Sid Schwab considers the meaning of eternal torment. Even a moment’s thought should make anyone realize that eternal punishment, besides being literally unimaginable, cannot possibly be just. Yet this principle is dogma in Christianity — Jesus himself said, “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment” — and even worse, those who are good and are admitted into heaven are going to be eternally aware of the torments inflicted on their unsaved fellows, and will be going out to witness the punishment of the wicked (according to St Augustine, anyway…I hear he’s a fairly highly regarded source on doctrine.)
I suspect that the truly good would be in rebellion against such a tyrant god, but then, we always knew Christianity was a death cult for sheep, that rewards submission to the odious and the unlikely.
I’d add to Schwab’s rejection of the principle that it isn’t just eternal punishment that is a problem, but the whole idea of eternal life. There can be no such thing. People change all the time, and the I that is here now will not be the same I that could exist in 20 years; my mortality is a part of my being, and removing that would be an event so traumatic and so life-changing that it would produce an identity even more substantially different than the vast revolution I went through 51 years ago, when I gastrulated. Immortality is meaningless and achieving it is impossible.
That’s not to say we don’t want a long life and will fight off death as long as we can. It’s just that life itself represents a kind of incremental dynamism that can’t be frozen without destroying it.
The whole page is italicized now…
EEEEEk!! Runaway Italics tag. Kill it!
My whole world is sloping to the right! Will this help?
And this is why you PZ Meyers and I’m just an undergrad student. =)
“It’s just that life itself represents a kind of incremental dynamism that can’t be frozen without destroying it.”
This quote is going straight onto my list of favorite quotes. One sentence that poetically sums up the fallacy of eternal life. Great work.
Crap. Supplying a lone italic-closing tag in a comment does nothing. Sensible, I suppose.
No, it’s not. You’re all hallucinating.
How can it be that even if I catch an error immediately after posting, and go directly to the editor and fix it on the spot, I can still get three comments pointing out the mistake before I can update? I feel like there is a whole host of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and tag Nazis hovering over my every word, awaiting even a moment’s lapse to pounce.
I remember this one from catechism, when we asked the nuns about whether it was fair that we puny mortals were at risk of everlasting punishment. The answer was very simple: God is infinite and eternal. If we offend him, then we deserve to suffer pain and torment forever and ever. See? Isn’t that reasonable? (And we good little kids nodded our heads and said “Oh!” and went home to our nightmares.)
If we are immortal, then why were we *born*? Shouldn’t we have existed for all time, like this supposed god? Why didn’t this god simply create us in the atemporal world in which he already exists? If he knew how we would behave and whether we were worthy of reward or punishment, why not skip all this earth stuff, and just have us “live” our immortal “lives” in heaven or hell?
Thinking like this makes my brain begin to hurt. They have a name for it: theology.
“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” – Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Is “a host of Nazis” the correct collective?
Shouldn’t it be a “krystallnacht” or a “blitzkrieg” or something? A “cesspool”?
We should blame Darwin for the typo Nazis. Without evolution they wouldn’t exist.
Swamp Thing encountering Anton Arcane being tormented in Hell, Saga of the Swamp Thing Volume 2, Chapter 5, “Down Amongst the Dead Men,” by Alan Moore.
“Hello, Arcane.”
“I muh-must look quite a muh-mess… Insect eggs, you know. Huh-hatching, insuh-side me… Very appropriate. Ha ha ha ha… […] Nuh-no! Wait! Puh-please, before you guh-go…
Huh-how many years have I buh-been here?”
“Since yesterday.”
“Yesterday?
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
If we are immortal, then why were we *born*? Shouldn’t we have existed for all time, like this supposed god? Why didn’t this god simply create us in the atemporal world in which he already exists? If he knew how we would behave and whether we were worthy of reward or punishment, why not skip all this earth stuff, and just have us “live” our immortal “lives” in heaven or hell?
Thinking like this makes my brain begin to hurt. They have a name for it: theology.
If you are ever particularly annoyed with a hell believing theist then just ask them to explain how heaven works out for someone whose loved one (child, partner, friend, etc) isn’t ‘saved’ – which, lets face it, pretty much means everyone.
How great would heaven have to be for you to put out of your mind the fact that your child or other family member is undergoing permanent torture at the hands(?) of sadistic demons?
I firmly believe that it is this type of question that will crack the resolve of fundamentalists far more than any lists of evidence about evolution or rationalistic science.
Parent in Heaven.
Child in Hell.
Just how heavenly is the Parent going to feel?
I would like to point out that Steve DiMilo misspelled Kristallnacht.
The correctionists are everywhere.
Hey, I think I’m getting a better feel for this eternal suffering stuff.
I have to mention one of Harlan Ellison’s stories in connection with this, “I have no mouth and I must scream”, in which an intelligent (and insane) supercomputer that comes to rule mankind plays the part of God. One of his best.
Oops: “Sven”, not “Steve”. I deserve punishment.
That is all.
It’s just another proof that God is an asshole. Jackass.
@ #12, I believe the usual answer is that the unsaved people you cared about in life will be erased from your memory, so you won’t worry about them. It’s a lousy answer, but what do you expect?
I had to post the quote above because it was too appropriate. But I still must respectfully disagree with the notion that ‘eternal life’ is a meaningless concept. It’s true that “life itself represents a kind of incremental dynamism that can’t be frozen without destroying it” but immortality is, kind of by definition, not ‘freezing’, but continuing that dynamic process indefinitely.
Of course an infinite life is impossible, – that’s a limitation imposed by physics as we understand it. But until I get the chance to stand on an airless planetoid in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud and watch the Milky Way galaxy rise over the horizon, don’t bother asking me if I still have things to do.
@#9, #9, #9 …. I beleive an einsatzgruppe of nazis is in common usage, while those prone to more flowery prose prefer a luftwaffe of nazis. However the correct term is a fuehrerbunker of nazis.
Moggie, its exactly the answer I would expect but it opens the door to repose the question to them. I think even the very religious feel uncomfortable with the ‘memory erase’ answer. I think we all inherently know that a large part of who we are is determined by our experiences, and friends or family make up a large part of these experiences. Erase these people from our memory and who we are also changes.
Thats not even a scientific point. If you say ‘erasing our memory doesn’t make sense, it will change or destroy our very personality’ I think most theists will understand and will also understand why you want them to provide an alternative answer.
Hartman/Skitt/McKean strikes again!
Glad to see Dr Schwab (oddly appropriate name btw) here. He manages to write so engaging and funnily about surgery that I can read him without cringing from sympathy pain.
One answer I heard was that God will change the saved so-that they’ll be okay with damned suffering their just punishment.
Obviously no one has read Larry Niven’s “Inferno”. It gives step-by-step instructions on how you get out of hell once you are condemned.
And if one achieves perfect knowledge in Heaven (as I believe many faiths argue), and God’s will is perfect, then that makes a kind of twisted sense, as you will realize why God did what He did, and it will all be obvious. Of course, what that means is that currently the saved person is deluded about the worthiness of his loved ones — he or she should reject them, cast them out as being abominations in God’s sight.
#9, I think we’ll have to go with a Stein of nazi’s.
no hugs for thugs,
Shirley Knott
@#12 Sigmund —
Here’s an “answer” to this question. Basically, God’s will is incomprehensible, so we shouldn’t even try (and we certainly shouldn’t try to judge him by his actions)…just wait until we die:
Sid Schwab is one of my heros. He writes about surgical, medical, social, and political issues with a compelling style. Find and read his ode to the liver, for instance.
Which of course means that it won’t be me, anymore, not in any way that I could currently recognize.
Of course, this brings up the great question of not having free will in heaven. If free will is such a wonderful thing, then why wouldn’t we have it in heaven (of course, the legend says we do, in that Lucifer chose to rebel)?
So what about, instead of having your memory of those who are now burning in hell erased, you are simply provided with computer (God) generated simulations of those loved ones such that you never realise or know that they are actually in hell?
Sorry to continue a discussion about such absurdity, but I just thought it was a fun exercise!
Any time someone brings up the whole eternal life thing I can’t help but think of acclimatization.
I imagine the first few years (how does one measure infinite time anyway?) I spend in hell will be equivalent to the pain of a hottub after a long, cold day of skiing. The rest of the time I should be able to get used to the idea of swimming in a lake of fire. After all, by definition the pain can’t kill me so it can only get better.
(This image of course sets my mind to thinking about my three year old laughing uproariously on his way to his time-out chair. I wonder how long it would take for the population of hell, or heaven for that matter, to become enured to God’s power and mount an insurection)
I don’t think the later follows – as long as they’re alive they’re redeemable (modulo blasphemy against the Spirit), and rejecting them is unlikely to help win them for Jebus. Every good Christian is supposed to be a fisher for
suckersmen.#29 Chris,
Do you by any chance read Jack (Furry webcomic, currently SFW on the frontpage, but very much NSFW passim).
That’s pretty much the depiction of heaven therein.
I’ve often felt that if people stopped to consider the implications of eternal life, they’d be horrified by it instead of attracted to it. Imagine living countless billions of years, having time to inspect every aspect of the universe in laborious detail a billion-times over, and not yet having blinked an eyelid in the eternity of life you’re being “rewarded” with.
I’m convinced that people don’t want eternal life, they just want to choose when oblivion occurs. Unfortunately that’s not the promise of the religious…
That’s monstrous. “You have lived a life of loving devotion to your family, now your reward is to have the ability to care about them taken away”. Doesn’t that speak volumes about the person who concocted that particularly nasty get-out clause?
I think my goal if I am sent to hell is to try to rise up through the ranks of administration. Get me out of the whole “boiling in the sea of fire” into the role of “hell’s angel.” I think Satan would appreciate the work I have done for him on earth, and could use a thoughtful person to help run the evil plots.
You may question why I would want to stoop to doing things to harm people, and I agree it’s not all that nice, but jeez, would you really expect me to do God’s bidding after that bastard sentances me to eternal punishment? Heck no, if I am stuck in eternal punishment, I’d do everything I could to fight the Man, and make it better for me. I’m sorry, under that situation the concepts of “selflessness” and “generosity” go right out the window.
Wow. I can’t remember anything that happened to me before neurulation.
Jens (#30) raises a question I thought about as early as first grade. It seems like you could get used to just about anything. It seems like a trivial thing to compare to questions of Heaven and Hell, but, after a long time I finally learned to like tomatoes. In spite of that Hell seemed fairly easy to picture, but Heaven was harder. Was it really fluffy clouds and people in long gowns strumming harps? If we could get used to swimming in a lake of fire, wouldn’t we eventually be bored out of our ethereal skulls in paradise?
Saw this gem in the comments over there:
If there is no God then our conscience is nonsensical and yours is as valueless as the guy who rapes and murders women and doesn’t have a problem with it. Your conscience is telling you that you should do good. But there is a point to it. If you deny God….then there is no point to doing the good that you do.
What in the green fuck is the matter with these people? Seriously…I don’t get it. I started to reply there, only to discover that I had no adequate response that would soothe my rage or provide a counterpoint that had any sort of chance of reaching the person. So, I’m ranting here. WTF?
Imagine living countless billions of years, having time to inspect every aspect of the universe in laborious detail a billion-times over, and not yet having blinked an eyelid in the eternity of life you’re being “rewarded” with. – Armchair Dissident
You’ve clearly never appreciated the beauty and fascination of mathematics. So long as my intellectual capacity can be increased without limit, and there’s reasonable company available, I’d be happy spending eternity working on it.
