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.)

I cited an article describing the current pope's view — unenlightened

What Francis said was frankly surprising, and I’m not sure what to make of it. Even more interesting to me was the chorus of children who thought God would not send this non-believer to hell. Where did that come from? Had they been improperly catechized? Were they too young to remember the right answer? The article makes them sound pretty confident they knew the right answer. Were they relying on that clever Catholic fallback, purgatory? (Hoping I end up in heaven’s waiting room if it turns out I was wrong to leave mother church.) Were they ignoring their catechism and substituting their own morality for what they had been taught? Geez, I don’t even know what doctrine is here, so maybe I’m roughly in the position of those children.

If we (the secular) aren't 'getting' what the Christians are saying, then we need to try harder. All of us. So that the baffled secular and the agonised Christian can help each other sort out the painful contradictions. Simply saying that the Christians issues are not within our understanding, by fiat, seems a bit of a cop out. — Isaac

Agreed, and to the extent that’s what my take looks like, that’s on me.

There is the spectre of believers getting a “free pass” — Dennett wrote a whole book about it, and @Banno has invoked the idea of a “taboo” hereabouts. Am I claiming Christians should get a free pass? A free pass for what? To believe what they believe? To experience the world as they do? Well, none of that is up to me anyway, not a choice I face. To remake my country’s political institutions in accordance with their creed? Fuck no.

I think I’m being asked to disapprove of their beliefs, yes? Well, I already don’t share them. Is there a stronger form of disapproval I should plump for? Yes, there is: they shouldn’t believe what they believe either. Why not? Because what they believe is irrational, inconsistent, contradictory, unsupported by the evidence, or morally reprehensible, something from that list. Because presumably that’s why I don’t believe what they believe, paragon of rationality and morality that I am. But here’s where I get stuck.

God being the creator of the universe having no implications at all for whether we worship him. A thing being divinely revealed doesn't have any necessary implication for whether one follows it. — Isaac

When a deity speaks to me, I’ll let you know. People worship human beings, of all things, how do you expect them to react to what they take to be actual divinity? Something or everything in the range covered by the phrase “fear of God” would be my guess. I keep coming back to such experiences because I don’t see how it could be anything but overwhelming.

I’m not trying to dodge the question about doctrine, just put it in some perspective. Without the feeling of having encountered the divine, it might be much easier for a Christian just to call bullshit on the concept of hell and bolt. On the other hand, such experience is exactly what empowers some to leave: the loving God they know is misrepresented by what Lewis calls the orthodox view.

I’m still not much addressing the intended thrust of the thread, I know, which was not supposed to be about what believers go through, but about how non-believers should think about believers, insofar as they accept some version of eternal damnation. There is, as the paragraph just above suggests, room for us to expect a true believer to hold onto their personal religious experience but abandon certain chunks of Christian doctrine. (And loads of Christians do this. American bishops are more or less continually frustrated that a whole lot of American Catholics don’t believe everything they’re supposed to.) That seems like a pretty reasonable course, but in practice it means holding people accountable for not breaking with their family, their friends, their social circle. It’s a big ask, as the kids say, but maybe it’s the right one:

For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. — That Guy

Of course, That Guy thought he was divine. I don’t feel like I quite have the standing to ask something like that of people. Also, I by and large don’t give a shit what people believe in the privacy of their own homes and places of worship. (Until a couple generations ago, evangelical Christianity in the United States was almost uniformly and resolutely anti-political. Same doctrine before as now.)

Why would we assume the Christians have somehow got it all beautifully stitched together — Isaac

Yikes, I hope I haven’t given that impression. I pointed out that it’s not unusual for Christians to struggle with or have misgivings about the concept of hell. And it’s not a secret either. There’s lots of writing. There’s lots of public discussion.

After all, our secular world is similarly constituted. — Isaac

That point I like a lot. I think it’s a great idea just to take Christianity as an example of a process of meaning-making that is of a type with what non-Christians do. As you pointed out before, though, the psychology here is almost too easy for you.

