story of the binding of Isaac (not the video game), drawing out its complexity, not just as a matter of faith but also psychology.

The alternative — well, you could shorten the Bible to the ten commandments, and maybe the beatitudes. A pamphlet. Maybe you could extract enough material to make something about the size of the Sayings of Chairman Mao. Or you could make a storybook with only nice things in it — like Bible Stories for Children. All of these look more dangerous to me than what we have, because people will be spared the trouble of thinking and feeling their way to a deeper morality, and though I’m not in principle concerned with their relationship with God, I think if they’re going to have such a thing in their lives, it shouldn’t be easy or simple.

a trivial social media forum — Isaac

Hey now

But one narrative among many, yes? — Isaac

I can’t help but think so, yes.

When people want to feel part of a group, want to find some meaning to the whole charity, forgiveness, compassion thing...do we want them reaching for Christianity as their story (the one with all the misogyny, homophobia and abuse in it too), or would we rather they reach for something a little less fraught? — Isaac

When I was young, I thought the main problem with Christianity was that it wasn’t true — just a culturally transmitted delusion, wishful thinking and fantasy. I’m a bit more inclined to see it now as you describe here, with the caveat that the narrative Christians use to structure their world may not be the one in the Bible, or in the Catechism, no matter what they say. It’s connected to the Bible, but in a great number of different ways, and it’s complicated. I think that’s fine. We all agree there isn’t just one narrative in the Bible to start with, so why pretend it’s simple and people have a simple relationship to it?

I get the reformist impulse — Jefferson, the Enlightenment slave-owner — made his own version of the gospels where he snipped out all the supernatural bits to present Jesus of Nazareth as a guy worth listening to, not a divine presence. There’s lots of ways to snip. But I wonder if maybe it isn’t better not to. Maybe it is better to learn from a book with some prickly parts and some rough edges. If there was nothing in it to reject — or at least to have to wonder pretty hard about — you’d have a religion where everyone did believe everything in The Book exactly as it is written, and that starts to look like not such a great idea. I think it might actually be good for Christians that their book is such a mess. (Back to the rough ground, you know.)

I’m not sure what to say next that would have any value as philosophy, so I’ll give a couple examples.

A very nice piece of qualitative sociology is Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her method is to try to come up with a sort of ‘story behind the beliefs’, and it’s interesting stuff. It’s another way you might try to deal with inconsistency you perceive that your subjects don’t.

There’s a preacher I know slightly, has a small church in semi-rural Georgia, and like a lot of communities theirs has a noticeably larger immigrant population than it used to, mostly from Mexico I think. Some of his longtime parishioners came to him to say they didn’t really like what he’d been doing, letting in all these new folks. “Which ones do you want me to chase off?” he asked, and they got all embarrassed, we didn’t mean that, it’s not like it, but he stood his ground, and told them it’s exactly like that. “Who do you want me to turn away?” (You might think the shame would be enough, but casual racism has been so normal here for so long that it’s tough to get around. What did the trick, he told me, was that he’s known some of these people since they were born, so he could say, “These people are new to our community and they come to us because they need a little help. As I recall, you’ve needed a little help now and then too.” And then he can remind them of such times in their lives. Putting it like that, he told me, he could see the light go on, and they could see that these new folks weren’t really so different from them.)

I don’t think you have to be a Christian to be this virtuous, but it’s a fact that being Christian is his way of being virtuous, and I think it would be just as big a mistake to say he’s virtuous despite being Christian. What about his parishioners? Aren’t they Christians too, but bad? I think they’re just not quite as far along as their pastor, and Christians do very much talk about being a Christian as a struggle to be the sort of person God wants you to be, not something anyone’s ever finished with. As it turns out, a lot of evangelical pastors have found their congregations changing, becoming more political and less religious, in a sense, and not all of them are handling it quite as well as my guy. A lot are quitting because they’re exhausted.

All philosophy involves thinking. — Xtrix

If you mean “philosophy” aspirationally.

Not all thinking is philosophy. — Xtrix

It’s a good starting assumption. Thinking may or may not turn out to be philosophy.

These two points together seem headed for a question like, “What makes some thinking philosophical?”, but instead you ask

What is thinking? — Xtrix

We could come back around now, and just say that it’s something that has within it the possibility but not the necessity of being philosophy. That’s not bad, but it looks like the goal here might be to understand what philosophy is, or understand it better, by understanding what thinking is better — so we can dangle philosophy out there as a possibility but we’ll have to decide whether to treat it as something already determinate or, what seems closer to what you intended, as something we figure out along with figuring out what thinking is.