“I feel like there is a whole host of grammar, spelling, punctuation, and tag Nazis hovering over my every word, awaiting even a moment’s lapse to pounce.”
Perhaps that’s a taste of eternal punishment. I confess to being an English teacher, but I’m not fond of grammar Nazis either. Life’s too short.
Matt (#38), whenever I read things like that the first thing that always comes to my mind is, “What does it say when some people think they can only be good if they’re being watched over and threatened with punishment?” For those people who are apparently so close to going insane and killing the rest of us but are only held in check by their beliefs, I’m actually a little glad they have those beliefs, as frightened as I am of what happens when their little bubble gets jangled. And I’m also glad I don’t work with people who apparently require such constant attention.
Reverend Lovejoy: “See you in hell…from heaven!”
But remember, Christopher, YOU are the immoral one…
Riiiiiigggggghhhhhhhtttttt……
in fairness, i have to say that i have met one or two christians along the way who struck me as something other than moral monsters and intellectual midgets. people who were surprisingly honest in their thinking and decent in their humanity.
and so far, they have all had one thing in common:
universalism.
this is the view–a minority view among christians–that no one is punished for all eternity. everyone–universally–gets saved. for any sinner, no matter how grotesque, there is a finite n such that they stay in hell no more than n years. for you, it’s only three years, for me, three thousand, for hitler, three million. but after some point, everyone gets out of the pool.
these christians have arrived at this view primarily by thinking hard about what is consistent with a loving god, as they take their god to be. (issues of omnipotence also come in: how can an omnipotent god be eternally *thwarted* in their attempts to save a finite mortal? can’t be.) and the gospel texts are all open to sufficient wiggle-room that it is not explicitly ruled out by the weight of the evidence.
so: yeah, christians who believe in eternal damnation=sick fuck psychopaths. and the same for their god.
christian universalists: not as bad. they at least have thought about what a loving god could and could not do.
check the wiki-links under ‘universalism’. i’m not saying these people are right, or even sane, but their psychosis is at least less blood-thirsty.
I’ve read it a good 10+ times. It’s one of my “waiting somewhere” books. Stuck in the Airport. Stuck in the doctor’s waiting room.
I don’t want to read all those women’s magazines like Redbook, Elle and whatnot. I don’t want to read People or Time or US News & World Report. Rarely is there a Nature, Scientific American or Journal of Psychology which I would like to read.
So I bring a book. An old, familiar book that I won’t be driven to finish later because I already have finished it. And, if I lose my place, so what? I can start anywhere.
And for those who say “but that’s boring.” Consider them literary chocolates. Chocolate never gets boring.
@#38 Matt —
Stifled by an infantilizing god, they’ve never grown up. In terms of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, they’re still stuck at step 1:
The next step in moral deveopment would be:
These people are unable to see that there are still steps that come after this; they fail to realize that there’s anything beyond the pre-conventional stage of morality at all. So they think that the only possible kind of morality besides their blindly obedient God-induced morality is total self-interest. They don’t understand notions of rule of law, the social contract, or ethical principles; all they know is that they’re children of God, and they feel neither the need nor the desire to grow up.
Isn’t it equally probable that God would just make a clone of the damned individual to accompany the loved ones in heaven?
Or perhaps the damned person goes to Heaven anyway, yet experiences hell, although he smiles all the time as if he’s happy.
When you leave reason behind, there are all sorts of possibilities. :-)
@#41 Christopher Waldrop —
See, this is what I used to think, but more and more I am becoming convinced that their psychopathic immorality is a result of those beliefs. As I said in my #46, they have beliefs that never require them to grow up, and indeed encourage them not to. Maybe some of them would be amoral psychopaths without religion, but I have a feeling the majority would have grown up and developed moral principles of their own like the rest of us, if only they’d given themselves the chance.
Kid Bitzer @ #38–check out the web page of Yale philosopher Keith DeRose. He has a long essay on Xtian universalism that give it about the best defense it’s possible to have. Which is not to say it’s correct [it’s ultimately just as ridiculous as every other life-after-death scenario].
Sorry, I meant Kid Bitzer #44–damn numerical keypad. I don’t know if Wiki links to DeRose’s essay; if not, it should.
It’s not the eternity that’s the problem… it’s the unchangingness. A human could be human for all eternity, so long as events continued to change them.
#50–
don’t worry–my 38th clone got the message, realized it was misdirected, and forwarded it to my 44th clone.
who tells me that derose’s essays is indeed linked on the wiki page.
get a computer with a web-browser, and you’ll be able to discover these things too!
I imagine my interlocutor was thinking of not a removal of empathy but of a granting of the insight that your husband/daughter/neighbour/whoever really does deserve eternal hellfire.
Now what I find monstrous is the idea that people whose only crime is not accepting Christianity without good reason are worthy of everlasting punishment in the first place.
This is one of the few occasions in which I must disagree with PZ. Although, as has been pointed out earlier, infinite life is probably impossible given the finite life of this universe, I for one would welcome the chance to live, if not forever, then for a very long time indeed. If, shortly before my biolgical death, I could transfer my personality and memories to a robot, android or even to a virtual reality simulation in the MegaNet, I would do it. The only condition would be that I have the chance of self-erasure if desired. I often find it frustrating that I live at a time in which we know there are so many wonderful things to learn about the universe but I will never know or experience them.
‘It’s true that “life itself represents a kind of incremental dynamism that can’t be frozen without destroying it” but immortality is, kind of by definition, not ‘freezing’, but continuing that dynamic process indefinitely.’ – Ray Ingles #18
The question Mr.Myers is asking, I think, is what exactly is “continuing” that dynamic process. If the self, in its entirety, changes every time something happens, infinite life would result in infinite changes that would result in an infinitely different self.
Taken to the extremes, I am not the same person I was before I wrote this sentence – though, I’m only marginally so. After 10,000 years of life in this body, I will be less like the me I am now than everyone else alive right now. Does it even make sense to say that that person will be me?
It gets weird when you start considering earthy punishments (returning to the ethics theme). After 20 years in prison, it’s pretty safe to say that the person coming out of jail is not the same as the one who went in. It leads me to wonder: at what point are we detaining a person who isn’t reasonably the person who was convicted?
Eternal life (consciousness) in “Heaven” is precisely my definition of Hell. Think about it:
No Yesterday from which to have anything remaining uncompleted.
No Today in which to work at completing anything.
No Tomorrow in which to complete that left uncompleted.
No reason to do anything at all since you never run out of time anyway. No reason to do anything at all since everything in Heaven is perfect and nothing needs doing in the first place.
No concept of time at all, actually. Utter timelessness. Utter stasis. Mere consciousness existing forever with no future, with nothing to look forward to, nothing to look back upon, nothing to look at here and now because here and now does not exist, “now” being indistinguishable from “then”, and never to be recognizable. “Here” being likewise nonexistent, as distance (displacement; “here” vs. “there”) cannot be reckoned without time.
Were my consciousness to be aware of its self in such a timeless and placeless existence would be Hell to me.
I’d add to Schwab’s rejection of the principle that it isn’t just eternal punishment that is a problem, but the whole idea of eternal life. There can be no such thing. People change all the time, and the I that is here now will not be the same I that could exist in 20 years; my mortality is a part of my being, and removing that would be an event so traumatic and so life-changing that it would produce an identity even more substantially different than the vast revolution I went through 51 years ago, when I gastrulated. Immortality is meaningless and achieving it is impossible.
That’s not to say we don’t want a long life and will fight off death as long as we can. It’s just that life itself represents a kind of incremental dynamism that can’t be frozen without destroying it.
Thanks, Paul.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. The real pain is having your life as you know it taken away but still be here to fully appreciate the loss. Damned unfair, if you ask me.
Regards, as always…Charlie
Etha: ” As I said in my #46, they have beliefs that never require them to grow up”
Let me fix that for you: ” As I said in my #46, they have beliefs that require them to never grow up”
I’m becoming more convinced that the underlying pathology in American culture is a refusal to just grow up, since that implies taking responsability – not just for yourself, but for your community.
I took a course with Roy Rappaport on the Anthropology of Religion (I guess that dates me). One of his intuitions from spending time in the mountains of Niugini was that what Americans lacked was the initiation ritual – some woo to smack it into your head that “You’re grown up now – you take on the burden for the world”, since we appear too dense to figure it out rationally.
I remember, as a little kid, the feeling I used to get when thinking about heaven. Living forever and ever in one place. It scared the hell out of me! It made me feel trapped and helpless, and I couldn’t understand why nobody else felt that way. Didn’t they understand infinity?
A human could be human, but probably not the same person. Who we are changes over time, and at some point one can reasonably say that we no longer share meaningful identity (except in terms of physical continuity) with the person we were before. Derek Parfit covers this issue in his book Reasons and Persons.
If this is true, there is some sense in which it is irrational for “me” to want physical immortality, since that doesn’t guarantee psychological immortality — there may be a person in this body, but after a long enough period it won’t be the “me” of today.
That said, I’m willing to take the risk…
Kid #44’s comment suggests a metric for rating punishment in Hell — the Hitler. If we define one Hitler as being 3.0*10^6 years in Hell, then we get the following:
Hitler 1 Hitler
Kid 1 milliHitler
Osama Bin Laden 200 mHitler*
Average “sinner” 1 microHitler
PZ **
Keith Olbermann ***
—————
* Converted from Islamic units
** Not applicable as, in fact, no afterlife exists
*** Keith Olbermann is a god
Pablo @#35: there’s a flaw in your plan. Satan’s plots are only viable for those souls alive here on planet Earth (stipulating that human existence is the only repository of a “soul”; from the Bible we get no clue as to whether “souls” exist anywhere else in this universe on other planets). Christianity teaches that the earth will not survive eternally and certainly we know through science that this is in fact true. One day humans will no longer exist upon the earth, as one day our sun will have expanded so as to destroy our planet.
So sooner or later you’re going to be unemployed in Hell.
As my mother would patiently explain, the punishment is not being burned in a lake of fire, it’s being removed from the personal presence of god.
Also, if you do some fancy jiggling about with the Hebrew/Greek (depending on your flavor) you can concoct a doctrine that explains that “lake of fire” is a somewhat inaccurate translation and that what is REALLY means is that fire is the presence of the Holy Spirit who, according to Acts, is represented by a flame. So even in hell, once you accept gods authority the flames of the holy spirit will no longer torment you, though you will never be allowed to elevate to the bliss of communing with god personally. After all, “Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess”, and all that. I dared not ask if there was also a “lake of doves” cuz that would have been asnwered with a swift smack and a prayer session.
And no, she didn’t make this up on her own, this is taught as standard biblical revelation in their particular brand of bible belt fundamentalism.
As for the problems with heavenly boredom, she has an answer for that one too. Her church teaches that the resurrected believers will be given the opportunity to descend to hell and teach their loved ones about god and assist in our knee-bowing. She fully expects to meet me down there one day and resume the bible studies that broke off when I was 18.
They have all sorts of fancy plans for once they get heaven-side. With some additional fancy jiggling they’ve come up with the notion that there are eternal “cycles” and that eternity isn’t just a timeless flat line, but that god has additional plans and revelations for the chosen few. The consummation of this world is just one step in his eternal plan. What comes after all this mess has been cleaned up is yet to be revealed.