There is a real sticking point — which I mentioned before as well:

Unless we're actually going to believe religious claims to divine access — Isaac

What are we supposed to do here? I don’t believe in God, so I don’t believe in revelation either. I don’t seem to have much choice but to say that revelation must be somewhere on a spectrum running from delusion to misinterpretation.

But on the other hand, all I can really say is that I haven’t experienced anything I understand as revelation, and I can recognize that if I had such an experience, I might be exactly on the other side of this argument.

I get the impulse to say, all I can do is judge things by my own standards, rely on my own faculty of reason like some Enlightenment hero — it’s what a lot of people here find exhilarating and liberating about philosophy. If an argument doesn’t convince you, then by god it doesn’t! Aaarrgh!

But I’m not inclined to shrug off my recognition that I could hold different beliefs from the ones I do, could have had different experiences from the ones I’ve had, and possibly understand a great many things quite differently. Maybe it’s just that I’m not all that committed to what I happen to believe at any given moment. However it works, I lean away from being as dismissive of other’s views as I was when I was twenty.

I wasn’t complaining about your typing skill, but about your habit of what one might call “controlling” or “manipulating” the conversation, rather than participating in it.

And again, your part int his conversation is tedious. — Banno

Please stop doing that.

Have you considered the possibility that you may have "tin ear" when it comes to religion? — Janus

That's an interesting analogy.

What we can put into words trumps what we can't. — Banno

Just how general is this maxim? Does what we can put into words about, say, playing music "trump" playing music? In what possible sense? And how does the case of faith differ from playing music?

Obviously I like a lot of this, so thanks.

Not much time at the moment, so more later, but one thing I found myself struggling with was that putting things into language is, at least for the cases we usually deal with around here, a sort of categorizing. You can deliberately avoid that, either through paradox, as mystics and zen masters are wont to, or through notation as Frege did (who complained that talking about concepts is to treat them as objects).

One bit I've been thinking about is this: imagine teaching someone how to pray. You tell someone they can ask God's forgiveness. "How do I do that?" First you must have a contrite heart. "How do I do that?" Open your heart to His grace. "How do I do that?" I've run out of words here, though an experienced pastor may have more. At some point you will have to give up describing the experience of prayer as you might a technique and suggest your pupil try it and see what experience they have. I think this is true as well of, say, woodworking or meditation or rock climbing. A lot can be put into categorical propositions, maybe eventually everything, I don't know, but every learner will have the experience of the teacher's words not making sense right up until they have a particular experience and then everything is clear. "This is what he meant!"

I think it'd be a hard argument to make that any Christian could talk about their faith without assenting to a proposition as an integral part of that discussion. — Isaac

There are indeed a whole lot of propositions!

Suppose you’re a Christian and you’ve been struggling with the concept of hell. On its face, it doesn’t look like something an all-loving god would set up. It’s a problem; how will you go about dealing with it?

First step for a lot of Christians would be talking to their pastor. There will be recognizable propositions here, sure, in the pastor’s explanation, but there will almost certainly also be some statements that strike us as paradoxical, and some statements that are deliberately incomplete (apophatic). It’s unlikely there will be anything you can test empirically, say, in a lab. There may be some reference to experience though: the pastor might connect the concept of hell to the feelings you had when you had done wrong; he will almost certainly counsel you to pray on it.

It just seems to me that whatever’s going on here, whatever the purpose of all this talk (right through to prayer, which is also a sort of talking), it’s not well-modeled as decision making under uncertainty. Consider this: Christians can believe that a proposition is true without understanding it, and will freely say so. That doesn’t fit our model of language use at all! You’re supposed to figure out exactly what’s claimed first in order to figure out whether it’s true. (Meaning and truth are always running mates in our world.) Christians are not expected to understand everything that they believe. Surely that has some implications for analysing their beliefs as a system of propositions, as if it were a scientific theory!

I’m bothering with all this because the argument presented here is not that some Christians have done things we non-Christians consider wrong — bombed an abortion clinic or something — and we need to rule out their faith as a defense for such wrongdoing; the argument is that their holding of certain beliefs is in itself wrong and their persistence in doing so is evidence of their moral bankruptcy.