So I’ll assume we’re not relying on a given understanding of what philosophy is and take a stab at what thinking is: it’s allowing thoughts to occur, to come to me. When I’m puzzling over a problem — people at work often find me just staring intently at things — sometimes I’m doing something like calculating: this can go there, and I can change that, and then this other thing’s fine. But sometimes when I’m “just thinking” I’m waiting, not calculating. And you have to wait in a certain sort of way, not forcing your thoughts into given channels. It’s a little like finding the perfect filter, one that keeps out stuff that’s no use, but doesn’t select a solution before the problem’s even clear. I don’t think there’s a method, in particular, for keeping out only what needs to be kept out, because associations and analogies are so powerful, you almost need to let everything in, somehow without getting distracted or bogged down. — And that’s a funny thing too, because of course just thinking might be daydreaming or musing, the sort of thing that undermines any sense of “distraction”, but you can also mull over a problem, which is a sort of focused musing. It is possible to be just thinking about something or not.

I think the filtering idea is off. The thoughts that come to you come for their own reasons, and some thoughts are up front about what those reasons are and some aren’t. (If they’ve come to help with your problem, you should see that in a flash; if they didn’t, that’s sometimes immediately clear sometimes not.) The ones that don’t immediately explain themselves are obviously often the most interesting. It’s very tempting to say that those are the sorts of thoughts that mark the beginning of philosophy. Maybe. If so, then philosophy would in some way be thinking that is truest to what thinking is, beginning in the allowing to come to you of thoughts that even once they’ve come haven’t fully arrived, can’t just be grasped and filed away for use in reasoning. I like reasoning, but it’s not what I’m doing when I’m just thinking.

Or he might hang out in Purgatory until his relatives pay the priest an indulgence. — frank

When I was a kid, we used to pray for the souls in purgatory. Have they brought back indulgences?

Anyway, after twenty pages of the iniquitous punishment God doles out, I thought for a change people could be offended by God not being nearly harsh enough.

What does he deserve? — frank

But there’s also the question of what he gets — if he genuinely seeks forgiveness from God, he’ll get it.

I haven't been trying to give Christians any more deference than I would anyone else whose beliefs are quite foreign to me:
— Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't for a minute think you'd do so deliberately, but I think it's the result nonetheless. — Isaac

Maybe it’s this: Christianity has an outsize presence in the politics of my country, especially where I live, in the Bible belt. It’s been on my mind — a lot. (It’s entirely possible that what I’m concerned about isn’t even exactly Christianity anymore, but a heretical offshoot of Christianity. This is the Jesus and John Wayne idea, but I’ve heard a few variations at this point.)

For some generations now, young intellectuals have been cheerfully leaving religion behind as they went off to college — we had science and the arts and humanities and no need for religion, which we used to assume belonged to humanity’s infancy and would fade away. That didn’t work out. There are a lot of us who face no question about whether to be for or against Christianity and just about all religion; we’re against. But the world has changed, and we can’t just ignore it as we intended; now we need to understand it. I don’t have a problem with ‘external’ approaches, in general, with doing psychology or sociology of faith, that sort of thing; but that ought to include some phenomenology (at least as the term is used in qualitative social science) of the life of believers, else those theories might hook up to some fantasy of Christian life instead of the real thing.

Christian doctrine has no particular urgency for me, but how real Christians live does — they’re people, after all, and fellow citizens, and quite likely my political enemies. I think that might explain why I’ve approached this discussion as I have.

Jumping in midstream here, so if what I say misses the point, ignore me. — Hanover

No, no. That's good. I was practically begging for someone to correct me there. But I've sometimes wondered how to read the first commandment if not as a holdover from an older tradition.

If you begin with the notion that the text of the OT isn't meant literally and that it is meant as a guide to ethical behavior and a meaningful life, I don't think you'll be burdened by any particular passage. — Hanover

Sound. And is this the way it's commonly read and thought about, in your experience?

People believe it's edicts for cultural reasons, it's not metaphysically compelling. — Isaac

I don't know. First part is incontestably true, but the incarnation is pretty interesting, a god emptying himself of his divinity that he might be sacrificed (to himself). Big deal for the Greeks too with Dionysus.

The mentalist approach is upside-down. — unenlightened

Yes yes yes yes yes.