No, I don’t have references for any of this, so don’t ask. But the church they belong to has thousands of members in the US and an equal number, if not more, throughout latin america, asia and eastern europe.
@ #54, you would perhaps enjoy the novels of Greg Egan, particularly Permutation City. I’m always reminded of this story when the subject of heavenly eternity comes up, because some of the characters live in a high-fidelity computer simulation, in which they have volitional control over their brain-states. There’s no reason to feel bored by a very long life if you can program yourself not to experience boredom.
Yeah, but I’d have that time at least (although admittedly it is inconsquential in the grand scheme of eternity), and there are always the possibility of other worlds that God could create.
It’s also a heretic answer, if I understand St Thomas Aquinas right.
Thred can haz winz0r, kthxbai.
What and what, respectively???
:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Hmmm, sounds like earth…
The concept of Hell is horrifying. So let’s examine the happy prospect of Heaven:
So, let’s say it’s all true. Good Christian folks, when they die, go up in the metaphysical air for judgment. They are all found guilty, but Jesus bribes the judge for them and they walk. Heaven is wonderful place where they live in the presence of God in mansions set aside for them and there is no sin of any kind.
Mind you, there’d have to be a few changes made in them. Once judged, they stand, theoretically, no chance of going to Hell, so they must have had the capacity for sin surgically removed. Otherwise, there would have to be angelic thought police ready to give an offender the toss for any slip through all eternity. Because, after all, the justification for eternal Hell is that God cannot tolerate the slightest sin.
So, we need to lose the body and all that goes with it. But a spirit being really doesn’t need a mansion or streets paved with gold. He/She…IT has no bodily needs, nor has comfort or wealth any value. That which gives pleasure can be misused for sin, after all. No sex…no need for reproduction. No eating or the subsequent messy and blasphemous after effects thereof.
But the mind that is left must be altered, too. All previous knowledge must be erased, for it is worldly and must contaminate the heavenly soul. Memories, too, must go. Can’t have someone in heaven grieving for friends burning for all time over in hell. Matter of fact, we need to lose empathy, too, since it would impede concentration to think about the poor, tortured sinners. Free will has to go also, since it is meaningless in the presence of God. Since one can no longer choose to sin, it is no longer needed. Most of the other emotions need to go, too. No one can have bad thoughts in Heaven…they’re sins. And one can’t be focused on ones self…that’s vanity…so all the focus in one’s eternal life must be on pleasing God. So, no need for any other sort of joy or pleasure beyond that. Having the capacity for enjoying anyone but God would undermine the focus and leave oneself open to disappointment, which is a no-no in heaven. In fact, the mere presence of other, detectable beings in heaven would be pointless, since they would be insignificant in the presence of God or be distracting.
So, where are we? You’re in Heaven. You are a bodiless spirit surrounded by luxury you cannot use and don’t notice. You have no knowledge or memories. Maybe you have a name, but you don’t care. You are alone with God for all eternity. Your only function…indeed the only function of which you can conceive is to praise him who needs no praises for all eternity.
And none of this bothers you. Because all that you are has been removed to make you palatable to this being who has no need of you. You aren’t human any more…you don’t even understand the term. You’re just a lobotomized soul: a single tiny ember eternally revolving the gigantic star of God.
Congratulations. You’re saved.
Steve “Reprinted from my blog” James
This talk of time and space in both heaven and hell is very alarming. I thought God existed outside of time and space? If heaven is being with god, you would have to be outside of time and space. What does it even mean to say eternity? What does it mean to say with?
Totally tangential, but Tolkien thought that spirits are inherently gendered. It never occured to me to ask before – what’s official RCC doctrine on this point? What about other churches?
I’ve tried asking my uber-xian mom about how she can say she’ll never be happy in heaven without her entire family, in the same breath as asking me why I wouldn’t want to live in a place like heaven where there’s always perfet happiness. The result is typically her in tears praying fervently for my soul to be redeemed.
I used to have panic attacks when I was a kid because the idea of being stuck anywhere for eternity freaked me out so much. It’s a relief to know that’s not actually something I have to worry about (there are plenty of other things that need worrying, after all…)
Clearly, in order to experience eternity in a finite universe, one must travel at the speed of light (see the Lorentz factor as applied to time dilation). But the only way to achieve this is to be massless, which means that Catholics can’t go to heaven: they have mass at least once a week.
I’ve always contended that eternal torment is the best place to start when trying to remove the Christ from someone. It rarely does any good though.
The funny thing is that eternal torment may not even be the doctrine taught in the New Testament, but rather universal salvation or annihilation. I’ve never been able to determine whether or not the material I looked at on the subject was just a bunch of crap invented by an anomalous bunch of Christians, or valid history. The claim is that the earliest churches all believed in universal salvation (which at least makes spreading the “good news” a bit more sensible), that modern translations of the Bible are incorrect, and that the Roman Catholic church squashed out competing afterlife doctrines as it rose to power.
The argument hinges on the translation of the Greek adjective aionios. It is invariably translated as “eternal” in modern English translations of the Bible, but apparently the word isn’t even found in ordinary Greek. The root of aionios, aion (we get eon from this), definitely denotes a finite period of time with the length being determined by the context in which it is used (as opposed to our current use of eon which definitely suggests a good long time). Sometimes the noun is even translated as “eternal” (for example, in Revelation what ought to be translated as “age of ages” is translated as “forever and ever”). The defense is that supposedly there is no word in Greek (or Hebrew) that means eternal, and hence aion was used.
Anyway, I find this subject fascinating since it was what ultimately caused my own deconversion. Google aionios for a bunch of information.
#70
milton also describes angels as inherently gendered, and i don’t believe it caused any concern about his orthodoxy vis a vis anglicanism. (other of his views did).
pl 7, an angel speaking:
Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
Us happie, and without Love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs:
Easier then Air with Air, if Spirits embrace,
Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure
Desiring; nor restrain’d conveyance need
As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul.
i believe he is saying that angels have teh awesome sexxors, and no need for birf control neither, but opinions may vary among miltonians.
I asked whether my dog would be in heaven with me. And the guy in the black shirt said “no, dogs don’t have eternal souls and don’t go to heaven.” And I became an atheist. It’s as simple as that.
Screw the eternal torture bit, who’d want to go to heaven if our non-human friends won’t be there? What kind of idiot god would create a creature as wonderful and loyal as a dog and screw up so badly on humans that he needs a torture-chamber for them? Who’s got time for an idiot god like that?
Again: for those of you who want the ultimate take-down on how stupid heaven is, you must read Mark Twain’s “stormfield’s visit to heaven” – which is now available free on project gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1044
Twain demolishes the stupid as only Twain can. With such graceful humor that I’ve heard even the faithful giggling at how stupid heaven is.
@davidstvz: For what it’s worth, the notes to my Bible says that the word translated as “eternal” can also mean “universal”, and that aion is translated as “eternity”, “long time”, “age”, and “world” depending on context.
@kid bitzer: TY
I have to go with Stein on this one…
“A laboratory of Nazis”
On the question of eternal punishment, is anyone aware if the Christian texts give any explanation as to the purpose of this never-ending torture?
While we’re alive, the threat of eternal damnation is clearly intended to try and make us behave – and believe. But once we’re dead (and assuming we fail the test, since no one is without sin and it seems no two people can agree on what the rules are to be forgiven those sins), what purpose will eternal punishment serve?
In this life, punishment usually serves one of two purposes: Either to attempt to penalise bad behaviour such that subsequent behaviour will hopefully improve or to punish by removal from society until dead (either by capital punishment or life imprisonment), to absolutely prevent hideous activity directly affecting the public in the future.
But once we’re dead and pass over into hell – who is at risk from any subsequent misdeeds? What behaviour modification can come from a punishment that never ends? Who is being guarded from future bad behaviour if all the nice people are in Heaven and the rest in Hell?
Is Hell just theatre for the righteous?
Oh, and how old are we in Heaven?
I always liked to think that when you get to heaven, you can choose to do what you want, and so lots of scientific-minded folks are “up there” creating new creatures–following the earthly rules of evolution, of course. How else can you explain the wacky creatures found in the ocean?
One of the fun vignettes in Twain’s “stormfield visit to heaven” is the mother who encounters her child in heaven. The child died as an infant. Of course, in heaven, who wants to be an infant? The child is manifesting herself as a 20-something and the mother is very upset that her baby is all grown up and they discover that they simply cannot get along.
I have to admit, until I read Twain the age-skew problem never occurred to me. There’s also a few wonderful bits about the mounds of left-over haloes piled up by the entryway… And, did I mention the crowds?
If you think about it, virtually every aspect of the heaven myth is laughable. What’s really laughable is that the followers of the jewish zombie death god (aka: christards) laugh at the muslims and their virgins.
“is hell just theatre for the righteous?”
well, yes; according to tertullian, an early father of the western church
forgive me for quoting at length:
“However there are other spectacles–that last eternal day of judgment, ignored by nations, derided by them, when the accumulation of the years and all the many things which they produced will be burned in a single fire. What a broad spectacle then appears! How I will be lost in admiration! How I will laugh! How I will rejoice! I ‘ll be full of exaltation then as I see so many great kings who by public report were accepted into heaven groaning in the deepest darkness with Jove himself and alongside those very men who testified on their behalf! They will include governors of provinces who persecuted the name of our lord burning in flames more fierce that those with which they proudly raged against the Christians! And those wise philosophers who earlier convinced their disciples that god was irrelevant and who claimed either that there is no such thing as a soul or that our souls would not return to their original bodies will be ashamed as they burn in the conflagration with those very disciples. And the poets will be there, shaking with fear, not in front of the tribunal of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the Christ they did not anticipate! Then it will be easier to hear the tragic actors, because their voice will be more resonant in their own calamity (better voices since they will be screaming in greater terror). The actors will then be easier to recognize, for the fire will make them much more agile. Then the charioteer will be on show, all red in a wheel of fire, and the athletes will be visible, thrown, not in the gymnasium, but in the fire, unless I have no wish to look at their bodies then, so that I can more readily cast an insatiable gaze on those who raged against our Lord. “This is the man,” I will say, “the son of a workman or a prostitute (in everything that follows and especially in the well-known description of the mother of Jesus from the Talamud Tertullian from this point on is refering to the Jews), the destroyer of the sabbath, the Samaritan possessed by the devil. He is the man whom you brought from Judas, the man who was beaten with a reed and with fists, reviled with spit, who was given gall and vinegar to drink. He is the man whom his disciples took away in secret, so that it could be said that he was resurrected or whom the gardener took away, so that the crowd of visitors would not harm his lettuces.” What praetor or consul or quaestor or priest will from his own generosity grant you the sight of such things or the exultation in them? And yet we already have these things to a certain extent through faith, represented to us by the imagining spirit. Besides, what sorts of things has the eye not seen or the ear not heard and what sorts of things have not arisen in the human heart (1. Cor. 2, 9)? I believe these are more pleasing than the race track and the circus and both enclosures (first and fourth tier of seats or, according to others, the comic and tragic stages).”
the parenthetical comments are from nietzsche, who quotes this bit in the genealogy of morals. but the original quote is echt tertullian.
