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Stuff I found on the web, probably on

andrewducker's del.icio.us feed or something.

Psychology Today on ex-Christian ex-ministers and on magical thinking

Psychology Today has a couple of interesting articles, one on ministers who lose their faith, and another on magical thinking. Quoteable quote:

"We tend to ignore how much cognitive effort is required to maintain extreme religious beliefs, which have no supporting evidence whatsoever," says the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He likens the process to a cell trying to maintain its osmotic pressure. "You're trying to pump out the mainstream influences all the time. You're trying to maintain this wall, and keep your beliefs inside, and all these other beliefs outside. That's hard work." In some ways, then, at least for fundamentalists, "growing out of it is the easiest thing in the world."

That sounds sort of familiar. I'm not sure I'd consider myself an ex-fundamentalist, but I did find that giving up removed the constant pressure to keep baling.

The stuff about moral contagion in the magical thinking article reminded me of Haggai 2:10-14, where it's clear that cleanness (in the Bible's sense of moral and ceremonial acceptability, rather then lack of dirt) is less contagious than uncleanness. There's possibly a link here to the tendency of some religions to sharply divide the world into non-believers and believers, and to be careful about how much you expose yourself to the non-believing world (q.v. the unequally yoked teaching you get in the more extreme variants of a lot of religions).

Old interview with Philip Pullman

Third Way interviewed Pullman years ago. It's the origin of one of his statements on whether he's an agnostic or an atheist, which I rather like:

Can I elucidate my own position as far as atheism is concerned? I don’t know whether I’m an atheist or an agnostic. I’m both, depending on where the standpoint is.

The totality of what I know is no more than the tiniest pinprick of light in an enormous encircling darkness of all the things I don’t know – which includes the number of atoms in the Atlantic Ocean, the thoughts going through the mind of my next-door neighbour at this moment and what is happening two miles above the surface of the planet Mars. In this illimitable darkness there may be God and I don’t know, because I don’t know.

But if we look at this pinprick of light and come closer to it, like a camera zooming in, so that it gradually expands until here we are, sitting in this room, surrounded by all the things we do know – such as what the time is and how to drive to London and all the other things that we know, what we’ve read about history and what we can find out about science – nowhere in this knowledge that’s available to me do I see the slightest evidence for God.

So, within this tiny circle of light I’m a convinced atheist; but when I step back I can see that the totality of what I know is very small compared to the totality of what I don’t know. So, that’s my position.

This isn't really a surprising statement, but, like Ruth Gledhill's discovery that Richard Dawkins is a liberal Anglican, some people seem surprised that atheists aren't ruling out things which some people would regard as gods. The point is that there's no decent evidence that anyone has met one. Deism is a respectable position, I think (although I'm not sure why you'd bother with it), but religions which claim God has spoken to them are implausible because of God's inability to keep his story straight.

The walls have Google

The thing about blogging is that you never know who's reading. Someone called Voyou makes a post ending with an aside which is critical of A.C. Grayling's response to Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion. Grayling turns up in the comments to argue with them.

(I keep turning up more conversations about the Eagleton review: see my bookmarks for the best of them).

"Compact of hypocrisy and secret vice"

Yellow wonders whether or not he should sign the UCCF doctrinal basis in this post and the followup. Signs point to "not". Si Hollett reminds me of myself in my foolish youth.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's far from clear that what Jesus is reported as having sent people out to preach (either during his life, or after the Resurrection) is The Gospel in the Two-Ways-To-Live sense of a recipe for salvation. (See, e.g., the discussion of N T Wright over on your LJ recently.)
As I said in the discussion over on my LJ, I don't think that a few scholars have come up with a different idea that is very new, a minority view, and one where N.T. Wright says "there are probably almost as many ‘new perspective’ positions as there are writers espousing it – and I disagree with most of them." is strong enough to warrant a "It's far from clear" statement. "There is a tentative minority theory..." seems more reasonable.

The advantage of trumpets from heaven would be that they're better evidence, not that they get the message out quicker.
I agree, trumpets from heaven would be better in all kinds of ways. That does not appear to be the way God chooses to do things though. He largely works through mankind to do all this stuff.