Why the protected status, why the concern for Christians being morally judged? — Isaac

(( Sorry for the little replies. Writing as I can squeeze it in. ))

I haven't been trying to give Christians any more deference than I would anyone else whose beliefs are quite foreign to me: I ought to put some work in before shooting my mouth off. Thoreau tells us that anyone who has lived truly is from another country -- so maybe there's no harm in generalizing the attitude.

this religion which hasn't even quite sorted out yet how their main man isn't actually evil — Isaac

I mean, that's obviously not even close. The problem of hell is how to reconcile our ideas of it with the perfect goodness of God. Way out of my league here, but maybe one could imagine the jealous God of the Old Testament as a different sort of thing altogether, a god that can kick the ass of every other god, our guy, not necessarily the principle of goodness. (That local badass-god was long gone by the time the book was written, transmuted into something universal.)

If we say of Christians "we ought tread carefully, their belief may be something of a crutch" then we're treating them a care we're not extending to say, UFO enthusiasts, or Qanon cultists whose beliefs may also be crutches to cope with some past trauma. — Isaac

Well, yeah -- but maybe we should. How much more obvious can you make it that you need help?

My favorite bit of wisdom about parenting:

Kids need your love most when they deserve it least. — Erma Bombeck

For what it's worth.

without time, that whatever one has made of one's life for good or ill in this world is what one is stuck with — unenlightened

And I'll put in another plug for my idea that you could think of each moment of your life as forever, since there's a sense in which it is. Since God is love, I can think of Christian faith this way: I am called, every moment of my life, to act with love.

Appreciate you chiming in.

when someone says 'God is love', they've thereby rendered it very insensible to treat their beliefs like a system of statements with an underlying logic. — fdrake

Which I thought was obvious but kept forgetting, and anyway it's hard to talk about anything without getting sucked into logical analysis. (No, it's not always the right thing to do.)

For me, one of the most interesting parts of the Lewis article is not the argument itself, but the reminder of how 'hidden' it is. Arguments about whether God exists are two a penny, the misdoings of the Christian Church are well known, but what's less often accepted is the simple fact that we accept (even venerate in our political leaders), adherence to a religion which is fundamentally flawed. God does some abominable things in the bible - no doubt about that. — Isaac

Step by step, this sounds plausible, but I think that’s only because it’s so selective.

“Hidden” from whom? Christian theologians have been arguing about the nature of hell for quite a while now. (I only made it through the first part of “The River of Fire”, a lecture from 1980 @baker recommended, and it’s eye-opening. I also found an orthodox blog that branded it heretical, but the author is talking about exactly this stuff as where Roman Catholic theology went wrong.) If there’s any substance to the “hidden” claim it’s that not many philosophers, or not many lately, have addressed the issue.

I think the main weakness is the connection between your last two sentences: Christianity is fundamentally flawed because of some things that are in the Bible. That’s hardly a new approach either. I read “Why I Am Not A Christian” as a young apostate, too. I know it’s their Holy Book and all, but if you tried this approach on someone of the caliber of, I don’t know, Niebuhr or Tillich or even C. S. Lewis, to say nothing of Kierkegaard or Aquinas, do you really think this would carry the day so easily? It has the flavor of the outsider coming in, without any real understanding of the tradition they’re jumping into, and telling Christians, “Here’s what you actually believe.” After all, it’s in the Bible, and they have to believe it! It’s the sort of thing you see when a physicist deigns to consider philosophy and finds it all in a muddle, which he can readily straighten out. (“Is this what you guys have been on about for a thousand years? Let me explain it to you ...”)

we need an historical understanding of religion, not a metaphysical one. — Isaac

All of which might just be me saying that you can’t have the latter without bothering with the former. There is a long and rich tradition of Christian thought I have close to zero interest in, except for some of the bits that have been picked out for me and labeled ‘philosophy’.

Back of my mind, this whole time, I’ve been thinking about Plato, because when I read Plato I feel completely alienated from the religious references — I don’t get it, I don’t get how it goes along with the nascent philosophy, I don’t know how to feel about it. We choose to just glide past them — some of us do, but some don’t and there’ve been some lengthy fights here lately about that gliding past — or treat them as picturesque or as an aspect of Plato’s historicity that’s not all that relevant, like what he usually ate for breakfast and that he lived in a world without bicycles.

But then we wander over to the church when we’re bored (or, lately, concerned about the politics that seems to be emanating thence) and point out all the weird shit in their holy book. And if the pastor says, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about hell here, we focus on helping our parishioners and our community, then we pronounce them not real Christians. It’s lazy (which is my complaint), but it’s probably some other unsavory things too.