I’m skeptical of that project in general, I’ll admit. I think people ought to be judged for their actions and the effects of their actions on others, not for what was in their head at the time. *** That’s a bias of mine I have trouble getting around. But here we’re not even talking about what any Christian has done on the basis of their beliefs, but whether the holding of those beliefs at all is morally acceptable. I don’t think we should go down that road, but if we are then I think it behooves us to consider carefully what we mean when we say someone holds the forbidden belief. I think religious faith is peculiar in a number of ways that haven’t been adequately addressed, and is not exactly like everyday or scientific occasions of ‘assenting to a proposition’. I don’t even share the faith in question, but I can see the mismatch without half trying.

Lewis argues that belief in hell is per se immoral, even though he believes those who hold such a belief are merely indulging in fantasy. We’ve barely talked about whether that argument is any good, but I think we get off to a bad start by not bothering to understand what the word “belief” means here.


*** Oops. That's obviously not right. Intentions matter, but as they inform the act. (Hurting someone intentionally is morally different from hurting them unintentionally, duh.) To focus on the thoughts and desires themselves, independent of any action they might or might not inform, as moral or immoral, strikes me as a needlessly "Christian" view.

My suspicion, voiced above, is that hell is unjust, and further that belief in hell may sometimes lead to cruelty here on earth. — Banno

And for evidence, we need look no further than the all but indistinguishable lives of Desmond Tutu and Steven Anderson. Yeah, I see what you mean.

What we can put into words trumps what we can't. — Banno

Is faith exactly a matter of your opinions on certain questions (the reality of God, hell, and so on)? Is it just some propositions you assent to?

an excuse to forgive those who consider hell appropriate — Banno

What exactly is it you would be forgiving them for? For having a thought, one you consider a fantasy? Why would that be something that needs forgiving?

You have gestured at a connection:

Belief in hell has implications in terms of explaining the behaviour of the believer. Perhaps there is some potential to understand the cruel behaviour of so many who call themselves christian in understanding the cruelty inherent in their belief. How much of their behaviour can be explained as resulting from fear of damnation? — Banno

but Lewis doesn’t, does he? He upbraids Christians for going along with divine evil — which Lewis believes, as an atheist, is just a fantasy. No one is eternally tormented by a god who doesn’t exist. Hell isn’t real. Christians aren’t collaborators because there is no tyrant to collaborate with. They are willing to collaborate, he says, and that in itself is evil, somehow, even though they’ll never get the chance to act on that willingness.

But you draw a direct line from Christian theology to Christian behavior you disapprove of. (I’ll admit I read the paper hastily, but I don’t think Lewis makes this part of the case.)

Here’s a question for you, Banno. You say above, that “perhaps there is some potential” to explain Christian behavior you find abhorrent by reference to Christian doctrine. And you finish with a question, not a claim. So I take it you don’t consider the case made, at this point, that the doctrine of eternal damnation explains why Christians suck so hard. Will you stick by that? Or are you now going to treat this “potentiality” as established fact?

Something like a conceptual scheme? — fdrake

I wouldn’t think so, not exactly. I suppose when I hear “conceptual scheme” I think “taxonomy”, more or less. But I don’t mean what categories you assign things to.

On the one hand, there might still be something here like a conceptual scheme, as my “created natural world” example indicates: there’s an over-arching category into which, well, just about everything goes. But it seems to me the nature of the (now) sub-categories changes if you relate them to a creator — there was no such relation before.

And you can say something similar elsewhere, but with similar issues. If I perform an act of kindness for a stranger, I don’t experience that as following the example of Jesus, for instance. You could say that this is a matter of categorization, but is that all it is? I don’t know, not having experienced the alternative, but I suspect it isn’t. Categorization would be retroactive, right?*** But we’re talking about me comporting myself as someone who believes himself to be within the sight of God. That’s not just a matter of how I categorize myself or my behavior, is it?



*** That’s not right. It would be both: if I’m emulating Jesus, that would also be forward-looking, seeking to perform an act that I will later, if successful, be able to categorize in the desired way.