What Paul says in Romans 1 about God's nature being clear to everyone from looking at the universe is obviously wrong
Well it depends what is meant by God's nature. If it is meant to indicate at the very least that God exists, then arguably the case is much stronger now now that we know how 'finely tuned' the universe is. Woah, before you write a large treatise disagreeing with me - it might be better to note that it's 2:30AM, and that I'm going to write a post about this in the near future which might be a better place for an extensive rebuttal ;-)

I don't think I think (and I certainly haven't *said*, unless I goofed) that punishment is never just unless there's a well signposted escape route
I thought you were saying that, but perhaps I've just read that in to what you were saying.

The trouble is that hell is an utterly disproportionate punishment for human sin
I'm not sure how I would work out what an appropriate punishment was as I do not have the right vantage point / knowledge with which to make such a determination. I could throw out trite phrases like "Ah, but it's sin against an infinite God" and so on - but I think such phrases merely demonstrate that we do not understand how to work out what an appropriate punishment would be for our sin because we cannot properly appreciate the sin itself never mind anything else that would have to go in to the equation (if we even knew what that was) that would calculate a fair punishment.

that we don't actually have the option of living sinless lives any more than we have the option of never making mistakes or never getting ill
Obviously this is a complex subject that I can't really do justice to here, tonight, in an LJ comment - but I don't think it is like never making mistakes. If you think of sin as being about volitional acts then it's quite different from making mistakes. Mistakes are not volitional.

It is unjust to punish people for something they have no way of avoiding.
I'm a bit tempted to say that God can do what he wants, but I know the doors that opens. However the temptation remains there.

Of course (I'll just add) I don't think Christianity is true because of all this stuff. I think it's true because of other stuff. All the things you've raised (many of which are admittedly quite hard to respond to) do not represent critical hits to Christianity AFAICT. I think it stands up to critical analysis pretty well.

On the meaning of "gospel": note, e.g., that the 1911 Britannica article on "gospel", written long before N T Wright, says e.g. "The disciples of Jesus proclaimed the Gospel that He was the Christ."; the idea that "gospel" doesn't always mean "how to get saved" is not unique to Wright and I think is far from being a tentative minority theory.

Fine-tuning arguments are interesting, but I don't so far find them very convincing. (But they do constitute one of the few lines of theistic argument that I can imagine becoming quite convincing in the future.)

I agree that it's hard to know for sure what constitutes a reasonable response to any given sin. And I suppose it could in principle turn out that the Right Thing is to burn people for eternity for any sin, no matter how trifling. But I think it's about as obvious that that isn't in fact the Right Thing as, say, that murdering people is usually wrong, or that fooling large numbers of people into accepting a totally false religion by causing error-packed scriptures to be written is wrong. Any degree of moral skepticism that leaves that last option seriously open completely undermines any form of religion that goes much beyond deism, I think; and I think you need that much moral skepticism before it becomes plausible that eternal torment is just.

Of course I don't think committing moral wrongs is just like making mistakes. But they resemble one another in the one respect I was pointing out: the fact that on any single occasion we can if we choose be pretty sure of avoiding them doesn't mean that we really have the option of living our whole lives without them. No matter how firmly you or I might decide right now that we will never again do anything selfish or hurtful or dishonest or otherwise Wrong, sooner or later we will; and any scheme of punishment that reckons *that* worthy of eternal damnation is unjust. (And, further: even if it were just, then letting the world get into a state where we are in that predicament would be monstrous.)

And now, as you rightly remark, it's 2.30am -- I mean, 2.50am -- and I shall go to bed.

One quick note before I go to bed. I agree that this stuff doesn't represent a critical hit on Christianity, because as I think I've said already somewhere in this discussion I think annihilationism is certainly a viable option for Christians (even if they're committed to a pretty conservative outlook) and largely sidesteps any complaints about hell; and universalism is probably viable too, and does away with such complaints entirely.

On the other hand, I *do* think these considerations render belief in eternal torment entirely untenable. You are, of course, welcome to disagree.

tifferrobinson said, I think these arguments about the New Perspectives on Paul probably don't affect what I'm calling the gospel in a serious way anyway. I don't think the gospel is 'how to get saved', I think 'how to get saved' is a part of it - and in a sense I don't really care what label goes with 'how to get saved', let's not call it the gospel if you like - but I want to tell people about 'how to get saved' as well as 'why you need to be saved' and other such topics. If gospel isn't the technically correct term for that collection of stuff then that doesn't bother me particularly.