@#58 frog —
This reminds me of a sign I saw at CVS while waiting in the check-out line:
Shouldn’t it be, “It’s not just illegal. It’s wrong”? But no. The only way you can keep people from wrongdoing is to threaten them with legal costs to them. Because we still haven’t gotten past step 1 of moral development — obedience and punishment orientation.
#23- “Obviously no one has read Larry Niven’s “Inferno”. It gives step-by-step instructions on how you get out of hell once you are condemned.”
I LOVE this book. Read it many times. IMO, it’s way better than “Lucifer’s Hammer” by the same authors.
It would make a terrific movie. Unfortunately the budget would be about $800,000,000.00…..
Ray, those are my sentiments exactly. Well put.
And what with God there, they asked him questions
Like: do you have to eat
Or get your hair cut in heaven?
And if your eye got poked out in this life
Would it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?
Crash Test Dummies
But once we’re dead (and assuming we fail the test, since no one is without sin and it seems no two people can agree on what the rules are to be forgiven those sins), what purpose will eternal punishment serve? – AndyD
It’s how God gets his jollies. Having lots of “sinners” to torture for all eternity was clearly the whole point of creating this universe in the first place. All the rest is just rationalisation.
#11 (J): Nice Swamp Thing reference! The perceptual aspect of eternity has perhaps never been better depicted.
We are “dissipative structures” as Prigogine put it. But immortality is possible for the germline. The rest of the structure is a decaying abandoned husk, its disposable somatic cells a sterile caste. (Unless it figures out how to become a transmissable cancer.) Let us be content with our role as the transient flesh vectors of the transmission of genetic, epigenetic, and memetic information.
Could we, in principle, divert resources towards the continual maintenance of particular somas or their associated minds? We could. But that would fundamentally change the subject being maintained – and would such an entity be worthy of preservation?
Danielle Egan, New Scientist, 10/12/07: “This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal.”
Transhumanist FAQ, hosted at the Extropy Institute: “For the first time in history transhumans are actively researching and developing the skills to end death. It is not an immortalist’s pipe dream–but an objective to be attained, and perhaps in our lifetime. Those of us who actively call ourselves transhumanist do so with a commitment to extending and improving life. The commitment to extending life is a litmus test for transhumanity. If we do not overcome death, we have no future.”
Thirty. Or that’s at least what some Christians hold.
(There seems to be at least two explanations for this figure – either it’s because it was Jesus’s age at the crucifiction, or because it represents the high point in human life, with maturation behind you and old age before you.)
Speaking of inferno, the potential boringness of heaven, etc — did anyone else think that Dante’s Inferno was a lot of fun, Purgatorio was somewhat boring, and Paradisio was downright unreadably dull?
If even a believer can’t make heaven seem appealing….
#56- Isn’t this what happens to the oldest of the old vampires in Anne Rice novels? Everlasting life ultimately defeats their will to do anything at all? They wind down into a state of utter stasis, no longer needing to feed, speak, or even move?
That’s because there are.
Personally, I consider grammar, punctuation, spelling, and tag comments to be the lamest of the lame. They contribute nothing other than showing the commenter’s sense of superiority. I used to leave a comment along the line of “fixed” after I fixed the problem, but now, after 3+ years of blogging, I got irritated enough with such comments that I have changed my policy. What I do now is correct the problem such comments point out (if problem there is) and then delete them with extreme prejudice.
I haven’t read it myself, but I’ve heard a fair lot of people who have say the same thing, and none the opposite.
What’s really fun is when theologians ponder the logisitics and properties of eternal damnation. In the Islamic view eternally tormented sinners have bodies the size of mountains so they are capable of experiencing that much more pain. According to some medieval Christian scholars, the body of a single damned sinner is so foul that if were brought out of hell it would pollute the entire world.
You just contradicted yourself, you jerk. Such comments manifestly contribute something: By bringing your boneheaded errors to your attention, they give you a chance to fix them and not come off looking like a dumbass. Ingrate.
I think most fundies are more enamored of eternal torture in hell for their “enemies” than in eternal reward in heaven for themselves. They are more into the god of smitings and blightings (channeling my inner-Gurgi here) than in the gentle Nazarene’s agape god.
Also, please note that Larry Niven has officially joined Orson Scott Card in coming out of the “demented fuckwit” closet:
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2008/March/SecurityBeat.htm#Science
Thanks for the link, PZ, even though you’ve caught me in one of my increasingly frequent fallow times. I posted in part because I liked the Joyce quote, and partly because of the idea I mentioned that a “true Christian” ought to have a hard time lolling around heaven knowing what was going on down below. In “The History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters,” in the final chapter a person is in heaven. After a few millennia, having learned everything there is to know about everything, talking to Einstein, da Vinci, et al, perfected his golf game, a few other things, he asks his guardian angel if there’s a way he could end it all. Eternal anything sounds pretty bad.
I used to be more tolerant of the religious. As our country seems willfully to be dumbing itself out of existence, however, I find it less and less possible to keep silent. I wish I could do more.
Meanwhile, if I might be so bold, I’d hope some of your readers would look at my most recent post, Sampler, which links to some of my good surgical stuff, and some of my rants. I think it might be a while before I gin up more blogability.
I don’t think it’s the oversight and threat of punishment that matters, actually. I suspect that in many cases their real fear is that without god as a reference point, they won’t be able to tell right from wrong at all. This is not an unreasonable concern when one’s system of morality is incoherent, not to mention somewhat arbitrary.
After all, if you believe X is wrong solely because it’s listed in the Big List of Wrong Things, then it follows that absent the List, you wouldn’t believe X to be wrong. But X is wrong – the List says so – so not believing X to be wrong would be bad. Perhaps you don’t actually see anything wrong with X yourself. Perhaps you even find arguments that X is actually perfectly acceptable rather compelling. But the List says X is wrong, and so X is wrong. If you don’t see it, that’s just because the List’s Author is much, much better than you. You simply don’t understand morality well enough; you need the List to tell you what is right. And, since the Author is also much, much better than everyone else, everyone else needs it too. If they don’t follow it, they’ll inevitably end up believing that something wrong is actually acceptable. Maybe even X.
But what if X is something small? Maybe it’s not one of the Big Wrong Things, like murder, genocide, or the consumption of the wrong type of meat at the wrong time. Maybe it’s a minor infringement like…oh. Wait. Apparently, everything on the List is equally wrong. And everyone who does something on the List is equally bad. It doesn’t matter how minor X seems to you, anyone who actually has the temerity to do X is just as bad as Hitler. And since no one can actually understand morality without the List…well, there you go. A world without the List is a world full of Hitlers. It follows as reasonably as anything can follow from an incoherent, arbitrary starting point.
E-mail works just as well for bringing my boneheaded errors to my attention. After three years, I’ve come to realize that the only real purpose served in using the comments to make the blogger aware of such errors of form rather than content is to show how smart you are or to try to embarrass the blogger.
All of your questions about Heaven and more are answered in Randy Alcorn’s depressingly popular book, Heaven (it was a serious gift). For example, how can God provide a feast with meat as promised in Revelation when animals don’t die? Answer: God will provide a delicious meat substitute. How will we breathe in the “New Jerusalem” when the Bible says it’s 1500 miles high? Will animals talk?
The book is hilarious and puts to rest once and for all any hope that Fundamentalists can be reasoned with.
Skimming through this thread, methinks quite a few of the people here might enjoy reading Mike Carey’s “Lucifer” comic book (or graphic novel, if you prefer) series (completely collected in trade paperbacks).
Basically it’s about Lucifer getting fed up with god and its omniscience (again) and what he does to get out of it. Very entertaining, I’m rereading it now actually. It even has, as someone suggested in an earlier comment, a damned soul rising through the administration of hell. And Norse gods. And centaurs. Yay.
*shrug* I think you’re wrong–some people are simply trying to help you out. Of course you’re right about e-mail, but that requires a few extra clicks. I’d offer the benefit of the doubt, unless the corrector is explicitly smug and supercilious about it. Sorry about the “jerk” thing.
Namely, Himself! God-burgers for all!
Kid Bitzer @ #74:
You win at life. I’m sitting here at work biting my fist (leaving deep dents, I might add) to avoid laughing my ass off at your “teh awesome sexxors” comment.
From the OP:
But this relates to the same issue that makes many Xians think atheists cannot be moral — to them, concepts of justice and morality derive solely from God. So to say “God is doing something unjust/immoral” is a contradiction, and to say “God’s judgment is just/moral” is redundant. If for a moment it doesn’t seem just or moral to them, they write it off as being “beyond our comprehension” (see the “answer” quoted in my #26). They believe that there is no justice or morality apart from God — and to consider this as “problematic” is to be guilty of the worst sin of all: lapsing in one’s faith and not “trusting the Creator to take care of the problems.”
I have to confess that I’m not convinced that infinite life is incoherent. I think infinite life would be awful, but that’s another matter.
PZ, if you’re still reading this thread I heartily recommend this piece by David Lewis from December’s Harpers (here). It’s highly, highly entertaining. The gist is that by worshiping a being that would consign people to the flames for all eternity for a pretty minor ‘sin’, Christians are themselves evil. (Fwiw, I think the problem with Lewis’ argument is the assumption that Christians actually believe what they believe they believe, but otherwise it’s not a terrible argument.)
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that there are some Xian sects that believe in hell, but not an eternal hell, while other individual Xians (including scholars) make the same claim. Seventh-day Adventists are one of the larger sects that claims that eternal hell is an abomination, and argue rather implausibly that “eternal hell fire” mentioned in the Bible doesn’t mean hell burning forever, although apparently “eternal life” means living forever.
And enough mainstream denominations have essentially abandoned hellfire altogether, or at least put it on a very low back burner. These tend to make hell out to be separation from God, etc. I believe this occurs among the less conservative Jews, as well.
One may ask, of course, how they pick and choose between Biblical statements, but that’s not really my concern. The fact is that many Xians really believe in some version of Xianity without believing in either Genesis or Revelation
I don’t know if it makes any sense to be Xian and not to believe in eternal hell fire, or in creation for that matter. That doesn’t stop a lot of these people from being Xian, though, and there’s not much point in no true Scotsman fallacies from either side.
Most Xians (as far as I know, religious Jews and Muslims too) believe in some kind of eternal life, though, and however difficult that may be to fathom as to what it means and whether or not one might wish to be caught up in conscious existence forever, they leave that in the same realm as how a “soul” might exist and survive death–something to be answered in the hereafter.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
PZ,
I recently had an online exchange with a Biology professor from Calvin College. He assured me that the Biology Dept. at Calvin disavows ID. I believe that he is a Calvinist; in any case, I know that he is a conservative Christian. He also told me that he knows you (I forget his name, but I think you’ll know who I mean). I’m curious – have you ever had a conversation with with him or with any other Christian scientist about the doctine of eternal punishemnt?
#103:
What you are describing can be summed up by them as “it’s god’s world and he can do whatever he wants, so why fight it?” That’s the sum total, though it’s not entirely common to hear someone admit this, at least not in my experience.
But this thinking extends to other non-religious people too. I recall a political discussion I had with a conservative friend a few years back. We were on the subject of religion and slavery, and at one point he tossed out the usual line about how the people who helped to tear down slavery were moral Christians. This was unique coming from my friend because he was admittedly not interested in religion. Yet, he was giving it a huge pass on this, choosing to focus on the Christian theme that it was Jesus and God that helped these people realize slavery was wrong and work to end it, rather than the obvious scenario that Christians both supported and denounced it, and the only thing separating the two was reason.