Believers do not experience a different world. — Banno

I genuinely don't know what the right thing to say here is. I'll admit I'm tempted to make Christian faith "adverbial": they experience loneliness, for example, "jesusly" (meaning they feel His divine presence) but I don't. There'd be something you could call "the same" there, but they're still having an experience I just don't. They could try to describe that for me, and some Christian writers have tried to do so, but without the experience, I don't really know what they're talking about.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression there's "something it's like" to have faith, something not describable as holding certain opinions but something that saturates your experience.

If we were to follow Srap Tasmaner's argument, we would be debarred from critique of any worldview unless we had been properly initiated into it's creed and understood it from the point of view of the true believer. I doubt he would apply this argument to Cartesianism, liberalism or Cricket, so again it is a form of special pleading. — Banno

I've tried, a little, to suggest how I think it's different from these examples. To me, faith seems to imply a meaning-world I am not privy to. I think believers experience the world quite differently from me. I think cricketers experience cricket different from how I would if I experienced it as a spectator, which I don't, but you get the idea. Some of that can be translated, with effort, but I'm not sure whether that's almost everything or quite a bit less. I do not know, for instance, how to see the natural world as created, and I can't imagine how people who do experience it.

It is obvious to the point of tedium that christians will not be dissuaded from their belief by the arguments here. They are not the audience, either for Lewis' article or for this thread. That Srap supposes otherwise is just plain odd. It seems to be little more than a veiled ad hom directed at Lewis and myself. — Banno

It's worth mentioning, in a sort of defense of Lewis's argument, that a great many Christians are uncomfortable with the traditional teaching on hell that Lewis takes aim at. It's not hard to find well-known Christian authors and theologians who have struggled with the idea, including at least one Catholic priest I used to know. I think I've known people who left the church (if not religion altogether) over this exact issue.

It is indeed a tough one, and many Christians consider themselves Christian despite deep misgivings about the concept of hell.

The OP says: — baker

I stand corrected.

I've been discussing the premises of this argument, not it's suggested conclusion.

I am intimately familiar with the problems unshared faith can cause.

I don't know what solution you're proposing, and I'm not convinced it's relevant to this discussion.

Near as I can tell, DL and @Banno think maybe they can, you know, refute Christianity. With an argument. I mean ...

But why should I care?
— Srap Tasmaner

Because they hold it against you. — baker

But why should I care?

What do you imagine as the remedy here? I already don't share their faith, so reasons for me not to have no purpose. Must I "deprogram" them? Why? So that I don't feel judged by them? Why should I care?

faith that... — Isaac

But this is a question: can faith be captured without remainder in propositions? I can't imagine any believer agreeing to that.

But, as you say, there may be more to faith than the propositions, but there are still the propositions: the believer must take some attitude toward them, and we are entitled to do so as well.

That's persuasive, on its face, but I don't think it can be right. Articles of faith don't hook up to whatever proposition-handling machinery you might imagine being handy elsewhere. (Gathering evidence, testing, refining, etc.) I mean, there is such a thing as theology, but I don't understand what that's supposed to be either! Hovering over all this is the problem -- as it would seem to a non-believer -- of revelation, which "links" to propositional knowledge in, let's say, a non-standard way... Everything about how a believer might characterize their faith -- much less their God! -- using ordinary logico-linguistic means, will be very misleading if you don't share the underlying experience. That's my hunch, anyway.

But why should I care?

Christians are specifically enjoined not to judge the state of another's soul. It seems to bother Lewis that they believe he will be judged, even if not by them. It bothers him that they "support" this judgy asshole in the sky, but Christians don't experience their faith as "supporting" God's decisions. They don't get a vote.

I don't read either the article, nor Banno's OP as an attempt to 'understand' why Christians think they way they do. We could invoke upbringing, group membership tokens, and cognitive biases to have that job done in a jiffy. — Isaac

I like the use of “invoke” there: you pray to your gods, they pray to theirs.

Anyway, I haven’t argued for an explanation of Christians faith, only that you ought to know what something is before judging it.