That's helpful. Thanks.

Hence the title, which apparently a number of non-christians found offensive. — Banno

Speaking for myself, as a non-Christian participant in the discussion, I was not offended by the title.

it looks like Banno wants to treat ‘Christian’ as the moral equivalent of ‘racist’ or ‘Nazi’, something we don’t have to put up with, something we might, for instance, add to the Site Guidelines as grounds for summary banishment. — Srap Tasmaner

The last part of this was a rhetorical flourish I probably shouldn't have indulged. Sorry, gang.

I was thinking of this sort of thing from early in the thread:

My interest here is as to the extent to which Christians (and Muslims) ought be allowed at the table when ethical issues are discussed. Given their avowed admiration for evil, ought we trust their ethical judgement? — Banno

We discuss ethical issues here. Is there any question about whether Christians and Muslims should be allowed to participate? It's hard to imagine, so I'm not sure what you meant there, @Banno. Can you clarify?

We've repeatedly discussed analogies between Christians and admirers of Hitler (starting with Fritz in Lewis's paper). I've promised @fdrake that I will get back to his analogy of admiring Mengele. Have I misunderstood the point being made here, or in calling Christians "advocates of evil"?

Presumably no one is calling for institutional sanctions against Christians, although the examples you gave recently were about job candidates. Can you clarify, @Banno, how you see someone who takes Lewis's argument to heart would put it into practice?

To my mind, the above makes religious faith something like a symptom of trauma? — fdrake

Spicy take indeed! That's both a horrifying and plausible thought.

It's mildly surprising that we have somehow avoided doing much in this thread about the psychology of belief, probably for the best. (Wasn't there some promising research some years ago about the neurological substrate of faith?)

but the signals from your soul are hidden states are they not? — Isaac

That is a gigantic mess. (It hadn't even occurred to me -- probably my unconscious warding off the gigantic mess.) Since I can't help myself, I'll say that I think when you hear the voice of God, or are guided somehow by the Holy Spirit, that you need not model this 'input' at all. It's God and you know it is. Anyhow, I want to say that, but the Deceiver is also known to whisper in people's ears...

I just want a more neutral framework for having this discussion. I'm not comfortable beginning from a commitment to religion being bullshit. That's what I personally think, but I don't go around, ahem, pontificating about how believers ought to modify their bullshit religions.

the distinction one might want to make for religious beliefs doesn't seem to apply if those beliefs are ultimately derived in the same way as any other belief. — Isaac

Your argument is that the voice of God has the same role in belief formation as the hidden unknowns we model, as the outside cause of whatever we do to end up with something identifiable as a belief -- is that it?

From 30,000 feet, that's kinda reasonable, but you can't add any detail to this picture at all. God doesn't even bother with your brain; He speaks directly to your soul. Or so I've heard.

my argument is simply that religious belief is no special category — Isaac

But if it's not 'special' in the sense indicated, then it's not true. Revelation can't be part of our usual game of justifying beliefs, so anything relying on it fails at the first hurdle.

What I have to justify is saying such an approach is fine for some purposes ("God told me to" doesn't excuse you from murder) but useless if our intention is to understand and judge how Christians believe and what they believe.

I've raised the problem of us not having unfiltered access to the causes of our beliefs. I think this gets in the way of a good category of 'revelational' belief. — Isaac

It does indeed, but if you just rule out revelation, you're ruling out Christianity tout court. Which is fine, but then there's just no point in nitpicking about theology. It's a two-pronged attack: "What you believe is bullshit, and you ought not believe it, but this particular bullshit is bad bullshit, and you also ought not believe it because it's also bad." What are you asking of Christians? "I'd prefer you believed some different bullshit. Make up something else"? How are they supposed to respond?

Once you personally (or some other group) are in charge of what's to be taken literally and what isn't, you no longer have a religion (from ligāre - to bind). — Isaac

Then there are probably no religions at all. This argument is clearly overbroad.

The idea is like privately holding a prejudice vs acting on it, some peoples intuitions are that so long as someone keeps their prejudice quiet and doesn't discriminate it doesn't matter. — fdrake

I distinguish between bias and prejudice, with bias being something you cannot just choose not to have, may not even know you have, and prejudice, which is bias you have reflected on and approved. As a ‘view’ you hold, know you hold, and approve of holding, the reasons for not acting on prejudice would be only practical. Bias you’re likely to act on if you are unaware of it, but if you’re aware of it and don’t approve of it, you can at least attempt to be scrupulous, and you can take steps you believe could lead to the weakening of your bias.

