I don't see anything in the presentation of the problem that excludes Christians from joining in the dissection of it. — Isaac
discuss a novel philosophical argument — Banno
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
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
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
I cited an article describing the current pope's view — unenlightened
The problem with this thread lies in its presumption. It starts with a screed against something. What is the something? Well, that's the "orthodox story" Lewis attributes to Christians — tim wood
Please clarify — tim wood
The essence of the doctrine of The Fall is disobedience. And disobedience is its own punishment. — EnPassant
But can't God show us how to live wisely so we won't turn our lives into hell? This is what religion is meant to do.
But people don't always listen. They want to live by their own lights even if that leads to hell. They will drink even if they risk ending up in the gutter. They will commit crimes even if that risks ending up in jail. God is the light by which we should live and if we turn away from it there is only darkness. Some are determined to go their own way. "My way or no way" - self will. No matter what the danger and no matter how many warnings "I will not serve". So be it.
The essence of the doctrine of The Fall is disobedience. And disobedience is its own punishment.
— EnPassant
That's like saying that drugs are bad because one disobeyed the order not to take them.
And not perhaps because they are toxic substances that mess up one's body. — baker
A rich and powerful person can kill, rape, and pillage, and it has no bad consequences for them
The observation here is quite specific: hell is immoral. The simple answer is that assuming god is good, then there is no hell, and various popular forms of christianity and other religions are simply wrong. — Banno
Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good boy/girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development
Again, yes to this and what follows. 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?
For my own part, it puzzles me that a religion supposedly founded on love of one's fellows can result in the Australian Christian Lobby, in the insanity of Texas abortion law, and the horrors of Canada's residential schools. Lewis may have identified the common thread. — Banno
The observation here is quite specific: hell is immoral. The simple answer is that assuming god is good, then there is no hell, and various popular forms of christianity and other religions are simply wrong. — Banno
In any case the point was that religious faith does not consist in some set of beliefs so much as it does in a feeling. — Janus
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!" — Srap Tasmaner
The observation here is quite specific: hell is immoral. The simple answer is that assuming god is good, then there is no hell, and various popular forms of christianity and other religions are simply wrong.
— @Banno
That's like saying that the police and the justice system are immoral, and that if they were good, there would be no arrests, no judicial processes, and no prisons. — baker
Forgive me, but this is just a stupid comparison, and needs to be called out. We are talking about a God, according to some Christians, obviously not all, who sends people to eternal damnation for not believing or accepting certain beliefs. We are also talking about a God, who /.../ knowing full well that many would reject these beliefs, given their free will. So, God would have known /.../ at the very least, would result in, or at least there would be a good chance, that that person would go to hell. — Sam26
If such a God existed, I would do all that I could to oppose that being.
Furthermore, eternal punishment or damnation, is excessive by definition, even if you don't think of it as torture.
Most people go through their lives without committing the most egregious of sins, yet because their not within the fold of Christian beliefs, they are damned, forever (according to many Christians, Protestant and Catholic). This is not just, and should be rejected as part of any Christian belief, and many Christians do reject it.
Oh absolutely. But here I find these struggles are presented as segregated from ours. We can't understand theirs, they can't understand ours. The point I was making was that since we seem to all be in the same boat (and they hardly seem to have it all worked out), a more parsimonious approach (and dare I say possibly even a better one for all) would be to assume, for starters, that we're not so incommensurable after all. That, if the Christian is struggling with the concept of hell, Lewis might actually be able to help - just in the same way as your (sometimes quite pointed) critiques of my positions have helped me. It's what we do. Put our positions into the crucible of public debate to have the edges taken off, the loose ends picked at. We do this by sharing a language. — Isaac
If we (the secular) aren't 'getting' what the Christians are saying, then we need to try harder. All of us.
Simply saying that the Christians issues are not within our understanding, by fiat, seems a bit of a cop out.
Lewis has raised a concern about what Christian doctrine says. His argument (as I read it) is basically "Isn't is a moral danger to allow people to worship a torturer whose punishments are out of proportion to the crime?". That's a legitimate concern on it's face. There's lots of evil in the world to account for. Much of it is religiously motivated or carried out by the religious (or those raised in a religion). So pointing out a potential cause seems to be well within the wheel-house of normal conversation.
/..../
Do I need to stand in your shoes to fully understand why you believe the things you believe? Almost certainly, yes. Do I need to stand in your shoes to even critique the things you believe? I hope not, that would rather render the whole forum (not to mention the whole of consensus-building politics) pointless.