I think the things I'm saying about 'how to get saved' and 'why you need to get saved' are 'historic' in the sense that they go all the way back to the NT writers. If I'm collecting them under slightly the wrong banner term then that is really of no concern.

Fine-tuning arguments are interesting, but I don't so far find them very convincing. (But they do constitute one of the few lines of theistic argument that I can imagine becoming quite convincing in the future.)
How might they be convincing in the future?

But I think it's about as obvious that that isn't in fact the Right Thing as, say, that murdering people is usually wrong
I'm very wary of 'obvious' things. It's a bit like common sense. Lots of things that we think are 'common sense' in all cases, but it seems to be that the further away they are from our ordinary experience / understanding they are the more chance there is that while being terribly convincing to us they are in fact wrong. Consider for example the idea that cats in boxes can only be either alive or dead (not in a superposition of those states). Even the greatest of men make these errors (http://www.spaceandmotion.com/quantum-theory-albert-einstein-quotes.htm).

... or that fooling large numbers of people into accepting a totally false religion by causing error-packed scriptures to be written is wrong. Any degree of moral skepticism that leaves that last option seriously open completely undermines any form of religion that goes much beyond deism, I think; and I think you need that much moral skepticism before it becomes plausible that eternal torment is just.
Sorry, you've completely lost me. Could you rephrase all that?

the fact that on any single occasion we can if we choose be pretty sure of avoiding them doesn't mean that we really have the option of living our whole lives without them. No matter how firmly you or I might decide right now that we will never again do anything selfish or hurtful or dishonest or otherwise Wrong, sooner or later we will
I just don't think this is true. In practice we (or at least I) will do selfish, or hurful, or dishonest, or otherwise wrong things because I will choose to do so. I might decide never to do those things, but that doesn't bind my future choices, it doesn't preselect what I'll do. I still have to choose to be selfless, loving, honest, and good - and I know I won't make those choices all the time - not because I am compelled such that I am unable to always be good (although that might be there, through original sin, but I'm not sure about all of that so I don't want to argue that) but because I will choose to.

As you point out, I *will* do those things in the future. However that *will* is really a prediction saying "It is highly probabilistically likely", and that prediction can be made based on the past choices I freely made.

(post edited to use very cool icon)

Edited 2008-05-29 02:23 (UTC)

I agree that the exact meaning of "gospel" isn't critical here. The only reason I brought it up is that it seemed like you were assuming that the disciples went out and potentially risked getting killed, or at least lightly ridiculed (I think independent evidence for any sort of serious persecution of Christians in the first century is nonexistent), in order to spread How To Get Saved, and I wanted to point out that there's more to what they were saying than that, which could provide reasons for their willingness to do it other than "it was the only way to save all those people from damnation".

I don't know what it would take to make fine-tuning arguments actually convincing. It just seems much more plausible that future discoveries or ideas might do that than, e.g., that the same might happen for something like the old first-cause arguments, or the argument that far and away the best explanation for having four old contradictory non-independent documents that tell differing stories about a resurrection is that the resurrection really happened.

Yeah, I'm wary of "obvious" things too, but as I said I think Christians can't afford too much skepticism about right and wrong. I see that I wasn't clear enough about that, so I'll expand on it a bit and try to make it clearer.

You believe that the Bible is reliable. (The exact details of how reliable aren't important for this particular line of reasoning.) Presumably you have some sort of reasons for believing this. I don't know exactly what they are, but I've basically heard two sorts. (1) "When I've checked it, it's come up OK." (2) "God wouldn't provide us with a pack of lies masquerading as revelation." (Both of those are of course terrible oversimplifications. I know, OK?)

Now, #1 can only take you so far. Especially if your checking involves actual comparison with the real world. For the rest, you need #2.

(Some Christians might base their beliefs not on the Bible but on, say, the teaching of their church, or some personal revelation. The same principles apply.)

But notice that #2 depends, inescapably, on the assumption that God *wouldn't* engage in a massive systematic disinformation campaign with you among its targets. Well, why wouldn't he? Presumably because it would be evil, or because it would be against his character.

