nameandnature | (no subject)

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

From:

mattghg (from livejournal.com)

I understand this isn't obvious from the layout of this thread-thing, but my last comment was actually in response to this remark of Paul's:

"You have free choice, but I'll fry you if you chose something I don't like" limits my ability to chose, I think

To which I retort as above. Or, if you prefer: Your ability to choose is not diminished but the fact that your choices have certain consequences. Let's be rigorous here. (Also, "I'll fry you if you choose something I don't like" is an utter caricature, as I explained to Paul, like, a year ago).

But then Paul said to Rob:

Why do we deserve punishment? If it is because of our wrong choices, my argument applies

What argument is that? Surely not the argument that we don't really have free choices because some choices have horrible consequences - after all, now we're talking about those consequences! You think it's this, I guess:

He did say that choices that every human being makes shouldn't have the consequence of eternal torture

But he didn't say exactly that, either. Not at this point in the discussion. What he said was:

Given how bad Hell is, it'd be better not to have been able to make those choices

which is a stronger claim ((p & ~q is better than p & q) isn't as strong a claim as (~p & ~q is better than p & q)), and is far from obvious, given:
(1) I have no idea what life would be like without free will.
(2) There are choices which lead to catastrophic consequences, but there is another choice which makes everything alright, namely
(3) "Given how bad Hell is" is one thing, but how good Heaven is has so far been left out of this discussion.

Standard Evangelical Position on this, which so far as I can tell is what you're offering here

It is (I hope!). That said, I believe that (so far) this is also the standard Roman Catholic position and the standard Eastern Orthodox position as well - although I am of course open to correction on this point by any RC or EO believers out there.

"Nice soul you've got here. Shame if anything happened to it, eh?"

At the start of this thread, Paul was calling Christianity a parasite. I asked him for a supporting argument, and he declined. Now you're comparing evangelism to unscrupulous insurance sales or something. OK. I'm simply going to ignore this kind of baseless slander as of (three, two, one) now. If you don't think sin is serious, I don't know what I can say that will change your mind. I admit that.

Paul,

Sorry to end up talking about you in the third person on your own blog.

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Actually, I had correctly identified what comment you were replying to. And, I repeat, "my choices should not have consequences" is not the same as "it is unreasonable for *these* choices to have *those* consequences", especially not when *these* choices are ones everyone makes and *those* consequences include eternal torment. You may repeat the same retort as often as you please, but that won't make it any more reasonable.

I agree that "given how bad hell is, better not to be able to make those choices" is an odd way of putting it; I think Paul has been briefly suckered by the all-too-common Christian move of representing eternal damnation as something God simply has no choice about. Much better than hell-and-no-choices would be choices-and-no-hell, I expect. "How *good* Heaven is" seems to me to strengthen Paul's argument that the choices aren't real choices; the bigger the carrot and stick offered to encourage choice A over choice B, the less meaningful it is to say that you get to choose freely between A and B. (The reality is that the choice between A and B is not clearly offered; those allegedly inseparable consequences are not clearly enough indicated to make those who choose one way or another responsible for those consequences.)

I was comparing (some versions of) Christianity to the mafia, actually, which is somewhat worse than most unscrupulous insurance sales. And it's not a baseless slander; evangelical Christianity really does represent God as offering that sort of choice. It's not *my* fault that your religion has such nasty bits in it :-). I've no idea how you get from there to "you don't think sin is serious"; that really *is* a baseless slander, since I've not suggested in the least that sin isn't serious. We do, perhaps, disagree over just how serious, and over what an omnipotent and perfectly good being might be expected to do about it. As for what you can say that will change my mind: well, you could always try rational argument. But if you prefer to think that because I made an analogy you don't like I'm impervious to reason, go ahead.

From:

ex-robhu.livejournal.com

the bigger the carrot and stick offered to encourage choice A over choice B, the less meaningful it is to say that you get to choose freely between A and B
No, I know that isn't right. There was a point in my life where I believed in hell, and a fairly good appreciation of how bad it would be. Yet I decided that I was making a choice to reject God that would (I thought) lead to hell. I had no less free choice then than I have today, or that I have had at any point.

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Oh, sure, there's *some* real choice still available. Just as you have *some* real choice what to do if a lunatic threatens you at gunpoint and also offers you untold riches if you do what he says. But it's a pretty attenuated sort of freedom, it seems to me, which makes nonsense of the claim that All The Trouble In The World is there for the sake of our precious freedom. If a supremely powerful god really cared as much about our freedom as would be needed to make the "free will defence" work, then I think we'd be entitled to expect more freedom than we have.