Unless we're actually going to believe religious claims to divine access, it seems far more parsimonious to believe that the mess of contradictions, inconsistencies and post hoc rationalisations we perceive in Christianity are, in fact a mess of contradictions, inconsistencies and post hoc rationalisations. — Isaac
It just seems really odd that a group of people who - let's be clear - do take part in the world of discourse, do say things to the secular, do expect to have their beliefs acted upon in our shared world... are given a sort of diplomatic immunity as if merely ambassadors from some other world where their beliefs have only impact on them and not us.
The religious are somehow thereby immunised from making the same mistakes of inconsistency, incoherency as are the bread and butter of the discussion we have here. — Isaac
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. — Srap Tasmaner
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 — Srap Tasmaner
All you you seem to be saying here is that some people who believe that an old book says a thing think they have more authority than someone who challenges received opinion. They might object more powerfully me, sure, and still be wrong. My standards are based on humanism rather more than a gut feeling. — Tom Storm
What I can't do is just condemn 1/4 of the species (or whatever it is) and leave it there. That's a dangerous mindset.
— frank
Why? Could you elaborate?
— baker
It sets the stage for immoral action. Any time you condemn a class of people, your unconscious, which holds all sorts of anger and frustration, will set on that class as deserving of punishment.
Then it only takes a weak moment and bad timing, and woops, you just committed an injustice and you should have known better. — frank
Sure. To know a person's moral character, we look at that person's ACTIONS. (I'm making the words bigger so they cross the confusion barrier a little better.
ACTIONS ARE WHAT WE JUDGE.
A person could be a devil worshiper, but if they're good in all they do, we have to say they appear to have good character because we don't have X-RAY VISION into their psyche.
See? — frank
The right feeling for the religious is love and compassion. And I think it's fair to say that those who are authentically religious, whether Buddhists, Christians, Hindus or Muslims, believe in compassion and love for others regardless of cultural or religious differences. — Janus
I can't make sense of this. The right 'feeling' is love and compassion (as if it isn't also for the non-religious!), but later you say they "believe in" it? What would it mean for someone to not "believe in" it? That they don't believe the emotions exist? That they don't believe they'll work (for what)? That they don't believe they're 'right (by what measure)? — Isaac
I agree, but I contend that that "feeling" is the feeling of certainty about the Christian doctrines. And that this feeling is due to having been born and raised into the religion, ie. having internalized it from an early age, before the physiological ability to think criticially has developed. — baker
I think that's true, but they must have some ties into the world, else what are they by little antigonish's? They need coherence, implication, consequence...something like that, to be real at all in a social world. I'm happy with incomplete commensurability, but not with no commensurability. No commensurability just means we have an entire mental world without a single tie-in to ours and that seems completely implausible on the face of it. It's not a good model of the behaviour we actually see. — Isaac
Not to mention the fact that Christians, bless them, are a part of our world, and moral actors within it. If we simply set them outside of our moral talk we undermine the whole project of morality (which is about us, not about me, you, them). Morality relies on at least a sufficient degree of commensurability to give a baseline of understanding common to all in the community.
I think that baseline, that commensurability, is in the concept of moral judgement. A Christian child doesn't need to understand the bible to understand that hitting people to get sweets is wrong. Christian adults don't routinely consult their bible or their priest in novel situations to work out who they should and should not spit in the eye of.
So it seems 'wrong' comes first, religion then tries to piggyback off that to say 'here's some other things that are also 'wrong' you might not have thought of'.
So with the most charitable interpretation I can muster, I find it virtually impossible to believe that a Christian has an incommensurable understanding of 'wrong'.
Like I said in the same post of mine you quoted:If that were true then adult conversion would be impossible, which it obviously isn't. — Janus
It's a feeling, an experience that is impossible to recreate at will for an adult person.
Except perhaps to some extent for adults who are going through an existential crisis and who in the process of their existential quest turn to religion/spirituality. — baker
The article seems to require that believers have a 'clear headed' conception of their God's atrocities to be simultaneous with their worship in order to transfer that veneration to the atrocities of God and tarnish the believer's character.
The final paragraph references nonbelievers being understanding of believers due to lack of a clear/ unified conception of God the Benevolent and God the Eternal Punisher - salvation through cognitive dissonance or avoided thought.
I wonder whether it is even possible to worship the God of the bible in such a 'clear headed' fashion? — fdrake
So I don't think one can generalise about the moral character of Christians in the way that Lewis appears to be doing. — unenlightened
Sure. To know a person's moral character, we look at that person's ACTIONS. — frank
So you're saying Lewis's argument is faulty because he's judging a class?if they're good in all they do, we have to say they appear to have good character — frank
It's a feeling, an experience that is impossible to recreate at will for an adult person.
Except perhaps to some extent for adults who are going through an existential crisis and who in the process of their existential quest turn to religion/spirituality. — baker
And you are the judge of who is "genuinely imbued with religious feeling"? — baker
Why does this even need to be asked? Of course not. — frank
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