So you're happy for something crucial to your faith to depend on an assumption either about what's good and what's not, or on what's consistent with the character of God and what's not. And, so far as I can tell, any skeptical argument you might deploy along the lines of "well, we can't be absolutely certain that it's wrong to torture billions of people for eternity on account of finite sins" will lead you equally to "well, we can't be absolutely certain that God wouldn't systematically deceive us". So if I'm not justified in saying that a supremely good God such as Christians profess belief in wouldn't countenance eternal torment, neither are you justified in saying that the Bible is trustworthy.

I'm not claiming that your future wrongdoing is compelled or coerced or anything like that. Just that for practical purposes it's inevitable, and entirely predictable, that there'll be some. Put differently: human nature is such that (barring miracles and a-million-heads-in-a-row coincidences) everyone does wrong. Requiring a standard of behaviour that no one is, in practice, able to live up to ... well, this chap called Jesus had some harsh words for people he thought were doing that.

re "obvious" things, there's an extension of Gareth's argument, which is that if you're considering whether to convert to a theistic religion, at some stage you presumably look at whether the God(s) are the sort you want to worship.

If you're interested in being good rather than evil, presumably you don't want to worship an evil God. Imagine a sales pitch from an evangelist which went along the lines of "Why not worship Satan? He's good, just like you want. By good, I mean that he loves his devotees, encourages you to help the poor, tortures kittens and eats babies".

At this point, you've not committed to worshiping Our Dark Master, so you're reliant on your own moral judgment of what good is. You might think that being loving and encouraging you to help the poor were good, but you've no reason to accept the kittens and babies stuff. Why do evangelical evangelists expect people to think that eternal conscious torment is a moral response to sin? In my experience, it requires quite careful preparation of the ground (along the "sin is very serious, you might think it's a long way down the road to the shops, but that's just peanuts compared to sin" lines that you might find elsewhere on this thread) before anyone will get anywhere near accepting it. I'm continually saddened by how easy it is to convince people that they're so wrong that they deserve hell, especially as the easiest people to convince generally seem quite nice.

I'm continually saddened by how easy it is to convince people that they're so wrong that they deserve hell, especially as the easiest people to convince generally seem quite nice.
(I'd say bad rather than wrong - as wrongness tends to be about understanding or belief, and that's not really what sin is about)

Maybe there is a good reason why people are so 'easily' convinced when they spend time looking in to it and praying about it. Maybe the reason is they discover it's true.

So you're suggesting that the question "is it just for people to suffer eternal torment for living as most humans do?" is one that we can, after all, reliably find the answer to?

That's not what you said before, you know...

I'm not sure what I'm saying here that contradicts what I've said before. I'm making two points there, the first is that the judgement I think the BIble claims people deserve is not as a result of misunderstanding stuff, it's about what you do.

The other is that

pw201 should consider that maybe the reason that it's 'easy' (his words) to convince people that they deserve hell is because they discover that it's true. That discovery is not a discovery in the sense that they can logically demonstrate to others that their sin deserve a punishment of that order, I don't think anyone has a proof like that - all we can do is make analogies and references to how bad it might be from God's perspective. From the outside all anyone can do is stress different bits of their argument to see if it chimes with other people. For the person who has become convinced (presumably who also becomes a Christian) I think they are convinced in favour of the punishment stuff because God's Holy Spirit convicts them of their sin, and if they become Christians then God's Holy Spirit comes to live within them and testifies to them (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans%208:16&version=31).

That is certainly my experience - it is absolutely convincing for me, and explains why when there are two possibilities of how to interpret whether God is good or not (for example) I will tend to go for the one that says he is. It doesn't make sense for someone on the outside - I should have stayed neutral or maybe gone for saying God is evil. It makes sense to me because I have access to something that those on the outside don't.

I know

pw201 (and perhaps you, I don't know your history) don't have / haven't had this kind of inner witness. I don't know why that is.

What you've said before is that no matter how obvious it appears that eternal torment isn't a reasonable consequence for finite sins to have, we aren't justified in thinking it's true (and therefore, e.g., that a good and powerful god would arrange for the world not to have billions of people suffering eternal torment for their finite sins) because we don't know everything about sin and justice and so on.

