A silly speculation: what if you die, go to heaven, and discover that a god had a set of fundamental rules that it didn’t tell anyone about?
I was initially sympathetic to the idea that a god would judge you for doing harm to small helpless creatures — I avoid killing insects without cause — but then there were a few disparaging comments about spiders, natural given the god’s nature, and I started tallying up my invertebrate body count, and I realized that the video character’s tally of having killed 11,000 insects was pathetic.
I’d be going to bug hell, wouldn’t I?
Purely hypothetcial question but couldn’t “bug hell” akso be arachnid heaven?
(Saves – infinite – space… )
I remember a comic where a person is confronted with having to apologize to everyone he killed before being allowed in Heaven. “No problem. I never killed anyone.” Angel: “Video game characters count.” (Mass of video game enemies emerge from the gates).
I’ve heard an idea that the purpose of the Abrahamic religions was to test humanity. Those whose critical thinking skills were so poor that they were convinced to believe something so ridiculous would be judged as unworthy for whatever reward really existed in the afterlife.
It’s been done before here on earth, in reality.
The Hindu Jains go to great lengths to not kill insects.
Why stop at insects?
Plants are also alive.
So for that matter are single celled organisms such as yeasts, protozoa, algae, bacteria, and viruses.
We’ve already seen even that level of concern in the last Pandemic.
There was a Friends of the Covid-19 Virus fan club in the USA. They ended up sacrificing the lives of some of their members to keep the pandemic going.
You don’t have to be religious to accept that taking care of all life forms on earth, broadly defined as the ecology, is necessary and a good idea.
We are on a large space ship, on a billions of years journey through the universe. It’s called the earth, third planet from the larger fusion reactor.
The ecology is our life support system.
It takes real idiots to wreck our life support system.
We haven’t wrecked it yet, but we have certainly put a lot of stress on it.
How is this different than regular religion? It’s not as if religious texts (or their reps) are consistent. I decided as a teen I may as well follow my values as try to appease a God that can’t communicate clearly in spite of being omniscient and omnipotent.
Do the 8 spiders you swallow every night count? /s
@3
My favorite version of that idea is as follows:
c. 1200 BCE.
Satan: hey, Yahweh, would you like to make a bet?
Yahweh: What’s the bet?
Satan: I wrote a book of completely preposterous stories. I’m calling it “The Bible.”
I bet I can convince a bunch of humans that you wrote this book and that everything it it is completely true.
Yahweh: I don’t know if I should take that bet. Humans are pretty gullible. Wait, hold on, there’s an entire section in this book about how you and I make bets testing humans’ faith.
Surely anyone who reads about this Job character will realize it’s just as likely that you wrote the Bible as it is that I wrote it!
Yahweh: And what’s this: a flood myth? You just plagiarized that from Enlil!
Satan: So do we have a bet?
Yahweh: You’re on!
…
Scene: c. 200 BCE
Yahweh: Oh my Anu, how did the humans fall for this book?
Satan: Well, would you like a chance to regain your losses?
Yahweh: What are you proposing?
Satan: I wrote three sequels to the Bible. I’m calling one of them the Talmud, one of them the New Testament, and one of them the Koran. I bet I can get three different groups of humans to believe that one (and only one) of these sequels was inspired by you, and that it’s the infallible truth. They’ll probably even go to war with each other over which sequel is the true one.
Yahweh: That’s absurd. In the Bible, you claimed that I didn’t want humans to eat a baby goat boiled in its mother’s milk, which seems pretty easy to avoid doing. But then in the Talmud, you claim that actually that means no mixing meat and dairy. Also, in the Bible, everyone is obsessed with patrilineal descent, but then in the Talmud you wrote that matrilineal descent is what actually matters. How could the humans be gullible enough to believe that both books are the absolute truth? Also, this “new testament” sequel claims that the original Bible no longer applies, but also that it still applies? I don’t think any of the humans are going to fall for this, even the ones who think I wrote the original bible.
Satan: So we have a bet?
Yahweh: Yes
….
Scene: c. 1000 CE
Yahweh: What in Ianna’s name happened? Humans are way too gullible.
Scene: c. 1830
Yahweh: Hey, Satan, what’s the deal with this “Book of Mormon?” Did you write it?
Satan: What? Oh, I stopped paying attention awhile ago. Getting humans to believe absurd things about you was so easy that it got boring. I’m pretty sure that’s just the work of a human con artist.
I’m afraid I would be in the 12th circle of bug hell, but not for killing spiders. Roaches and mosquitoes, especially mosquitoes, by the thousands. As Kobayashi Issa said, “All the time I pray to Buddha, I keep on killing mosquitoes.”