Is any of that business relevant? Maybe. Bias, as I conceive it, is a bit like faith in that it’s not something you just choose to have or not have. I’m tempted to say that puts theology in the space of prejudice, the reflected on shaping and filling out of the underlying belief. But I don’t really know how to make such an analogy work: the ‘content’ of a bias is pretty robust and identifiable — that is, it’s a tractable topic even without being further conceptualized as prejudice; religious experience is not so clear at all. Without being conceptualized as an experience in line with some particular creed, people only have very vague and mystical things to say about it. (The oceanic feeling, and all that.) A casual glance at the world’s religious landscape would suggest that the underlying experience type, if there is one, can be initialized conceptualized in a great number of ways. (Has anyone ever said, “I’m a Lutheran, but last night when I was praying, the Presbyterian God answered”? Why not? This is such a messy area to talk about conceptualization. I’m not getting it right, and maybe the whole approach is useless.)

In short, bias looks pretty simple by comparison, and way more tractable to analysis.

But the question of remedy is interesting, because it looks like @Banno wants to treat ‘Christian’ as the moral equivalent of ‘racist’ or ‘Nazi’, something we don’t have to put up with, something we might, for instance, add to the Site Guidelines as grounds for summary banishment. On my approach above, ‘being a racist’ means reflectively choosing to endorse the bias you find you have and acting on it. So the answer to “How can you be mistrustful of Black people?” is “I can’t help that, not much anyway, but I’m working on it; I can be aware of my bias, and try not to let it influence what I say and how I act.” Having that ‘gut reaction’ makes you biased, and a racist in one sense but not in another.

Is there a similar remedy available to the Christian?

All of this analysis feels pretty shallow, but there’s still so much to get out of the way before we can get to the nature of worship, which looks more and more like the key issue here.

I want to address your Mengele analogy, but I’m late for work!

It is Abraham that reproaches god for going to kill a bunch of innocent people in Sodom. — Ennui Elucidator

Ah, I see. Didn’t know that was Abraham addressing God. Well, yes, Abraham is a pretty convincing precedent.

One can reproach god, is expected to do so, and should be criticized for encouraging god to do bad things. — Ennui Elucidator

I’m probably missing this suggestion in the passage from Jonah you quote. Was it in there? Or do you have another source?

On its face, reproaching God sounds impious, and the suggestion that some of the things God does are bad also sounds, on its face, impious, so I’d be really curious to know if there’s either scripture or theological (patristic or later) support for either idea.

Worship is not, and has never been, blind cheering for all that god does. — Ennui Elucidator

This part is a bit easier to swallow. I know there’s plenty of writing to support the idea of Christians taking pleasure in the eternal suffering of those in hell, but “Let he who is without sin ...” seems pretty clearly on the other side. (And there’s a counter-tradition anyway.) Christians may be called to accept God’s justice, maybe even to love him for being just, but there’s no way to make taking pleasure in another’s suffering look moral.

you don't think realizing that neverending damnation is immoral could cause a belief revision of some sort (contra voluntarism)? — jorndoe

I mentioned before that I think for some Christians it has. There are a few possibilities here too:

(1) Loss of faith altogether. If you identify your faith with a certain set of teachings, and you cannot accept all of those teachings, you may find no way to preserve your faith at all.
(2) Change your theology. Some find different understandings of hell, some find different understandings of salvation, with or without any hell. That may or may not include leaving your church, depending on how central particular teachings are taken to be. Even if an alternative soteriology is not in direct conflict with the official creed, if there is one, it may be so marginalized, socially and intellectually, that you cannot remain.
(3) Hate God.

I don’t happen to know what various denominations teach about who exactly goes to hell; it’s natural to distinguish (a) those who haven’t heard the good news from (b) those who have, and natural to distinguish among those who have, (b1) those who haven’t accepted it as the truth from (b2) those who have, and lastly (b2+) those who then worship God from (b2-) those who don’t.

It’s plain that at the top of everyone’s list is (b2-), the person who believes in God, believes the Bible to be the truth, believes the teachings of his church, but takes the other side — hatred of God, hatred of what is good, and so on.

That makes our option (3) rather complicated, because you are supposed to see God as evil, and therefore oppose him, but in the name of what is good. That doesn’t really look like (b2-).