But apparently this hard-line skepticism (and it really is pretty hard-line; without the Christian traditions about hell, do you think anyone would take you seriously if you said: all things considered, it's probably best for the world if most of its people suffer eternal torment?) only applies when a person's conclusion is that hell is monstrous; the fact that so many people (including, by the way, some eminent evangelical Christians) draw that conclusion isn't, for you, evidence that hell really *is* monstrous, but the fact that many other people decide that hell isn't monstrous *is* reason to think that they've somehow "discovered" that yes, what's best for the world is that I and billions of others should be tortured for eternity.

Perhaps, instead of saying that the monstrousness of eternal torment is (1) obvious and (2) a straightforward deduction from just about every system of ethics I find at all credible, I should claim to have had an "inner witness" telling me that eternal torment is monstrous. But I rather doubt that it would help :-).

What you've said before is that no matter how obvious it appears that eternal torment isn't a reasonable consequence for finite sins to have, we aren't justified in thinking it's true
I've not claimed that because I don't think you have given any such obvious arguments. I think you've said it feels wrong (which I can understand, but I think is an appeal to 'common sense'), that really it's not our fault because God must have designed us to be like this, and then that it's wrong that God has compelled us to not be like that by forcing our hand by threatening us with hell.

The position I'd want to persuade people of is that our bad actions ought to warrant a response from God in the role as judge. I wouldn't (at least not yet) want to push the position of eternal conscious torment as the appropriate punishment. I'm defending that position because that's where the argument is happening, I'm not constructing an externally verifiable proof for the whole of that position though, I think that can only really come by God supernaturally revealing it to someone.

Perhaps, instead of saying that the monstrousness of eternal torment is (1) obvious and (2) a straightforward deduction from just about every system of ethics I find at all credible, I should claim to have had an "inner witness" telling me that eternal torment is monstrous. But I rather doubt that it would help :-).
I guess here you're either saying I'm lying to make my case stronger, or that I've mistaken my own inner intuition to be something more than it is. If you think I'm lying I can't do a great deal about that. If you think I'm mistaking my own intuition then all I can do is to say that it is completely unlike the intuitional sense that I had before I was a Christian, and is entirely different from the intuition I get about other things that I wouldn't expect to have any witness from God on (say which programming language is best or something like that).

When claiming something's obvious, I'm not sure there's much to do other than saying "it's obvious". And I really do think it's about as obvious that finite sins don't merit eternal torment as, well, anything else in ethics; I don't know what I could appeal to that would be any less obvious. If you think that's an "appeal to common sense" then, well, perhaps it is but I'm not sure what's supposed to be wrong with that.

But, not that I think it will be much help, here are a few lines of thought that lead from possibly-more-obvious premises to the conclusion that eternal torment is not a reasonable consequence for finite sins to have.

1. (For utilitarians.) Eternal torment provides its victim with a huge (perhaps infinite) dollop of negative utility, and there's no evidence that it provides any counterbalancing dollop of positive utility. (Further: the only plausible way for it to do so is if God or someone else takes pleasure in others' torment, which is in fact not very plausible.)

2. (For Christians.) According to the New Testament, Jesus repeatedly told his followers to forgive others any wrongs done to them, and to repay evil with good, and this appears to be intended as a moral imperative. The NT also claims in multiple places that goodness consists of emulating God. (Or: emulating Jesus, who reveals the character of God.) It is hard to understand eternal torment as repaying evil with good; it appears to be repaying evil with infinitely more evil.

3. (For anyone.) Punishment, according to every legal or moral system I've ever heard of, is required to be proportionate to the offence. Eternal torment is by definition not proportionate to finite offences.

Another thing I don't think I've said is that "really it's not our fault because God must have designed us to be like this", but I have said some similar things: (1) that if our nature (as humans) is really such that in practice none of us, even with intentions as good as humans are capable of without divine intervention, will behave in a particular way, then it is not reasonable to punish not-behaving-in-that-way; (2) it is wrong to bring about the existence of billions of people who will (entirely foreseeably) behave in ways so bad as to justify eternal torment; (3) it is wrong to bring about the existence of billions of people whom, entirely foreseeably, will end up suffering eternal torment. (Actually, I don't think I've explicitly said #2 before in this discussion.) Note that none of those claims is about whether anything is our *fault*. The question I'm addressing is whether it's reasonable to torture us for eternity for our sins, which is not the same question as whether they are our fault.