Also, love bugs but it wasn’t my fault they choose to have sex on the wing in the middle of the road.
The mosquito is considered the deadliest to humans animal in the world.
Mosquitos kill around 1 million humans a year.
Killing mosquitos is self defense.
I kill ticks whenever I find them on my cats or me. The common local species is Ixodes pacificus, one of the Lyme disease spreading ticks. Lyme disease is uncommon on the west coast but it is endemic at low levels.
Even the purest vegan Jains will be confronted in the afterlife by a massive wall of gastrointestinal and hematic bacteria. Repent!
If it turns out that ants rule the universe, I might be considered history’s greatest monster.
@11 I have to disagree with you there. It has long been clear to me that the sole purpose of our existence is to maintain the proper warm, wet and nutrient rich environment that the bacterial overlords in our gut demand. They live out long and prosperous lives and its their fault if they decide to venture into our toilet bowls and perish.
@13 I should point out that some of the bold bacterial explorers that leave our gut go on to colonize new worlds and species. These are clearly the Christopher Colon-bus’s of the gut world.
I mean, you breed thousands of insects for no reason other than your intellectual curiosity and keep them in artificial captivity for their entire life. In the end, you don’t even eat them–tossing them away in the garbage. You are worse than a cattle rancher. /s
No, the thousands of insects are thrown screaming to their doom in containers full of spiders.
When I was a vet tech at a research university, I estimate that I personally murdered around 12,000 mammals during my career there. Which is the main reason I retired from that profession. I still support the goals they aspire to, but the smell of death will never leave my brain.
Maybe it’s hypocrisy on my part (I’ve been a chef for years after that, and still eat meat on occasion), but I have never hunted or fished after that.
Being an executioner has weighed on my conscience ever since. I don’t want to think about what would be waiting for me in this situation.
Except now I’m thinking about it.
Thanks PZ…
(sarcasm tag optional)
raven @10:
How many humans do humans kill per year? ;)
(Self defense priorities!)
Thing is, mosquitoes are not one single species.
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585164/)
(“Kill them all, God will know his own”)
Laudable as it is, perfect not-killing-anything is a bit of a tall order. One needs to eat and if animals and plants are out, then what? (there was/is a cult of “breathairans” who claimed breathing was enough? Can’t recall right now, or was it a joke? Bof).
Like Leonardo said, facciam nostra vita con altrui morte, we build our life with the death of others.
[Not a joke, outis; there are documented deaths]
Fungi and bacteria?
Fruit, berries and nuts.
Eggs.
Well, they’re unborn chickens according to some, but still — I can tell the difference between an omelette and a roast chicken.
The OP is a joke, but I’ve sometimes wondered about using a serious version of that in arguments.
“If you die and find out that you are denied heaven because of something you got wrong about what God wants — say, keeping the Sabbath on Saturdays, as specified in the Torah — would you feel that your fate is just? After all, God’s will and desire is paramount, and you got it wrong, so whatever God wants is just. Or would you feel that your fate is unfair; that God should have made it clearer to you, and to all Christians, that keeping the Sabbath was important enough that violating it would have an effect on your eternal fate?”
(I might have to remind them that Jesus never said that keeping the Sabbath was canceled; that rejecting the Sabbath was a development in Christianity many years after Jesus died)
(If I’m arguing with SDAs or similar, I would have to use a different example — maybe circumcision?)
That’s basically Euthyphro’s dilemma, no?
For the most part they still are, or contain, living organisms. Is living on nothing but seedless fruit or parts of fruit possible for more than a few weeks?
I doubt it, other than with multimineral/vitamins supplementation.
Calories and roughage should be adequate, might have eat a fair bit, but.
Fats are no prob, protein should be sufficient.
Still, even if it’s not 100% achievable, I reckon just maximising their use as best as possible would be a good outcome from that ethical perspective.
Some seeds benefit from or need to pass through a mammalian gut, it serves several purposes including spreading the seeds and in the need stimulating germination. Should you happen upon an abandoned old fashioned sewage plant, in the right climate, you are very likely to find an abundance of tomato plants.
[Jazzlet; my granma told me about her youth in a rural part of Spain at the time (Algete) and about ‘tomates culeros’. Basically, tomato plants that grew from seed in the, um, droppings of the children in the field. Roughly, around the turn of the century (last one)]
It has some similarity, but I don’t think it’s an exact match.
Any discussion of divine (command) morality will have overlap with that general scenario.
Fair enough, Owlmirror. Can’t really dispute that.
So, if you’re arguing with someone who already understands the concept of divine command morality, they probably shan’t be moved by your using that in an argument.
(Main thing is you’re approaching it from the subjective perspective of the worshipper rather than from an empyrean perspective as if it were some sort of Platonic truth)