Religion has had millenia to market itself in entirely illogical ways that take credit for things it didn’t really deserve to.
Well, I hope you at least washed your hands after you gastrulated…
#76 wrote in response to my #73: “For what it’s worth, the notes to my Bible says that the word translated as “eternal” can also mean “universal”, and that aion is translated as “eternity”, “long time”, “age”, and “world” depending on context.”
Yes, that’s true as far as I know. Aionios is translated as “eternal”, but the noun form “aion” usually is translated as “age” or “world” (and less commonly “long time” or “eternity”). Although I’d never heard the meaning “universal” applied to it.
#105 I’m not familiar with their arguments, but if they are the same ones that I’m familiar with, they may not be as implausible as you think. Eternal punishment and eternal life become “punishment of the age” and “life of the age”. The “age” referring to the reign of Christ whenever he gets bored and finally comes back. So the eternal life comes not from selectively translating aionios, but from other statements in the Bible (such as the ones about abolishing death and that sort of thing).
Pffft. That’s nothing
I suspect that the truly good would be in rebellion against such a tyrant god, Hey standing up to the Nazis was difficult enough that few did it until everyone knew how the war was going to end. You expect them to go up against the omniscient and omnipotent? You expect them to suffer eternal damnation and torment just so they don’t have to watch other suffer at the hands of a malevelent God? I try to have an optimistic view of human nature, but I don’t think that very many are THAT “truly good.”
St. Augustine was also a strong proponent of making biblical dogma conform around modern scienec… sigh
The same flaw appears in C.S.Lewis’ Narnia series. The final book, The Last Battle, covers eschatology and Lewis’ concept of the afterlife. As a kid I was horrified that he destroyed the entire Narnian world and all living things therein. The “real Narnia” he provides as a substitute didn’t work for me at all. I wanted my Narnia back, thank you very much.
I’ve come up with what I consider a similar paradox, perhaps as a way to help me deal with a death of my own.
My mother died when I was 16. She was a devout Christian, and I was a moderate Christian at the time turned atheist within a couple years of that. Nonetheless, I don’t know how many times i’ve heard from Christian family and friends that “she is looking down on you from Heaven” or “you’ll see her again in Heaven” or some such BS like that. It’s a nice thought, I guess (is it, really? I’m not sure I want my mom looking down on everything I’ve done in the past 12 years…..).
But herein lies the paradox – Heaven is supposed to be an eternally happy, blissful place, no? What made my mother happier than anything when she was alive? Me and my brother – her two children. I know that she would not, COULD not, be happy without us. I also know that according to Christian dogma, I (or my brother) am not going to Heaven, because I’m not a believer. So, Christian’s – which is it? Is my mother going to be happy without us somehow, which I don’t think would be possible for her? Are my brother and I going to heaven, just so she could be happy? That doesn’t seem right…. Or is she going to be miserable for eternity because her sons are suffering in hell? Not much of a paradise, I’d say…
75 ” I asked whether my dog would be in heaven with me.”
I think it was Randy Newman who said when you get to heaven every dog and cat you’ve ever had comes running up to greet you. Now, that is starting to sound good.
#23:
Is Step One “put down your copy of Larry Niven’s ‘Inferno’?”
#104: Thanks for mentioning that Harper’s article by David Lewis and Philip Kitcher. Lewis was one of the truly great philosophers of the 20th century, a philosopher of fantastic analytic power and originality, as well as a forceful advocate of some of the truly nuttiest ideas ever ginned up (as he himself cheerfully admitted). Also a helluva nice guy. Since David has been dead since 2001, I assume he’s well-placed to address the topic of this post.
#102-
thanks. that pleases me so much that it’s a good sign i should get off the internets for the rest of the day and get a life.
deriving profound satisfaction from the prospect of unseen strangers giggling at one’s witticisms is not the sign of a healthy mind. obsessions with the unseen never turn out well.
GlenD: And enough mainstream denominations have essentially abandoned hellfire altogether, or at least put it on a very low back burner. These tend to make hell out to be separation from God, etc. I believe this occurs among the less conservative Jews, as well.
Hell and fiery torment are a Christian and Muslim vice – don’t pin this one on the Jews. Judaism takes very little interest in the after life, and the reference to Sheol and such by even very conservative Jews is taken as symbolic of the separation from The Divine (with appropriate bass, please).
“You have lived a life of loving devotion to your family, now your reward is to have the ability to care about them taken away”.
Gain 50 experience points and 500 gp. Turn to page 35.
Well okay. You do get some mentions of hell in various Jewish writings, and Xians seemed to have originally gotten their ideas of hell from contemporary Jewish beliefs.
But it does appear that present-day Judaism doesn’t have much of a doctrine of the afterlife, and especially not of hell. So that’s good.
I just didn’t want to suggest that many Xians had given up hell, while perhaps suggesting by omission that many Jews had not–when I didn’t realize that it isn’t really a doctrine in present-day Judaism.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Glen #105,
the problem lies, as it is always the case with the translations from ancient greek to modern languages.
The Greek adjective that our English Bibles translate as “eternal” or “everlasting” literally means “age-enduring” or perhaps “that which pertains to an age.” As
many commentators have pointed out, this adjective need not carry any implication of unending duration; in fact, the context may even preclude such an idea. When Paul speaks of a “mystery which was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed” (Romans 16:25-26),he clearly supposes that an age-enduring mystery or a mystery that endures for “eternal times” can come to an end; and if an age-enduring mystery can come to an end, so also, one might argue, can an age-enduring punishment.
Another example, if I write :
“The dull after dinner speech simply dragged on forever!”
Do I really mean to say that it lasted for an eternity ?
In the Old Testament story of Jonah, we thus find Jonah praying as follows from the belly of the great fish which
had swallowed him: “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me for ever; yet thou didst bring up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God” (Jonah 2:6).
Do we not have here a perfect analogue for a Christian understanding of hell?
As usual with the bible, unless we could actually interview those who actually wrote those verses, it is almost impossible to know, what they really had in mind.
Glen: You do get some mentions of hell in various Jewish writings, and Xians seemed to have originally gotten their ideas of hell from contemporary Jewish beliefs.
My impression is that it was never in the mainstream of Jewish thought. The priests were more worried with ritual and earthly control, and the scribes were more worried with interpretation. In most ME mythology, the afterlife is just a shadowy, crappy place, much like this world was.
The hellfire writings seem to have come from the hellenistic/Jewish convergence of the second century on, which did influence Judaism, but mostly created the umpteen divergent sects that became Xianity, Islam, Druze, etc; the marginal Jews caught between the victorious empire and the decaying monarchy.
When I read The Golden Ass, I was really struck by how that feeling of a malignant world, of a soul trapped inside a decaying corpse, was really widespread in Imperial religion of the 1st-3rd centuries; it also comes up in the Satyricon at Trimalchio’s dinner.
This one really falls into the lap of the Hellenistic world.
But then, much of present-day monotheism does.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
One of the best examples of eternal punishment is that of Prometheus. Maybe the xians got it from there.
You might also want to include Atlas.
As usual, Mr. Deity explains in episode 7.
and even worse, those who are good and are admitted into heaven are going to be eternally aware of the torments inflicted on their unsaved fellows, and will be going out to witness the punishment of the wicked
Ick. All the more reason to be “bad”: I’d rather suffer eternal torture than witness eternal torture if those are my only two options. This heaven doesn’t sound so great.
RE: #115
The pets my family had as I was growing up, and in my adult years enriched my life…I couldn’t imagine life without them. As an atheist, I came to terms with that long ago. Every day I wish that they could still be here with me, but they won’t be. And that’s OK.
To Dizney, Sam, Duchess, and Mugsy: I love you guys.
If life is constant change and you are never the same person you were at any previous time, then if you lived forever, you would eventually become every possible person there is. So maybe you’re in heaven right now, and your current life is just one of the possibilities. The bad news tho, is that at some point you’ll still have to experience reality as Bill Dembski or Sal Cordova. Even PZ will have to go through a phase like that.
I didn’t think I’d have to bother with Biblical exegesis and interpretation after my little aside about SDAs arguing “implausibly” that “eternal” means one thing with respect to “eternal life” and another with respect to “eternal damnation.” But since both davidstvz and you bring up the arguments I grew up with (I was SDA until my teen years), I have to argue that it is not the words “aion” or any such thing that indicate an eternal hellfire, but the entire context of how hellfire is discussed.
The only real excuse I can see for the SDA interpretation is that they have to try to make all of the Bible self-compatible. The OT in particular does speak often enough of death being the end (Sheol barely counts as continued existence, if at all), so, if you insist that the Bible has the same message throughout, you have to make it so that hell will end. And because “aion” needn’t mean a literal “eternity” in all cases, they insist that the many times that “aion” is used with hellfire needn’t mean that hell lasts for an eternity.
But the contexts don’t indicate anything like this. Why would you use “aion” to refer to “living forever” and then turn around shortly afterward to say that “aion” doesn’t refer to burning forever in hell’s fires? There is no sense to such equivocation within the same context.
Then you have additions to many of the texts which emphasize that hell lasts forever. “The smoke of their torment ascendeth forever” is a phrase in Revelation. You get the “unquenchable fire” (either “asbestos” or a form of that word–again, by itself able to refer to something that ends, but when coupled with “aion” the sense is not of something which ends) of hell in at least one place. What you don’t get in the NT is any place which suggests that hell ends, with many suggesting that it continues forever.
And then there’s the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, which appears to be nothing but an unending hell, from which the rich man cannot be released even for a short while–or even to receive a cooling drop of water. I know it’s just a parable, but it wouldn’t make much sense as a parable if it didn’t refer to something that is supposed to be real.
2 Peter refers to Jesus’ harrowing of hell, something that was pretty much ignored in the SDA church I grew up in. Would Jesus really harrow a temporary hell? Does it even make sense for there to be supernatural territory which is temporal? Not in most theology, indeed.
A hell that ends is not an implausible doctrine just because “aion” is used to refer once or twice to hellfire. It is that hell is always portrayed in early Xian theology as never-ending torment, from the NT through the early church fathers and beyond. As PZ noted, Augustine speaks of eternal hell fire, and all or nearly all early extra-canonical writings refer to hell as everlasting. One should think, too, that the NT canon is fairly arbitrary, and that many of the other texts which refer more explicitly to an eternal hell could have ended up in the canon, had accident decided matters otherwise.
I spent too long hearing excuses for why hell supposedly is not eternal not to recognize them for the one-sided apologetics that they are. The fact is that you cannot find a temporary hell in the NT. The SDAs have some excuse, simply because they insist that the Bible is consistent throughout, another highly implausible claim. We do not have that excuse, and while it is true that the NT need not be consistent either, there seems to be no point at which it convincingly deviates from unending hellfire.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
negen: As usual with the bible, unless we could actually interview those who actually wrote those verses, it is almost impossible to know, what they really had in mind.
That’s exactly the point that religious folks can’t get through their thick heads! For example, most of these works went through a phase of being written in vulgar Latin, which happens to be a language which is primarily attested to by graffiti and a few surviving secular novels. The grammer and vocabulary is more different between vulgar Latin and Classical Latin than you get between two Romance languages today, and vulgar Latin itself was extremely variable between different regions of the empire, and even between different neighborhoods – like any basically unwritten creole.