And I certainly haven't said that "it's wrong that God has compelled us to not be like that by forcing our hand by threatening us with hell". I've even said something almost exactly opposite to that, namely that if our actions inevitably lead to hell then it is a good thing if God (or anyone) warns us about it; the more clearly the better.

I am alarmed by how many things I am being accused of saying in this discussion that I have not, in fact, said. (And I apologize if other people feel the same way in reverse.) It is tempting to speculate on why it is that skeptics' criticisms of Christian doctrines so often get transmogrified into sillier criticisms when Christians reply to them, but I shall manfully resist temptation.

I am not saying that you're lying; I'm sorry if I gave that impression. I do think you've mistaken your own intuition as something more than an intuition, but I dare say you think the same about me. My point was only this: I decline to give some people's intuitions extra credit because they describe them as "inner witness" or "revelation" or whatever, at least until such time as they give me evidence that it has some source more reliable than their own brains.

I would, however, be interested to know more about the ways in which this whatever-it-is differs subjectively from (other) intuitions.

If you think that's an "appeal to common sense" then, well, perhaps it is but I'm not sure what's supposed to be wrong with that.
I think I explained that here (http://pw201.livejournal.com/91140.html?thread=473604#t473604), and you said you were wary of 'obvious' things too.

1. (For utilitarians.) Eternal torment provides its victim with a huge (perhaps infinite) dollop of negative utility
But I'm not a utilitarian.

2. (For Christians.) According to the New Testament, Jesus repeatedly told his followers to forgive others any wrongs done to them, and to repay evil with good, and this appears to be intended as a moral imperative. The NT also claims in multiple places that goodness consists of emulating God.
But God does continue to dole out goodness on those who are his enemies, He 'causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205:45%20&version=31). He sent his son to die for us, He has already done enormously more than we could ever reasonably expect.

emulating Jesus, who reveals the character of God
Exactly, and the supreme way Jesus revealed the character of God was by dying on the cross so that the punishment we deserve could be avoided.

3. (For anyone.) Punishment, according to every legal or moral system I've ever heard of, is required to be proportionate to the offence. Eternal torment is by definition not proportionate to finite offences.
I agree it's hard to understand from our perspective. Like I said, I think our perspective is so far removed that we can't work it all out logically.

(1) that if our nature (as humans) is really such that in practice none of us, even with intentions as good as humans are capable of without divine intervention, will behave in a particular way, then it is not reasonable to punish not-behaving-in-that-way;
When you use say 'in practice' you're removing our responsibility, which I just can't accept because I know that when I do bad things it is because I choose to do so. I've said this a lot in these threads and you've come back with arguments about how it's statistically improbable that anyone would not sin and so on - I agree, but that's not because they have to but because they choose to. Our choices will have consequences (as they should), and "Well everyone else did it too so it's not my fault" is not going to wash I don't think.

For example, if there was a town where everyone stole things, we'd rightly wonder why everyone in the town stole things, but we'd consider that they had done it of their own free will and so deserved to be punished - even if everyone in that town chose to steal.

The question I'm addressing is whether it's reasonable to torture us for eternity for our sins, which is not the same question as whether they are our fault.
At the end of the day I think Christians have some answers to these questions (

woodpijn has tried to give some of them), but none that are entirely convincing to people who lack trust in God or the witness of God's Holy Spirit. I think it's a terribly bad angle to investigate Christianity from. Far better, I think, to assess whether Christianity is true, get to know God, and then think about it. There are a whole bunch of questions that don't have good answers, such as why we weren't created perfect to begin with (which is kind of related to all this), why there was a snake / devil at all, etc... But because we don't know the answers to questions we should expect to be outside of our domain of understanding (we don't know if love requires free choice which entails sin for example, and how could we know for sure unless we were God?) doesn't mean Christianity falls down - there are other things about Christianity we can check, and we can ask God if he is real and get to know him before / without understanding these things fully.