Suppose the teaching about hell that you learned is wrong, but you assume it’s true so you set yourself against God the tyrant, in the name of good. Will God reward or punish you? It’s tempting to say God would judge your opposing him as exemplary, in accord with the message you should have received had it not been garbled by weak human understanding. But by hypothesis, he wasn’t going to send you to hell anyway, so what difference does it make? Maybe it doesn’t matter to God whether you worship or oppose him, whether you’re good or bad. Maybe God was just trying to do you a favor by telling you what is good, since it’s better to be good than bad.

As for the others, there’s a whole lot of (2) out there, but it’s irrelevant to the paper under discussion. Which is too bad. (1) either happens or it doesn’t, in my view; I don’t see this as a choice. Some people find faith; some people lose it.

What about people stuck believing. Some will hold onto their belief in God and continue to worship Him even if they cannot understand how hell could possibly be consistent with the goodness of God. This is a difficult position to be in, but it’s not a unique one for a Christian. People endure tragedy which, given their faith, will seem to them unjust: why would God allow this to happen? This too they must somehow accept without understanding. It cannot be easy. If you ask them about hell or about their suffering, they will probably frankly tell you they don’t know how to reconcile their feelings with their faith.

Which brings us round again to the question of worship. In previous posts, I’ve mostly ignored (b2-) the believer who sets himself against God, not because God is evil but precisely because of his hatred for what is good. I’ve mainly been imagining the case where to believe is — quite directly — to love and to worship. I don’t see the gap there that @Isaac does; I think unless you are that rare Luciferian sort, to believe in something at all like the Christian God is automatically to love and worship that God.

There’s more we could say about (2), but there’s a problem here that is woven into the question of worship or rebellion: what is the truth? Suppose what you were taught about eternal damnation is more or less right, hellfire and torment and all. Does your belief in such a place and in God having some policy regarding it make you a collaborator? I don’t see why, no more than believing Hitler actually did what he did does. It’s worship that matters. Now suppose you cannot accept your church’s teaching on hell, so you find another you like better and go on worshipping your cleaned up and more modern God. You’re still exempt from Lewis’s criticism even if it turns out you were wrong and God does send people to hell.

But hold on there. Yes, this is just restating the criteria for being vulnerable to Lewis’s attack. But if you look at the criteria as ways of avoiding the attack, you get a pretty strange result. Lewis says you ought not worship someone (human or divine) you believe to be evil; to please Lewis, you can of course (1) not believe in him at all; (2) not worship him; or (3) not believe he’s evil. What’s odd is that (3) is apparently entirely up to you — you can just choose to believe God, being good, would not countenance eternal damnation, declare your disbelief and be rewarded with Lewis’s approval, even if hell is real. That’s right, even if hell is real, all you have to do is not believe in this part of reality, and you get a free pass from Lewis. What the actual fuck?

Decision-making is involved. If someone expresses assent to neverending damnation, then we may express repugnance. — jorndoe

Well, that’s what we’re here to talk about, isn’t it.

What are the options?
1. You believe in the Christian God and hell.
2. You believe in the Christian God but not hell.
3. You believe in neither.

Given those, we get a list of questions:
1. How does one come to be in one of those buckets?
2. How might they move from one bucket to another? (Several permutations available.)
3, What might someone in one bucket say about someone in another bucket?

Given the source material, we’re supposed to be focused exclusively on what those in bucket 3 have to say about those in bucket 1. I’m not crazy about that, but it’s the topic I’ve had trouble staying on, and I’ll try not to make it worse.

So is it okay, within the parameters of this discussion, to ask questions 1 and 2? Are we at all curious about how the people in bucket 1 got there? I’m betting almost everyone here is ready to say, that’s how they were raised, explanation complete. I was raised to be in bucket 1 but I’m not and I have no idea why. At what point did I become a morally acceptable human being? More to the point, what did I do to merit this improvement in my moral status?

It occurs to me — what should be obvious but I don’t think anyone’s mentioned it — that I’m in the habit of thinking of faith, much as I think of other sorts of belief, as something that’s not up to you. You believe or you don’t. I’m a doxastic involuntarist, as the cool kids say.

This has natural consequences:

(1) If it’s not a choice, then it is unfair of me to judge you for it.

(2) Understanding your own experience — even experience you may identify or have identified as religious or spiritual — differently is also not a choice you make, but something that more or less happens to you, through other experiences, or that you learn to do. And that leaves learning as the deep and tricky part, which feels right to me. (You may not quite be able to choose what you learn, but at least you can choose what you try to learn, so I’m provisionally distinguishing it.)