Yet folks have the temerity to think they can translate these materials. You’d have better luck with Linear A – at least it’s harder to fool yourself on that one.
Etha Williams #48 wrote:
My temptation to agree with you is tempered a bit by the suspicion that Clayton’s phrase back in #104 regarding the “assumption that Christians actually believe what they believe they believe” might be off. Do Christians really believe that right and wrong can only be established by a divine Parent Figure? Or do they only think that’s what they believe?
I don’t know any Christian parents who teach their children to obey God out of fear of going to hell. Not as the only reason, or most important one. They really want their children to obey God because God is loving and good. They want their children to love God, because He deserves their love.
And if you ask them what it means to be “loving and good” they give the same sort of explanations and definitions a humanist would: fairness and kindness and empathy as it relates from human to human.
The God bit is really just an exclamation point, a sort of “so there!” added on to the exact same sort of moral and ethical reasoning that anybody, religious or not, actually puts into practice.
So what the hell is all this “there is no morality without God” crap coming from, if they really don’t believe it?
I think part of it is habit and sloppiness — they haven’t thought it through and they’re going with what they’ve been taught by rote — and part of it is what they think applies to other people.
They obey God because they love Goodness. But other people need the fear of hell, and promise of heaven, or there’s no reason to be good.
When Michael Shermer asked people why they believed in God (for his book titled Why We Believe), he found that the vast majority of theists said they believed in God because they reasoned it out. It was a conclusion they came to rationally. But when asked then why they thought other people believed in God, their answers were different. They thought most of their fellow Christians believed because they were raised that way, or because they wanted heaven, or some other irrational reason.
They may be doing the same thing with morality. Mouthing shallow, childish, I’m-a-sheep rationalizations for doing good and evil because that’s what OTHER people need — but they only believe they believe it. When it comes to themselves, they anchor good and evil in how we treat each other in this world — same as we do.
Most of them have developed mature moral principles without even realizing or admitting it.
@#133 Sastra —
Yeah, that’s a good point, especially since they seem to be quite capable of cherry picking the very worst parts of the bible out and only interpreting the better parts as “relevant”/literal/etc.
Perhaps the insistence that other people can’t be good without God is made out of a desire to convince themselves that they really do believe — to protect their continued belief in belief? I don’t know, just thinking out loud, really.
Highlighting two very astute observations. Well thought!
“(is it, really? I’m not sure I want my mom looking down on everything I’ve done in the past 12 years…..)”
http://cutewendy.com/go/16
Nonsense.
First, you’re greatly exaggerating the difference between Classical and Vulgar Latin. Second, calling the later a “creole” is utterly bizarre. Third, the NT was written in Greek, and the Greek literary tradition is unbroken to this day – the Greek text as we know it today simply didn’t pass through any kind of Latin at any stage. Fourth, when the Bible was translated into Latin it was translated into Classical Latin like any other piece of serious writing, not Vulgar Latin.
Not that anyone will read this, this far down…
The problem of eternal damnation is, as you suggest, quite impossible for Christian theodicy.
I prefer the Orphic-Platonic version whereby the punishments described by the poets is misunderstanding by mortals of a process that is in reality is a purification that allows the damned to eventual ascend to heaven also. Origen actually wanted to adopt a version of this into Christianity and argue that in the end even Satan would be redeemed. But that is neither her nor there.
There has been a lot of discussion in atheist internet circles about the impossibility of immortal reward in heaven, the same unimaginative response to the problem suggested here.
First of all, heaven would not be just like trillions of years of life as we know it–that is what the Jehovah’s Witness think.
Paul says they we will be resurrected in bodies that are spiritual, i.e. will not contain any matter. Obviously we can’t imagine what that would be like while we are constrained by matter. It would be liberating in terms of the senses and of the whole intellectual and emotional process we are now used to. If you can imagine the difference in these respects between a one-celled organism and your self, it would be orders of magnitude greater than that. One’s primary activity would be experiencing both passively and actively the sensation of which the love we know on earth is but a shadow. In that enlightened condition, events and relationships fleetingly experience on earth probably would not seem that important. Its not really possible to extrapolate further than that. One point worth making is that in the Christian conception that is the limit, however great it is, as opposed to, for instance, Neoplatonism, where the individual will become part of God (not the demiurge that created and rules the earth, but a being who is not pure existence, not pure love, and not anything that can be expressed in human language but which is absolutely unbounded), which is to say identical to the whole. The closest approach to what a Christian might actually be like I’ve seen in popular culture, by the way, is Defending Your Life, although it did incorporate the Indo-European concept of reincarnation. “You still don’t get the big-brain thing, do you?”
Again, I am not endorsing any of this–I am not a Christian–but it doesn’t do much good to argue against straw men, and, in this case, not against the rather limited imagination of fundamentalists either. You (that is Myers if by some miracle he can find the time to read down this far–I only skimmed through the responses), offer a suggestion as to why immorality of the Christian sort would be impossible: “my mortality is a part of my being, and removing that would be an event so traumatic and so life-changing that it would produce an identity even more substantially different than the vast revolution I went through 51 years ago, when I gastrulated. Immortality is meaningless and achieving it is impossible.” But this does nothing to attack the Christian position since Christianity expects that the transformation into immortal life will be greater than what we know as birth or physical death. “We will be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” after all. As physical facts all this is most unlikely to say the least, but you can’t argue against X by postulating X.
To return to hell for a moment, it doesn’t talk about demons sadistically tormenting the damned anywhere in the Bible. That is a medieval elaboration you get most famously in Dante. The bible talks about the lake of fire, and it is not immediately clear what that means (it would be extraordinary foolish to think of this in literal terms, as, say, a planet with a surface of boiling sulphur and billions of human beings unable to die bobbing around like corks). Except to the fundamentalists, that leaves open a whole range of possibilities.
Pablo (#28) raises an interesting point; “Which of course means that it won’t be me, anymore, not in any way that I could currently recognize.” That’s right. You might well regard all of you experiences on earth the same way a gall stone patient does when seeing his stones preserved in a jar. The balance of meaning between this life an that is probably proportionate to the temporal balance (which again calls into question from the point of view of theodicy and other questions the importance Christianity assigns to this life).
I don’t think anyone mentioned the Rabbinic version of heaven, spending eternity studying and memorizing the Hebrew Bible–that might get tedious after a bit.
yes, Frog’s #132 “That’s exactly the point that religious folks can’t get through their thick heads! For example, most of these works went through a phase of being written in vulgar Latin, which happens to be a language which is primarily attested to by graffiti and a few surviving secular novels. The grammer and vocabulary is more different between vulgar Latin and Classical Latin than you get between two Romance languages today, and vulgar Latin itself was extremely variable between different regions of the empire, and even between different neighborhoods – like any basically unwritten creole.
Yet folks have the temerity to think they can translate these materials. You’d have better luck with Linear A – at least it’s harder to fool yourself on that one.”
is the kind of thing one sees often in athesit discussion, as though we don’t have the original texts of the bible, but its just giberish for reasons already stated at 138.
I will add that we don’t translate the bible, we read it in the original Greek and Hebrew–that is the wrong way to look at it. Translations are either for the mass of readers who can’t read the orignal, or to make some point about interpretation.
Well, I’m certainly glad that I’m not the only one that finds eternity in Heaven a terrifying prospect. I can still remember the first time that I tried to imagine what it would be like to be in heaven. It felt much like looking over a vast cliff with no bottom in sight. Just going on forever, unchanging. It gave me the jibblies…
Johansen: Nonsense.
First, you’re greatly exaggerating the difference between Classical and Vulgar Latin. Second, calling the later a “creole” is utterly bizarre. Third, the NT was written in Greek, and the Greek literary tradition is unbroken to this day – the Greek text as we know it today simply didn’t pass through any kind of Latin at any stage. Fourth, when the Bible was translated into Latin it was translated into Classical Latin like any other piece of serious writing, not Vulgar Latin.
Nonsense. I can read vulgar Latin, but not classical Latin, solely by being literate in a few Romance languages. The case structure is hugely simplified, articles are thrown in willy nilly, and the sentence structure is formed around subclauses, rather than declensive phrases.
Have you bothered to read pieces from the Latin translations? It’s in Church Latin – aka vulgar Latin with a little “class” thrown in. The NT wasn’t serious literature for several centuries – it was written for the lower class, which was not conversant in Classical Latin. Classical Latin was an almost artificial language kept for the aristocracy.
Additionally, it was absolutely a creole. It’s bizarre not to see it (or deluded). Vulgar Latin was spoken across the empire by folks for whom it acted as a secondary language. You can clearly see it in the structure – it picked up articles from the Greek, where Classical Latin not only lacked them, but where they were foreign to the very grammatical sense of the language. All the vulgar Latin descendants are dependent on articles.
Finally, we know next to nothing about the back and forth of the Gospels. Those who claim to know it are damn fools – we have no complete copies of the early stages, we know that there are many scraps from very early on in languages such as Syriac, and it only stands to reason that very early on Latin-speakers were influential in the formation of this literature.
The concensus is bunk.
@#138 Helena Constantine —
I treasure my experiences on this earth, because I know that they are all I will have. The idea of thinking of them as a patient would consider his gall stones is absolutely repugnant to me. What kind of regard does that give us for our current earthly situation, and that of our fellow human beings, if all we see in it is a relatively meaningless stop on the way to eternal/very long life?
Helena: is the kind of thing one sees often in athesit discussion, as though we don’t have the original texts of the bible, but its just giberish for reasons already stated at 138.
I will add that we don’t translate the bible, we read it in the original Greek and Hebrew–that is the wrong way to look at it. Translations are either for the mass of readers who can’t read the orignal, or to make some point about interpretation.
Oh, pray tell, are these “originals”? In what monastary have they been squirreled away for the centuries? Oh no, you tell me that we have partial fourth century versions that you just know are faithful reproductions of first century copies, right?
Humbug. We have scraps from the second century, we have a few copies of other documents from that period that are parallel to those documents and we know that in the second and third centuries major strains of Christianity called forgery on each other.
We know that folks in this period considered it perfectly fair to write in the “name” of some past hero, and to rewrite passages that they believed had been corrupted. And we know that the early Christian community wasn’t a bureaucracy that had the technical capability to faithfully reproduce documents, but used skeleton structures as aids in the oral reproduction of narratives transmitted partially as letters. Finally we know how such structures evolve, because we have numerous others primarily oral traditions to compare with.
Such smugged self-assurance; that’s the kind of dogmatism that we often see in science come crumbling down as examples of past foolishness. I guess the advantage of the historical arts, as oppose to the sciences, is that empirical base is basically fixed, allowing the “concensus” to survive long past the point that the corpse has begun to stink.
frog, dude, you have said some righteous and true things on this thread and elsewhere, but some of the stuff you’re saying now is just plain old ill-informed.
to begin with: the nt was not written in latin. it was written in koine greek. latin played no role in the formation of the greek text of the nt that we have.
we can argue another time about the rise of late latin, differences in word-order and lexicon, etc. which are all interesting stories. but they have nothing to do with the nt.
like, maybe just wiki it before you go any further?