It is tempting to speculate on why it is that skeptics' criticisms of Christian doctrines so often get transmogrified into sillier criticisms when Christians reply to them, but I shall manfully resist temptation.
Trust me, we could say the same about how people (perhaps not you) keep missing out that we actually make these choices that are sinful, or the (hopefully not deliberate) conflating of the two separate points of us doing wrong and so deserving punishment (point 1) and God providing an escape route (point 2).

I do think you've mistaken your own intuition as something more than an intuition, but I dare say you think the same about me.
No I don't. You haven't claimed to have an inner witness from the Holy Spirit.

My point was only this: I decline to give some people's intuitions extra credit because they describe them as "inner witness" or "revelation" or whatever, at least until such time as they give me evidence that it has some source more reliable than their own brains.
Fair enough. I'm not using it to score extra credit, I'm trying to explain why I am so solid in my position (about God's existence primarily - not all the details of the punishment).

I would, however, be interested to know more about the ways in which this whatever-it-is differs subjectively from (other) intuitions.
It's not like any other 'intuition' at all. I don't want to use the term intuition, but dictionary.com sez 'The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition' which I suppose means it falls under that banner. It's like having truth imparted to you by an external power more powerful than yourself. That's not a very good description really. Oh well.

I'm not *investigating Christianity* from this angle. I'm investigating (or, actually, criticizing, but if anyone finds anything new and worthwhile to say in defence then I'm all ears) *the doctrine of eternal torment*. And, guess what?, what I actually did is to first of all evaluate (almost entirely on other grounds) whether Christianity is true, just as you suggest. The outcome of that prevented me continuing along your recommended course.

I am not claiming that not knowing the answer to every question is a problem with Christianity, or indeed with belief-in-eternal-torment. I have said so absolutely clearly and explicitly. (I drew a distinction between "puzzles" and "problems", if I'm remembering my terminology correctly.) Enough with the straw men, already!

Yes, there are other things in Christianity that we can check. I checked. Christianity is wrong. Yes, we can ask God if he is real. I asked. If he is, he's not telling.

Sorry to be so blunt about that, but it seems you're suggesting that somehow it's improper for people who aren't Christians to make any comment on things like hell because the only right perspective to approach such things from is (1) that of having investigated Christianity carefully, and simultaneously (2) that of actually being a Christian, which for some reason you appear to take as equivalent. They are not equivalent. But, in any case, perhaps it hasn't escaped your notice that people who *are* Christians don't always find eternal torment credible, or compatible with the alleged goodness of God.

I am sure that people on all sides of this debate erect straw men, misunderstand one another's positions, etc. As you already remarked in another context, "other people do it too" isn't a very good justification for anything. So please don't.

Of course I haven't made the *same* claim about my intuitions (or whatever they are) as you have about yours. But I am claiming that my conviction that eternal torment is not a reasonable consequence for finite sins to have isn't *just* a matter of how I happen to feel. It seems that you disagree. This is pretty much parallel to my opinion of your belief that, all considered, the best thing is probably for me to be tortured for eternity.

I'm afraid I don't know with much confidence what it feels like to have truth imparted to you by an external power (unless you count things like university lectures). Did you have prior experience of that, to enable you to tell that whatever-it-was-you-experienced was that rather than something else?

Yes, I'm wary of obvious things too. But if something you believe is contradicted by Very Obvious Things, then I think that's evidence against it; and if your defence is to say "well, the understandings that lead you to think that's obvious aren't reliable" but you don't have some specific account of why *that* evaluation of obviousness is more unreliable than other similar ones, then you've landed yourself with (in this case) a very far-reaching skepticism about our ability to tell what's right and what's wrong; and I've explained my reasons for thinking that such skepticism badly undermines Christianity, or any other revealed religion for that matter.

Of course I don't think you're a utilitarian. But, as I said, one of the things that makes me trust this particular bit of "common sense" is that a variety of different ethical systems seem to me to lead to the same conclusion. Also, it's widely (not universally) agreed by non-utilitarians that utilitarianism is at least often a good approximation to the truth.

Perhaps what you "reasonably expect" doesn't include "not being tortured for eternity". Expectations differ. But tell me, what would you think of someone who claimed to be obeying Jesus's instruction to "turn the other cheek" if when someone slapped him in the face he smiled sweetly, offered the other cheek ... and then, a few days later, burned his assailant's house down?

