, you don't think realizing that neverending damnation is immoral could cause a belief revision of some sort (contra voluntarism)?
Maybe, maybe not, getting into psychology...

, Christianity was not any one particular single movement in the first centuries after Jesus' demise (≈ 30-40).
There were all kinds of zealous factions and cults and whatnot fighting each other and, well, anyone really, often refusing to discuss things for that matter.
And this continued after Constantine's (272-337) organized efforts to get them all together under Roman Catholicism and do away with the rest.
Celsus found them a nuisance, and Origen later complained about Celsus.
Theodosius I (347-395) officially decreed them "dementes vesanosque" (demented lunatics) in 380 — everyone but the Roman Catholics of course, since they were now rubber-stamped by the empire, or more accurately, Roman Catholicism was now part thereof.
Backing by the empire and its resources was a "seismic" turning point in history (to use one historian's word).
And, naturally, another few centuries later yet another religion hit the market with Muhammad, swiftly splitting up into two factions due to some succession disagreement.
It's a bloody story laced with fanatics, strife, and antisemitism, not a mere neat story about the righteous innocents being persecuted.
The Romans tried to deal with the cesspool of zealous cults, countryside preachers, resentment/dissidents, etc, of Middle Eastern antiquity, in their brutish ways, yet Christianity (Catholicism) outlived the empire, and so here we are, with some folk raising Jesus to divinity and perfection, and apparently assenting to neverending damnation.

Seems we need to revisit some very basic theory of action.

Actions are explained in terms of a desire and a belief.

I went to the freezer (action) because I wanted some ice-cream (desire) and thought there was some in the freezer (belief).

From there on it gets complicated, but this should be sufficient to convince most reasonable folk that there is an intimate link between belief and action.

Let's look at a couple more examples. Fred is a candidate for the position of security guard at the capitol building. He believes that Trump won the election and that there are members of the senate who are members of a satanist cult.

Do you think his beliefs relevant to his appointment?

Jenny is a creationist. She does not believe evolution, and believes that the earth was created a few thousand years ago. She wishes to sit on the panel writing the science curriculum for your child's school

Do you think her beliefs are relevant? Does she get your vote? Given that she has not acted on those beliefs, do you judge her as of equal standing to Ann, who believes that the earth is billions of years old and that animals evolved?

OF course not. And with good reason. If one's beliefs can be used to explain one's action, one's actions can be predicted from one's beliefs.

A specific belief can reasonably be taken to imply a specific action.

A bit more introductory stuff.

A belief is a propositional attitude. That just means that a belief is a belief that such-and-such is the case, where such-and-such is some statement, or if you prefer, some way the world might be.

I believe that the chair is blue. Your belief that the moon is full is accurate. And so on.

Consider what would be the case if this were not so. If you met someone who claimed to have a belief that was not about how the world might be. What could be done with such a belief?

Folk do say such things "I believe in family"; "I believe in Democracy". What are we to make of such utterances?

Yes, they pretty much say nothing until they are put into a more concrete form - until they are put in terms of a belief that families should be the primary caregiver, or families deserve more funding. "I believe in family" is perhaps a sentiment, or a rhetorical ploy, rather than a belief.

You can see why this is so from the relation between actions and beliefs set out in my previous post.

And you continue to back up my point. Excellent.

More introductory stuff.

Faith is just belief. But it can be, and here it should be, used for those beliefs in which there is insufficient evidence. I've no evidence that you have understood this analysis, but I have faith in your ability.

Yes, you, the person reading this.

Faith becomes problematic when insufficient evidence is replaced by contrary evidence. That Trump won the election; that the wine is the blood of christ, despite it still looking and tasting like wine...

Faith relies on trust.

Faith relies on trust. — Banno

Not sure how relevant this is but I generally draw a distinction between faith (belief without good reason) and reasonable confidence in, for instance, a plane's capacity to fly and land without crashing. I personally never use the word faith because of its religious associations and how believers will often make asinine claims such as - 'but you have faith in science' etc.

Sure - that's how I would usually use it, as belief in spite of the evidence pointing to the contrary conclusion. I was just allowing for some subtlety.

Are you planning to link this account to the OP or a claim like "A belief in the Christian God is a bad mark on someone's character"?

There is an inconsistency in conjoining these proposals. — Banno

It's time for you to make clear just exactly what you're on about. It appears to me you're critical of both people who have beliefs and the beliefs themselves you 1) don't like, 2) think are inconsistent, and 3) think are evil. And I do not question that there are such people. But your category error is breathtaking. So&so is an idiot, is inconsistent in his beliefs, claims to be a Christian, and thinks evil thoughts. Well, you can have your So&so. So what? But your conclusion appears to be that Christianity is bad.