I’m not sure the Christians in Heaven should feel bad about there being non-believers in Hell – many of them seem to be convinced that Hell is a just and proper reward for all humans because of the sin that God arranged for us all to inherit.
If that is the case, I think it would be something of a miscarriage of justice for the christians to escape punishment themselves. If they had any moral fiber at all, they would insist on going to Hell for their just punishment, and politely turn down the undeserved eternal bliss on offer.
Helena Constantine #138 wrote:
In other words, you can’t argue against X is we redefine all our concepts about X. If consciousness becomes a different sort of thing, and if life becomes a different sort of thing, and if love becomes a different sort of thing, and if caring becomes a different sort of thing because we become different sort of things once we die — then all the problems with immortality, hell, and God go away.
This sort of thing seems very common in theology. God is loving — but not like the love of our experience. Better. God is just — but not like the human concept of justice as we understand it — better. God exists — but not as we understand what it means to “exist.” No, it’s better. Different, but better.
We know what “different” means. We know what “better” means. Therefore, every time we have a problem understanding God, we just plug those in. To fail to do that is a “failure of the imagination.”
I don’t know. I can sort of imagine that working. But it’s a stretch.
The only thing that would piss the fundamentalists off more than an atheist is someone preaching “Hey, God loves everyone. Nobody goes to hell.”
@#146 Sastra —
It’s interesting, because I have a theistic friend who insists that one cannot talk about the existence or non-existence of God — that as a timeless “Ehyeh asher ehyeh” (variously translated I am what I am, I be that I be, I shall be that I shall be…etc) and uncreated essence, God cannot be accurately described as existing because he could not not exist. It seems an odd distinction to me, but it was very important to him.
Etha #148 wrote:
Sounds like a version of the Ontological Argument (There has to be something whose existence is not contingent on anything else, and that’s God.)
I’ve collected a whole slew of theistic definitions of God which assert that God doesn’t exist. Some highlights:
“The question is not whether God exists. The question is whether we concern ourselves with, or are utterly indifferent to, the sanctity and ultimate transcendence of human existence… God is a verb. God is a process accomplishing itself, not an asserted existence. And God is inescapable.” (Chris Hedges)
The existence of God is meaningless, rather than false (Paul Tillich)
“God does not exist per se but only in the I-Thou context of human beings.” (Martin Buber)
“God is so great that the greatness precludes existence.” (Raimundo Panikkar)
“… the God rejected by modern atheism is not the God of orthodox, premodern Christianity. God is not any kind of thing whose existence might be rejected in the same way that one might reject the existence of Santa. Turner’s God — owing much to the medieval mystics — is profoundly apophatic, wholly other, and, in the end, unknowable darkness.” (Simon Oliver)
Hey, this is deep stuff. So deep I’m not sure that hip boots would be high enough.
Really? Do you check your inbox that often, and do you never suffer from the Yahoo! Lag or other constipation phenomena of teh intartoobz? I bet commenting on the blog itself is faster in way over 99 % of all cases.
The idea seems to be that it’s simply revenge. Payback. God is neither a Jedi nor an Epicurean, you see. God knows wrath. God has Holy Wrath. Ass-kicking wrath even.
————————–
frog, I agree with all you have written, except two things: 1) please look up the definition of “creole” — Vulgar Latin was less of a creole than modern English is, and for English I’m not talking about the French but about the Norse influence; 2) that the surviving Greek manuscripts were influenced by Latin is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, which I’d like to see.
Helena Constantine
and Sastra,
Exactly.
None of the Christians I know really care about the details of eternal life, and it’s impossible to argue against their beliefs rationally.
All they know, and all they really need to know (as far as they’re concerned) is that heaven is the best possible place to be, period, end of discussion. Heaven will never get boring, there will be no pain, or needs, or wants –just pure happiness from being reunited with God and living as the immortals we were meant to be in the first place.
It all goes to show how great God’s love is, that he is giving those who still honor and obey him, after passing the earthly test of greed and ego, a chance to upgrade to a more godly type of immortality than that which was originally intended! What a great guy!
I’m not sure how many of them really believe in a literal lake of fire. The ones I know are too busy trying to act like Jesus to really care about the exact details. Their argument is more of, “You’ll find out when you get there, but if it’s the opposite of heaven then you are truly to be pitied.”
There are things you can do to reach seriously deluded people, but pointing out the illogic of their belief in heaven and hell is usually futile, as it’s just a given that it all surpasses human understanding, anyways.
kidbitzer: to begin with: the nt was not written in latin. it was written in koine greek. latin played no role in the formation of the greek text of the nt that we have.
I wasn’t claiming that the NT was originally written in Latin – you’re right that the primary influences were, and had to be, Koine and Aramaic, the Eastern lingua francas.
But on the other hand, they had to be translated early on (at least orally) into vulgar Latin – that was also a lingua franca, and some missionary work to those communities also occurred; there are some references to Latin Christians from the end of the first century.
Since the documents weren’t solid for centuries, there would have been some feedback – words that had been translated back and forth, narrative and sentence structure that were familiar from the vulgar affecting writing in the Koine, etc. There were no royal academies of language in the empire – the boundary between languages would have been more fluid than in our own days of nationalism.
It may not have been an important effect – I don’t see any obvious way to test, since our data of the period is so minimal. It is speculative, to say the least, but then so is so much that is accepted as CW. It would seem extraordinary for there to have been no influence at all, since so many people had at least a rudimentary skill in all three of the empires languages.
But my major point is that in a time where documents were copied by hand, where nothing like our common state educational systems existed, where copies of media where much much rarer, and where most of the population were illiterate and had a world horizon of 10 miles, it is inconceivable that language (any language) had the stability and the commonality of meaning that we can take for granted today. Christianity wasn’t forged in the concensus of the educated class, but at the bottom of the middle class and among the slaves.
David: There are certain commonalities among creoles that the vulgar exhibits, particularly it’s loss of verbal and nounal forms, and a reduction in phonemic distinctions. You’re right that the vocabulary in the vulgar was less creole than in English – but the grammatical changes reflect to me that Latin acted as a superstratum to a number of native languages (which would be the reverse case of English), including Greek. Forms like the use of tense auxiliaries are very common in creoles, and a complete departure from Classical Latin and other language which are wholly passed on by the family.
I don’t think it’s noticed because most modern day creoles have more superstrata than substrata – you have a local group that get invaded by multiple colonial powers with standardized national languages, and develops a language in response. Vulgar Latin was formed by a single imperial power overwhelming multiple nations in a fairly short time period, and the language acted as a common language between these groups; additionally it wasn’t developed out of the Classical Latin, but out of a pre-existing vulgar that had already significantly diverged from the classical, probably as a response to cross-migration with hellenic and other non-latin Italian groups.
I think there is a great deal of anachronism in our interpration of events going back more than a few centuries – it is particularly bad in the case of Roman history, where we see it all through the lense of the very distinct medieval Christian society which succeeded it. Think Nietzche’s interpretation of Greek philosophy by stripping away the Christian re-interpretations.
Helen: But this does nothing to attack the Christian position since Christianity expects that the transformation into immortal life will be greater than what we know as birth or physical death.
So then why should I care? How can I possibly care about a being that is more distinct from me than the gulf of birth and death, who I’ve never met, and of whom I have absolutely no knowledge of? You seriously care what happens to some alien being living around Sirius, enough to structure your entire life on what will happen to them???
Wow, I thought you people were crazy before…
frog, i think the reason people are jumping on you about this is because there really is quite a lot of knowledge available about the history of the nt.
the rise of ‘scientific criticism’ of the bible had a huge and positive influence during the 18th & 19th century in breaking the superstition’s stronghold. it started among believers, of course, who simply wanted a text that would be more faithful to the original ‘word of god’. but it had the result of showing how deeply human, contingent, arbitrary and accidental the whole gemisch had always been.
to compare biblical criticism to a science is not out of line in any way–the religion itself may be a crock, but the study of the texts, of their language, of manuscript affiliations etc., has been carried out in exactly the way that sciences are carried out: by attention to evidence, by the proposing and testing of conjectures.
if we can only get people to look at the quran in the same way, a lot of folly and a lot of deaths will be avoided, too. (which is why those who are starting to study the quran scientifically have to publish their results anonymously so as to avoid being murdered–the fanatics know exactly what is at stake.)
what bugs me about your attitude above is that you are pooh-poohing a science that has 1) produced some solid accomplishments just qua science, i.e. increased our knowledge, and 2) done a huge amount of good in undermining and corroding the irrational grip of religion.
i’m not willing to treat that as mere “dogmatic consensus”, or to make room in it for conjectures that are *entirely* without any evidence, as your views about latin influence are, to my knowledge.
to put this differently: there’s a hell of a lot of peer-reviewed literature about the origins and constitution of the nt. do you want to bring forward any peer-reviewed literature about the role of latin in establishing the text of the nt?
“The ones I know are too busy trying to act like Jesus to really care about the exact details.”
Boy…you must know a special crew. Turning the other cheek. Dissing the preachers and mom and dad. Smiting fruit trees in mid-January. Living as an itinerant wandering preacher with no worldly goods or ties. :)
RamblinDude #61: That is a perfect description of the feeling I also got when thinking about heaven as a kid. I can still reproduce it, to a limited extent, even knowing that immortality is bullshit. Oh, the sheer mathematical terror of it all! It made my brain crash and reboot every time.
Actually, eternal punishment makes perfect sense once you realize that the Abrahamic god and the Abrahamic devil are the same entity. The problem is only atheists bother to actually _read_ the bible rather than cherry-pick verses out of context. Then again, actually reading that cobbled-together mess is probably the best cure for belief there is. The book of Job is just the most blatant example of Yahweh being a complete asshat.
kid:
There is a significant different between ‘scientific criticism’ and standard science. I think that whole Q hypothesis should make it clear – the data we have underdetermines any conclusions.
The fact that it may have had some therapeutic effect is irrelevant, other than politically. None of the papers I’ve seen, other than archeological work, is anything but rank speculation that would be laughed out of any other field. You simply can’t do things like take two late existing documents for which you have no historical data on their order of construction or any third sources, and reconstruct a common ancestor. The phylogenies done before sequencing was available should make that clear – and those were done with much, much larger data sets that weren’t intentionally mutilated.
What can I say? I think the field is crap. There are some archealogically based work which appears to be very good – but we know how limited that is. If I start going through papers on Biblical analyses, the most outlandish hypothesis have just as much supporting data as the most conservative ones. Did the Iron Age Judeans sacrifice their children? Were the Essenes celibates? Was Paul a competitor to the apostles? Who really was involved in the uprising of the ’60s? When did the Christians arrive in Rome? For God’s sake, when were the damn Gospels written? You’d think that everyone would realize that as long as that can’t be nailed down, doing any more analysis is madness!