I am not, of course, removing your responsibility. (Go on, check it's still there. See?) I have said at least twice now, I think, that I am *not* claiming that "everyone else did it too so it's not my fault". In fact, I see that I made that clear in the very comment you're replying to. If you must argue with straw men, could you at least make them ones I haven't already explicitly said aren't my position?

If there were a town where everyone without exception stole, then actually I *wouldn't* conclude that everyone in the town should be punished. I would conclude that probably there's something in the water or the culture that somehow stops the people understanding what's wrong with stealing, or makes them unable to resist the temptation; I would regard punishing them as an exercise in futility; but I would try to figure out what was broken so as to make the town stop being a place where everyone steals.

And of course that's different from our actual situation, since in your hypothetical example I'd know (since it's not true that everyone everywhere steals) that the problem, whatever it was, wasn't so deeply ingrained as to be Part Of Human Nature; but here in the real world, we aren't in a position to draw any such conclusion.

Moral intuitions are good and important, but (assuming moral objectivism) ought to be open to correction. In your Satan example I guess the balance of good to bad (as per my intuitions) isn't such as to make me believe I've encountered a superior moral authority.

On the other hand, if I come across someone whom I (for independent reasons) hold to be perfectly good and completely trustworthy (like, say, Jesus), and that person says "the life you're living has you heading for unmitigated catastrophe unless you repent", I sit up and take notice.

I'm continually saddened by how easy it is to convince people that they're so wrong that they deserve hell

Maybe there is a good reason why people are so 'easily' convinced when they spend time looking in to it and praying about it. Maybe the reason is they discover it's true.

Right. ISTM there's a bit of a tension here between the view that "x is obviously false" and "it's easy to convince people of x" - it's not obviously false to them, obviously...

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.

Just to throw a slightly different perspective on things (completely derail the thread and annoy everyone...)

I think that when we boil Christianity down to a system of one right and one wrong choice leading to this destiny or this we miss the essence of the message. When Peter preaches to 3000 in Acts 2 he tells them all of the great wonders Jesus had been doing, the miracles and signs, and how he was crucified by them, but raised up by God. He was the Lord and Messiah, whom you crucified.

And then he stops. And the people respond. He hasn't mentioned heaven or hell, and the people respond just the same. This isn't scare tactics, this isn't TWTL, nor is it a "choose this and live, that and die" system. It is simply a case of telling truth, inspired by the Spirit, a truth which convinced 3000 people to respond (if you take Acts to be authentic, but it is likely this kind of situation is, considering that the theology of Peter wouldn't have been too dissimilar to Luke, who was writing very early anyway, and the numbers are likely to be necessary for the rapid growth of Christianity in the 1st century, taking into account the ratio of those converted against those willing to give their lives for the sake of mission)

The disciples clearly believed in an eternal place of suffering for those who don't accept forgiveness, and the glorious new heaven and new earth resurrection for those who do, but those are the consequences for our choice, not the motivation for the choice itself (although it can be). If someone told me that if I didn't believe in the toothfairy I'd go to hell I would probably be 0.5% worried that it might be true, but if I didn't feel the claims of the toothfairy were convincing no amount of scare would make me pledge my life to her (can fairies be male?). People accept the claims of Christianity and accept the love and grace that the cross and resurrection have made accesible to us, and their eternal destiny is a consequence of that. First God loved us, then we love God, then either stick with him for eternity or, well, don't.

Of course I'm not saying you can't boil it down to the response+choice if you so desire, but it isn't the way the New Testament puts it. If we discuss Christian concepts such as hell without the Christian belief in the cross in mind it makes little sense, which is kind of the point really.

I pretty much agree with this.

I'm not a Christian because I want to avoid hell, although I do also want to avoid hell.

Discussions about whether hell is really a place of eternal conscious torment have a tendency to become so focussed that they imply that's why you're a Christian.

For the avoidance of doubt: I wasn't suggesting that anyone becomes a Christian for the purpose of avoiding hell I'll guess that, in fact, some people do, but it's no part of any point I was making. Nor do I think anyone should, nor do I think that that's what Christianity is about. (One of the multiple things I loathe about "Two Ways To Live" is that it does rather give the impression that that *is* what Christianity is about.)

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