Try this. Substitute for "Christian" in you arguments, "Australian." There are Australians I don't like, that are inconsistent in their beliefs, and that think evil thoughts. Must be something wrong with Australia and Australians. Which of course only proves 1) I don't know what I'm talking about and 2) I don't even know how to think about it. And that would be you. So why are you persisting in such grotesque error?

It's clear the Lewis article is about those who believe that god damns souls, together with the inconsistency of Christian theology.

Can they articulate a nice version that retains the distinctive ideas of Christianity?

Still an open question. There are those who think they have, but the consistency of their ideas is a topic of some debate.

Your analogy doesn't work.

Not again.

Not again. — Banno

Link up the stuff about belief and action to the OP. You haven't done that yet, have you?

The link to the thread should be obvious. We can, do and ought judge folk by their beliefs as well as their actions.

Fine.

So a belief is a propositional attitude, and faith is a subgroup of belief.

I asked before for you to consider what a belief would be like without a subject.

Consider what faith would be like without a subject. "I have faith in you", like "I believe in you", is an expression of trust. If it means anything then it pays out in "I believe you will replay your debt" or "I believe you will keep your promise".

Why would faith in god be any different?

"I believe in family" is perhaps a sentiment, or a rhetorical ploy, rather than a belief. — Banno

Same for "I have faith in the Lord".

There is nothing even remotely novel about Lewis's argument. — Ennui Elucidator

The interesting variation here is that the argument asks us not to consider the morality of such an evil god, but of those who consider him worthy of praise or worship. — Banno

This topic has not, so far as I am aware, been discussed in this forum before.

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?

This topic has not, so far as I am aware, been discussed in this forum before. — Banno

I couldn’t say.

You and I agree, however, on the main point - people who believe something that is evil is good can be judged for both their belief in the bad thing and the inadequacy of the process they used to arrive at that belief. When someone reveals that they believe something horrid, you should act accordingly. To the extent that such a person is being called upon to pass judgment upon a matter and that judgment is of necessity complicated and not prone to efficient inquiry, excluding them from making that judgment based upon their expressed beliefs seems a reasonable heuristic/proxy. I only disagreed that self-identifying as a Christian of necessity demonstrates poor character - a point that Lewis does a poor job of establishing in his article.

As an aside, as an out group member I have had to learn far more about Christianity (secular or otherwise) than I would have liked to. Being in the out group, the essential nature of Christianity takes on a heightened importance because it often has to be appealed to to stop the Christians from murdering us (or otherwise persecuting us). Further, as an out group member you must be careful to find friends where they can be found, which requires that you not just write all in group members off as worthy of condemnation in all contexts/respects. Having a place at the table was not easy to come by for the out groups; taking your chance to sit at that table to demand that everyone in the in group leave (thereby ending the the collaborative process you were trying to join) is dangerous.

And for what it is worth…

. .It is profane in You to do such a thing, to kill a righteous one with a wicked one, rendering the righteous one like the wicked one. It is profane in You. Will the Judge of all the land not do justice? — “Genesis 18:25ish”

It is for people to demand justice even from god, not to sit idly by the blood of their neighbor. So from my perspective, it is abundantly obvious that one can worship/love/etc. god and still call god out for being an asshole. Cheering as god does bad things is demented and contra god. Indeed, even when god decides to do justice (horrible as it is), it is not for people to take issue with justice not being done.

And Jonah commenced to come into the city, one day's walk, and he proclaimed and said, "In another forty days Nineveh shall be overturned!"

. . .

And God saw their deeds, that they had repented of their evil way, and the Lord relented concerning the evil that He had spoken to do to them, and He did not do it.

Now it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was grieved.

. . .

8Now it came to pass when the sun shone, that God appointed a stilling east wind, and the sun beat on Jonah's head, and he fainted, and he begged to die, and he said, "My death is better than my life."
9And God said to Jonah; Are you very grieved about the kikayon? And he said, "I am very grieved even to death."
10And the Lord said: You took pity on the kikayon, for which you did not toil nor did you make it grow, which one night came into being and the next night perished.
11Now should I not take pity on Nineveh, the great city, in which there are many more than one hundred twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well?
— “Jonah 3 to 4”

Worship is not, and has never been, blind cheering for all that god does. One can reproach god, is expected to do so, and should be criticized for encouraging god to do bad things.

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.

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

It is Abraham that reproaches god for going to kill a bunch of innocent people in Sodom. Abraham, as a Biblical character worthy of emulation, models expected behavior. Jonah is the jerk that runs from god and whines that he wasted his time going to Ninivah because god didn’t bother to kill them all. He actually antagonizes god a bit in the passage, “I disobeyed you and didn’t go to Ninivah because I knew you wouldn’t do it.”