You might as well pick a hypothesis out of a box. It’s all so underdetermined that the safe bet is that current conclusions are primarily internally driven by our cultural desires and needs. I’ve gone over some of the Jesus seminar stuff – no surprise, it matches the liberal theology of the seminarians! Internal consistency runs right over external consistency, since there is so little external data, and very little new data is coming to light – which is almost always completely unpredicted by the current theories. Isn’t that the best proof that the theoretical structure is ad-hoc?
frog–
agreed, there’s a lot of crap.
agreed, the evidence tends to underdetermine the conclusions (though a little birdie named duhem-quine says that’s true in even the most respectable sciences–let’s set that aside and agree that it is at any rate far *more* true w/ biblical criticism).
agreed, people’s conclusions too often mirror their prejudices (though this becomes more true, the more that the question bears on matters of faith. so you’ll see more self-interested skewing in “was paul a rival to the apostles?” than in “do these two manuscripts share a common archetype?”)
but, look, there is still some stuff to be known, and some of it is better grounded than others. the continued existence of controversy does not undermine the discipline’s right to be considered a science.
anyhow–i’ve got no beef at all with most of what you said earlier, and less and less with what you’re saying now.
Boy…you must know a special crew.
Yeah, they’re special, alright. I just wish they weren’t so darn normal.
RamblinDude #61: That is a perfect description of the feeling I also got when thinking about heaven as a kid.
This is really interesting to me, to read the other commenters who had the same reaction I did. It’s like we’re the ones who woke up from the matrix or something. LOL.
My mom once told me that if I went to hell and she went to heaven, she would be aware of it, but God would keep her from caring and she would still be happy.
So, I guess, uh, that answers that.
My sister-in-law, a very intelligent and basically nice person, once said at the dinner table to one of her kids, who was complaining about something not being fair, “If life were fair, we’d all go to Hell.” Before I could go nuclear my father-in-law managed to deflect the conversation in a different direction. It was really hard to understand how a caring person like she is could say something so grotesquely evil so casually. Most of her family (including her now deceased mother, my mother-in-law and a wonderful person) doesn’t share her religious convictions. If the thought of them spending eternity in unbearable torment bothers her, I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Just another example of the corrupting influence of religion.
PZ, don’t ye pay no nevermind to yer misstakes. I got me a hi skrewl eduvacation and I cain’t punkchewate neether. Ye jest get aloong home en git ther trophy wiif ter kiss yees boo-boos. Them iz pointin et yer boo-boos jest ain’t christin! It ain’t fittin.
When you look at Christianity, what is it? The whole narrative is a story about childhood and maturity. God is the parent, we’re the children, and like good children we do what we’re told because we don’t know any better.
It’s basically a nod towards how hard it is to grow up, except that it comes to some pretty obscene conclusions in that, for example, the basic premise is that growing up is evil. Unlike in the real world (at least, the Western world), where children eventually become the less experienced peers of their parents, we are always expected to be the children of God, or we ought to be, God is always the parent, and our job is to revert back to childhood under Him, forever.
The problem is that it encourages a childish mentality, and a childlike view of the world where the only end is God (the parent), everything happens either because of Him, or with His knowledge, and He can be relied on for anything (even when we don’t understand Him), and all means point in His direction. It vilifies any sign of adult-like independence, for example, the ability to set ones own goals, to follow ones own preferences (or those of our peers) as ends in themselves, the ability to determine right from wrong on ones own, and the ability to take sole responsibility for anything. Any influence which demands that we behave in an adult manner is a bad influence.
Eternal life in heaven or hell, in this view, is just the great threat; existential window dressing – the vindictive, infantile promise of retribution no matter what. Real life is about growth and development and renewal, and no matter how long we happen to live, the only good reason to end this process is stagnation, which is, ironically, the prime prescription of the Christian faith.
JM, I completely agree. I don’t respect a parent – or deity – who insists that his children remain children. Is the Christian hypothesis that the afterlife is the adulthood of the human spirit, or soul, or whatever the heck is supposed to live eternally?
Somewhat off topic, but I was searching “christianity maturity” in google and, in the usual roundabout way of the internet, came upon the following verse:
Well, it does explain a lot….
I think I may need to read through the Bible again. There is clearly a lot I missed when I read it as an Xian (with typical mental filters, rationalizations, etc in place).
Gah…the verse in #166 is just Collosians 2:8…not 9-15….
I think I may need to read through the Bible again.
I can think of far, far, better ways to spend you time.
seriously.
In fact, even posting here is a better way to spend your time.
if you’re looking for an easy way to search for specific babble quotes, try this:
http://www.biblegateway.com/
you can choose from 50 different babble versions in 30 plus languages.
for example, a search for “stripes” will net you one, single, interesting verse of valuable breeding information:
Genesis 30:37-43
whee!
I’ve often used this method to breed striped fish by wading in breeding pools while wearing a pin-stripe suit.
(yeah, sure I have)
:P
now you’ll have to excuse me while I watch the last quarter of the Lakers/Jazz game, as I want my kids to have purple and gold skin.
As a mathematician, I like to demonstrate the zero/infinity aspect: “Say God creates you to live for 80 years, we’ll overlook the fact that He knows *in advance* that you will not accept His will and will go to Hell but he creates you anyway. You live for 80 years and then you suffer unimaginable torment for eternity. Now, mathematically, a finite sum no matter how large divided by infinity is essentially zero. What you are trying to say is that God created you to suffer eternal agony for … nothing.”
Proof positive that only batshit crazy fucktards invented God and continue to believe in this shit.
And they’re willing to kill me over it…
Sounds like a version of the Ontological Argument (There has to be something whose existence is not contingent on anything else, and that’s God.) – Sastra
One of my undergrad assessments (many years ago) was an extended essay on the ontological argument. While writing it, I somewhere came across an ontological argument for atheism, which went something like this:
Only a being whose existence is logically necessary (equivalently, whose non-existence is logically impossible) is worthy to be called “God”.
However, it is logically possible that nothing at all should exist.
Therefore there is no being whose non-existence is logically impossible.
Therefore there is no God.
Q.E.D.
In my estimation, it’s just as valid as the original ontological argument of Anselm, and as the updated one based on the idea of “necessary existence”.
Via Etha Williams (#80):
———> Scientific Method
0 Catholic Theologians
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Oh hell, wrong thread. Umm, not that the sentiment is wrong.
Why are you guys concerned with the vulgate translations and all that Greek, Hebrew, and jibber-jabber. Everyone knows that only the King James Version is the TRUE bible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King-James-Only_Movement
–Just when you though the fundies couldn’t get sillier.
Do you have any examples of this?
Sure, but tense auxiliaries can develop by other means, too. For example, French has lost the passé simple except in higher writing, and the southern dialects of German have lost the homolog of the past tense because a sound shift (loss of word-final vowels) made the regular past sound like the present. (The homolog of the present perfect is used instead.) Contrast this with English, where there are to this day rules when to use the past and when to use the present perfect, even though that language has a much more creole-like history!
Of course you can. Just remember all you’ll arrive at will be the most parsimonious hypothesis for the data you put in.
It seems you need to learn more about phylogenetic analysis. The phylogenies done before phylogenetic analysis ( = cladistics) seem to be what you mean; cladistics doesn’t require molecular data, and molecular data have their own non-trivial problems, too (like alignment).
That said, I’d be surprised if phylogenetic analysis were used in NT research. After all, “the closer you get to humans, the worse the science gets”. It has been used on manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, though…
“Justice exists only in hell. In heaven there’s mercy.”
— Seen hanging in a room affiliated with a Catholic church. Author forgotten.
Then read this first.
Does eternal life mean life without change? Or simply means living forever, but still able to change and grow as a person?
David: Do you have any examples of this?
I don’t do greek, so you’ve got me on this one. On the other hand, the examples of this anywhere two languages come into contact are endless (Spanglish anyone?) I doubt that the mechanisms of language acquisition and mixing were different 2kya – if anything, language mixing would have been heightened by the lack of standardization — see where creoles and mixed languages do develop.
Sure, but tense auxiliaries can develop by other means, too.
And if it was just tense auxiliaries, then you’d have a point. But it was a wholesale slaughter of grammatical forms. Cases – reduced to nominative and objective, and those two (as I understand it) would have been reduced in many cases to indistinguishability for many nouns in pronunciation. Replacement by word order (another common feature of creoles). The addition of articles by way of demonstratives (another creolism). The replacement of appositive phrases (I think that’s the phrase), by subordinate clauses. Phonemic reductions (such as the losss of consonant length and the reduction of ‘um’ to ‘o’). The vulgar is closer to Spanish than it is to classical Latin.
That’s not a normal contained language evolution. Compare the scale and nature of the changes to German over the last millennium. In general, it looks more like what has happened to English grammar.
Of course you can. Just remember all you’ll arrive at will be the most parsimonious hypothesis for the data you put in.
Can’t meaning “it would be stupid to”. There is no uniqueness, not only to the most parsimonious hypothesis, but even to the class of parsimonious hypotheses. It’s a reverse engineering problem with insufficient data, and insufficient theoretical constraints.
It seems you need to learn more about phylogenetic analysis. The phylogenies done before phylogenetic analysis ( = cladistics) seem to be what you mean; cladistics doesn’t require molecular data, and molecular data have their own non-trivial problems, too (like alignment).
No, I meant a surprisingly large amount of cladistics done before the molecular data have turned out to be wrong. I’ll have to be close to my books to pull out examples, but morphology, etc, contains insufficient data to uniquely identify clads consistently. It’s the reverse problem once again, and it takes a lot of data, or extremely constraining theory, to produce close to unique results. Yes, molecular data has it’s own problems — but it both vastly increases the information content, and is much more theoretically tractable.
Of course, the case of cladistics is magnitudes better in terms of constraints and available data, compared to Biblical criticism. The former gets a lot right; I doubt that the latter gets anything significantly right. It’s best when casting doubt – the impossible can be shown with little data and a few constraints, positive statements are in a different class.
By the way, it’s so much more fun to argue with the non-trollish! Thanks.
–Just when you though the fundies couldn’t get sillier.
If there is one thing I have learned from Sciblogs, it’s a complete rejection of that as a applicable statement.
I haven’t thought the creobots couldn’t get sillier for years now.
tossed out my irony meters long, long ago. In fact, I think I’ve turned into an irony vampire now, and I’ve grown quite overweight in the process.
Justice delayed ain’t justice. If God wants to be just he’s got to even the score right now.
Hey that’s purty lightnin’ bo–
Frog ought to become acquainted with the science of textual criticsm.
He also needs to develope an understanding of the English language sufficent to distinguish between vulgar Latin and its transformation into the Romance languages and the Vulgate translation of Jerome which is written in Classical Latin.
The Vulgate is in Church Latin, which is not Classical Latin by any means, but a more sophisticated register of the common speech. It keeps more of the nounal and verbal forms – but the sentence structure is Romance, not Latin.
Really, you folks are disconnected from reality. Most Christians never even understood Classical Latin – the Church Latin is what the lower class sounded like when they were faking Classical Latin. Just imagine what the rough drafts looked like!
The science of textual criticism? You make me laugh. I have actual science to do. Will you acquaint me next with the science of astrology?
@#176 David Marjanovic —
Thanks for the link — very interesting stuff.
Not that anyone will ever read this again:
1. Frog, get it through it through your thick skull, I am not a Christian–so do I have to echo Luis Bunnuel? “I shit on Christ!”
2. Based on your knoweldge of fourth century Latin, and I am sure you’ve spent endless hours with your Lewis and Short pouring over Ambrose and Augustine, would you please point out examples of vocabualry, syntax, grammar, or other features of the Vulgate that are inconsistent with Classical Latin?
Or, as you last statement woudld indicate, do you believe that it is impossible to read ancient Latin texts (and therefore edit them)? Even assuming it is for you, that is not a universal limitation.