(There are two separate and kinda-opposite freedom deficits at work here. On the one hand, if I know that some choice of mine means the difference between eternal bliss and eternal torment, then that greatly reduces my ability to make a meaningful choice, just as being told to do something at gunpoint does only infinitely more so. On the other hand, if that's true but I don't know it, then my choice might be nicely free but you don't get to claim that I freely chose damnation. That last claim isn't one that anyone's making a big deal of in this particular discussion, I think, but it's commonly made when people start asking whether it's reasonable to condemn people to hell for their very finite sins. )

From:

ex-robhu.livejournal.com

Sorry, putting asterisks around 'some' does not nullify my point - which is that to deny that people have a free choice if they believe this stuff is true is wrong - I can say that with certainty as I was such a person and it was a choice I freely made.

If there was a metaphorical gun being held to my head (which I presume is the threat of hell), and untold riches on offer for doing what the gunman wants (which I presume is heaven, cute Christian girls, and so on). Then I very definitely had a completely free choice to choose what I wanted, and I chose to be shot (in your analogy).

Arguing that people have no choice here just doesn't stand up.

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Um, whatever gives you the idea that putting asterisks around "some" is meant to nullify anything? I agree with you: even at gunpoint, or even at hell-point, it's possible to make a genuine choice. I can't speak for Paul but I'm guessing he'd agree: all he says is that the threat of hell "limits my ability to choose".

Are you trying to say that actually the threat of infinite harm, versus the offer of infinite benefit, *doesn't* constitute a limit to one's ability to choose the other way? Do you never say things like "I can't do that, it's against the law" or "I can't go that way, there's a 100-foot cliff and I might die" or "I can't do that, I'd lose my job" or whatever?

From:

ex-robhu.livejournal.com

Because I said I had a real choice, then you responded by saying I had *some* real choice. I presumed (maybe wrongly) that the contrast was meant to show that my choice was not as fully real as I thought it was, hence the asterisk emphasis on some.

I can't speak for Paul but I'm guessing he'd agree: all he says is that the threat of hell "limits my ability to choose".
But it doesn't. My ability to choose in just the situation we're talking about wasn't limited. I made a choice, the choice that you're saying was limited. Yet it can't be limited because I made it.

Are you trying to say that actually the threat of infinite harm, versus the offer of infinite benefit, *doesn't* constitute a limit to one's ability to choose the other way?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Do you never say things like "I can't do that, it's against the law" or "I can't go that way, there's a 100-foot cliff and I might die" or "I can't do that, I'd lose my job" or whatever?
Yes I do. I do that because language is imprecise and when making offhand remarks like that I inevitably use imprecise and incorrect language. I would try to avoid doing that in a discussion like this of course.

A more accurate rendering of the things you portray would be: "I don't want to do that, it's against the law, and because of the consequences of breaking the law I'm choosing to not do it". The point being that the fact that there are consequences doesn't limit my ability to choose at all. It influences the decision I might make, but that's not a limitation.

If knowing that sin is so serious that we're going to burn in hell for an eternity (not the only possible reading of the Bible I think, but certainly the most stark one (and the one I think most likely, I'll add before you think I'm trying to wiggle out of things here)) makes us stop and consider if that's what we really want, then I'm really glad it influences our choices. If a criminal (or potential criminal) decision as to whether to commit a crime is influenced by the knowledge that he will be punished for committing the crime, then that's a great thing! That doesn't mean he has no choice (otherwise we wouldn't have any crime).

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

I think a person making a choice with a big threat hanging over them is (1) potentially still making a real choice but (2) less able to make a real choice than someone without the big threat attached to their decision. It may or may not feel like there's less choice, on any given occasion.

Apparently you disagree; correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like your position is that any given choice-like-thing either is or isn't a real choice, with no scope for different degrees of real-choice-ness. That seems very odd to me; perhaps the oddness will be clearer if we consider some different sorts of context where choice might be impaired: habit, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypnosis, starvation.

I agree (of course!) that if sin inevitably means damnation, then it's good for the prospect of damnation to influence our choices. The points at issue are (1) whether it's reasonable for an allegedly supremely good and powerful god to set things up that way, (2) whether it's plausible that actually God didn't really have any choice but to set things up that way (there is a certain sort of recursive irony around about here...), (3) whether, given his decision to set things up that way, it would in fact have been better for us not to have the option of making the choices that would land us in eternal damnation, and perhaps (4) whether, given the decision to set things up that way and our option to make the choice either way, we ought to have been better informed about the consequences of our choices. My own best-guess answers are: no, no, dunno, yes.

From:

ex-robhu.livejournal.com

Apparently you disagree; correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like your position is that any given choice-like-thing either is or isn't a real choice, with no scope for different degrees of real-choice-ness.
I'm not really sure what a not real choice would look like. I've only ever encountered real choices (should I follow God or not?, shall I kiss this nice Christian girl?, etc). I suppose you could say some things that happen are not-real choices (Shall I choose to obey gravity? Erk, yes I have to), but that would be a category mistake.