… And he prayed to the Lord and said, "Please, O Lord, was this not my contention while I was still on my land? For this reason I had hastened to flee to Tarshish, for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, with much kindness, and relenting of evil. And now, O Lord, take now my soul from me, for my death is better than my life."
And the Lord said: Are you deeply grieved? — “Jonah”

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.

Re judging people by their actions:

This is a very generalized heuristics, and thus often unfair or useless for judging people.

By the time someone does something that could be problematic, it's often already too late. Such as discovering only a few years into your marriage that your spouse is a thief, or serial killer.

On the other hand, judging people merely by their actions results in the kind of absolute stigma of convicted felons, who, even though they have served their prison sentence in full, are never really allowed back into society, no matter what they do.

I don't think something so basic was seriously disputed. It just looks like you've tried to demonstrate that people can be justifiably judged on their beliefs, not why Christians should be judged for their belief, or whether Christian faith counts as a belief in the sense you've dealt with (an attitude towards a statement).

BTW my computer will not download the River of Fire you linked; it advises that it is a security risk. — Janus

It opens fine on my computer. There used to be quite a bit of talk about the River of Fire about 10+ years ago (and several online sources for the text, with easy copy-paste option). It's an Eastern Orthodox take on eternal damnation. What I find esp. interesting about it is that it literally spells out that in Western Christianity, God is portrayed as a threat, as the danger from which we seek salvation.

We can, do and ought judge folk by their beliefs as well as their actions. — Banno

I don't think something so basic was seriously disputed. — fdrake

Actually, this is precisely what was disputed by some posters this thread, and is in general disputed in society about some beliefs.

Ultra political correctness would have us not judge anyone, in any way (except, of course, those on the official list to be judged).

Religious beliefs and believers, given that they are protected by the constitution, are also not supposed to be judged.

You could find yourself sued for criticizing a Christian for his Christian beliefs.

There is a loophole in secular constitutions that gives religions a free pass. Religions and religious people thus have special constitutional protection that ordinary non-religious people don't.

Let's focus on the ones who believe in it in Hell and eternal torture in some regard + worship the entity that tortures - regardless of their attitude towards it.

@Isaac and jorndoe seem to have made points in this quarter.

I find it quite plausible that they don't 'really worship' or 'really believe in' the God that tortures, but I'd struggle to spell out why. — fdrake

Because they themselves might not be safe from hell yet.

A proper Roman Catholic, for example, is expected to his last breath to consider himself capable of the ultimate betrayal of God, and thus even though he has lead a pure Catholic life, lose everything on his deathbed. Ideally, a Catholic is always supposed to be in a state of anxiety about his own salvation, given his capacity for mortal sin. (This is why scrupulosity is also called "the Catholic disease".)

Protestants generally don't have such concerns, insofar as they believe that their salvation is guaranteed by Christ dying for them on the cross, and doesn't depend on the purity of their conscience on their deathbed.

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? — Srap Tasmaner

Religious people tend to be authoritarian, and their critics tend to be such as well.

I was raised to be in bucket 1 but I’m not and I have no idea why. — Srap Tasmaner

That shouldn't be too hard. If a family are only Sunday saints and don't put in much effort into teaching religion to their children; if they are religious, but there is domestic discord; if religion was practiced primarily for socio-economic purposes; then it seems more likely that children born into such families will not develop a deep religious affiliation.

Re judging people by their actions:

This is a very generalized heuristics, and thus often unfair or useless for judging people.

By the time someone does something that could be problematic, it's often already too late. Such as discovering only a few years into your marriage that your spouse is a thief, or serial killer.

On the other hand, judging people merely by their actions results in the kind of absolute stigma of convicted felons, who, even though they have served their prison sentence in full, are never really allowed back into society, no matter what they do. — baker

The arguments we're addressing want us to draw conclusions about the character of Christians for what we take to be their belief (or the logical outcome of their beliefs).

*You worship a torturer, so...*

So what? So you must approve of torture? You think torture is a good thing? Have 100s of millions of Christians all believed it's good to torture people?

How about looking at their actions to see if they believe that instead of worming our way to it via a logical argument?

Am I really alone here in this? Because it seems bloody obvious.

Gang laws, tribe laws.

If you're a member of a gang, you are accountable for what another gang member does. Even if you were nowhere near when he committed the crime, even if you knew nothing about the crime being planned. Simply by being a member of the gang, you make yourself accountable.

Making use of the name and demanding special treatment on account of one's gang/tribe membership, makes one such a gang/tribe member and it makes one accountable for anything other members of the gang/tribe do.