If someone you've hitherto regarded as perfectly good and completely trustworthy tells you that it's right and proper and morally good that most of the world's population should spend eternity suffering torments worse than any human has inflicted on any other, it's time for some urgent re-evaluation of their goodness and trustworthiness. (Failure to do this sort of re-evaluation, on a more modest scale, is part of how crazy cult disasters like Jonestown happen, so it's important to be willing to do it when appropriate.)
Of course no one is saying (at least, so far as I've noticed) that if someone you've decided to trust tells you you're headed for disaster then you shouldn't take notice.
I agree about the tension. (There's the same tension between saying, as e.g. Rob has been doing in this discussion and St Paul did a couple of thousand years upthread, that God's made his existence clear to everyone and noticing that there are lots of people to whom it seems not to be clear at all.) But there *are*, demonstrably, lots of things it's easy to convince people of but that when looked at clearly enough are easy to see are false. See, e.g., the thing sometimes (I think unfortunately) called "conjunction effect" or "conjunction fallacy", where it doesn't even take any convincing to get people to judge that A-and-B is *more* probable than A. Or consider the success of racist and nationalist demagogues throughout history. It's possible, at least a priori, that something like the nonexistence of God or the defensibility of hell is one of those things that people are easily convinced of but that aren't sustainable once you look at them from the correct angle.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-05-30 01:25 pm (UTC)Of course no one is saying (at least, so far as I've noticed) that if someone you've decided to trust tells you you're headed for disaster then you shouldn't take notice.
I agree about the tension. (There's the same tension between saying, as e.g. Rob has been doing in this discussion and St Paul did a couple of thousand years upthread, that God's made his existence clear to everyone and noticing that there are lots of people to whom it seems not to be clear at all.) But there *are*, demonstrably, lots of things it's easy to convince people of but that when looked at clearly enough are easy to see are false. See, e.g., the thing sometimes (I think unfortunately) called "conjunction effect" or "conjunction fallacy", where it doesn't even take any convincing to get people to judge that A-and-B is *more* probable than A. Or consider the success of racist and nationalist demagogues throughout history. It's possible, at least a priori, that something like the nonexistence of God or the defensibility of hell is one of those things that people are easily convinced of but that aren't sustainable once you look at them from the correct angle.