And I have suggested that this may be difficult from an outside perspective, because faith is not just an opinion someone holds, but that’s just how Lewis discusses it. (A view held in relative ignorance.) If you must, you could say it’s a language-game you just don’t understand, and move on, but there’s no point in insisting that those playing it must be playing a game you do know, and playing it wrong.

We’re here because @Banno believes Davidson refuted incommensurability in all its forms, and that means religious experience must be translatable without loss into terms he can understand. I doubt that, but I don’t even see much effort being put into the translation.

Understanding Christian psychology and discussing Christian ethics are two separate things. The OP, as a understand it, is about the latter. — Isaac

I believe I made that point in the very paragraph of mine you were quoting, but your second sentence is clearly wrong: the OP presents an objection to Christian theology. No Christian is called upon to decide whether anyone else receives eternal reward or punishment; it is not only not an ethical choice they face, it is one they are, in so many words, warned against. As Lewis sees it, you do face such a choice for yourself — is that an ethical choice? — but are denied crucial evidence you would need to make an informed choice. I have suggested this is a ridiculous model of the experience of faith. Lewis’s principal point is that you might as well worship Hitler, but, and this should sound familiar, no Christian believes themselves to be in a position to evaluate God’s job performance.

Is God beyond our petty and all too tellurian morality? But if so, then why follow his edicts, why pursue a place in heaven? — Isaac

Because you have faith.

If, like me, you have no such faith, then move on. But my lack of understanding of someone’s faith is no objection to it.

in so far as they admire those who do accept eternal damnation — Banno

You know, the way you say this, it’s as if a Christian might say, “I approve of the job God Almighty is doing.”

You see how ridiculous that is, right?

the view that christianity ought be judged only (or mainly) from a christian perspective — Banno

If you want to shun Christians because their ethical views don’t align with yours, have at it. But you want to find their faith wanting, without bothering to understand it. Indeed, there may be a barrier there: I’m not sure you can really understand that life without living it. I don’t, and I don’t, that’s all I can say.

I’m trying to read the article — no, I hadn’t read it before — and I come to this:

He places people in a situation in which they must make a judgment that binds them for eternity, and he knows that some will be so inadequately informed that they will opt for an eternity of torment (or a state for which torment is an apt metaphor). — p. 233

Evidently David Lewis doesn’t know any Christians, and hasn’t so much as eavesdropped on any conversation among Christians, because no Christian ever talks this way. Christians don’t believe that you gather information and then make a decision about how you’d like to spend eternity; they believe you either open your heart to His grace or you deliberately shut Him out.

Whatever Lewis is talking about, it’s nothing remotely like what Christians in my experience actually believe.

He could leave incompatibilist freedom intact while doing far more luring and urging than he does. Assuming we have to make a choice, why must it be made through a glass darkly? God seems negligent at best.

Ugh. He sent His only begotten son here to die so that our sins might be forgiven, and Lewis says, “Big whoop.” And, again, grace: Christians believe God is constantly luring and urging us, offering us His love unconditionally, and reminding us that He will forgive any sin, all we have to do is ask.

From my mundane perspective, I may judge myself happy enough in my denial of God. Once I am fully informed, however, I will appreciate the grossness of my swinish satisfaction, and torment will be an apt description of my insubordinate condition.

Christians believe you are “fully informed” right now. What does Lewis mean? By “fully informed” he seems to mean, when he sees the afterlife with his own eyes, and finally knows what’s what. Such knowledge is irrelevant to Christians. This whole paradigm is wrong. No sensible evidence is needed because God is happy to speak to us directly, creator-to-soul, and does so all the time.

In this little section seems, Lewis addresses my “hell is a spiritual state” thing, but he interprets his experience as “contented atheism”, not something for which “torment” is an apt metaphor. But, of course, he’s just wrong about that. If there is a bliss surpassing all imagining that he knows not, then from that point of view, his contentment looks like torment.

I think there is a good question here, about why some people experience themselves as touched by God and some people don’t, but it’s nothing like this intellectualized business Lewis is on about.

I’ll try to read the rest, but the whole thing seems to me — and I’ve been an atheist at least my entire adult life — extremely shoddy and ill-informed.