That seems very odd to me; perhaps the oddness will be clearer if we consider some different sorts of context where choice might be impaired: habit, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hypnosis, starvation.
I think if you want to properly compare it then you ought to compare it with a crime where the criminal knows he may be (or perhaps will) be judged for the act. That's the closest analogy I think.

(1) whether it's reasonable for an allegedly supremely good and powerful god to set things up that way
Which I think resolves down to the question of whether an eternal conscious torment in hell is a reasonable punishment (assuming it is eternal etc). There are other angles to look at it from - some people interpret things as people making a choice as to whether they want God in their life, and if they choose no then ultimately they get exactly what they want, with absence of God (who is the source of all good things) being the worst thing that there could possibly be (i.e. hell). Personally I don't buy in to that all that much, but I don't want to completely write these things off because of my lack of understanding of them.

(2) whether it's plausible that actually God didn't really have any choice but to set things up that way (there is a certain sort of recursive irony around about here...)
I suspect that is unknowable. Or if it is knowable (which I doubt) we're going to have to wait around for a long time for the philosophers to work it out (and even then, who knows, philosophy is quite the fuzzy thing).

(3) whether, given his decision to set things up that way, it would in fact have been better for us not to have the option of making the choices that would land us in eternal damnation
Not having the option of making the choices that land us in eternal damnation essentially means that we wouldn't have free will, as it is by free choice we choose to sin (or at least I do). So it doesn't make sense to say that it might be better for me to not have the option of making the choices that would land me in eternal damnation because to do so would mean robbing me of my free will, and without free will I do not think I would be a

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com - Date: 2008-06-02 10:04 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

I forgot to say something: what I'm comparing to the mafia isn't *evangelism*. The person extorting protection money in my analogy is God, not you.

And, since I claimed my slander isn't baseless, I suppose I'd better justify it. Christianity (in the version that, AFAICT, you espouse) says that sin is soooo serious that it requires those who commit it to burn eternally in hell; not even omnipotence can (without compromising justice) simply set that punishment (or "consequence", as you may prefer to call it, ignoring e.g. Jesus's admonishment to "fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell") aside; but, on the other hand, that the on-the-face-of-it-irrelevant action of Turning To Christ can entirely, or almost entirely, get rid of that "consequence".

Let's turn that around: sin is so trifling that one can (without compromising justice) entirely escape its consequences provided one sincerely Turns To Christ (despite, e.g., continuing to sin at more or less the same rate as before), and yet God leaves everyone else (insert here the usual, no doubt perfectly sincere, pious platitudes to the effect that of course we don't know the will of God and he may in his infinite grace choose to save more people than we imagine; but heaven forfend that choices not have consequences) to burn.

Which, I submit, is not so very different from your classic protection racket. There's a threat (shame if something happened to that nice soul of yours such as, say, eternal damnation). It's a very big threat. There's nothing remotely resembling a decent justification for it (please feel free to demonstrate that I'm wrong, but I'll take quite some convincing). There's a way out, which curiously has rather little to do with the actual threat (e.g., it doesn't involve, you know, actually not sinning any more). The fact that this way out is available suffices to show that God does, in fact, have a choice in the matter, so you don't get to claim that eternal damnation is just some kind of inevitable "consequence" of sin that God couldn't prevent.

I'm sorry that you don't like the comparison. But, unfortunately, if you hold beliefs that entail that God is a monster then every now and then people are going to be tactless enough to point it out.

From:

ex-robhu.livejournal.com

The fact that this way out is available suffices to show that God does, in fact, have a choice in the matter, so you don't get to claim that eternal damnation is just some kind of inevitable "consequence" of sin that God couldn't prevent.
This raises the question, if Jesus' death on the cross provides a way out then why is it necessary for people to also choose to turn to Christ to get access to that way out? Is it an inevitable consequence of the 'mechanics' of how that works, or is it an 'arbitrary' additional step that God introduces?

I don't know the answer to that. I don't think the mechanics of these things is spelled out in great detail in the Bible (if at all) because there is no real need for us to know that sort of stuff. It could be an inevitable consequence.

If it's not then I don't think it can be right to blame God for the problem of sin (you could blame him for creating you at all I suppose, but personally I'd rather have existed) when he actually has provided a way of dealing with the problem at great personal cost.

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Yup, I agree that that's a good question. (FWIW, when I was a Christian my answer was that anyone at all could, in principle, be saved by means of What Jesus Did. So "no one comes to the Father except by me", but that isn't the same as "... except by joining my club". I think this is theologically quite satisfactory. Whether there's any answer to the question "And how often, roughly, do this happen?" that doesn't either clash too badly with the Christian tradition or make God out to be monstrous, I don't know.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "If it's not" at the start of your last paragraph -- there are a couple of different things you could be referring to. But (1) even if God somehow had no choice about tying salvation to Turning To Christ, there remains the question of why he's not done a better job of getting the news out. "Beware of the Leopard" and all that. On the other hand, (2) if in fact The Whole Jesus Thing enables everyone to be saved, or everyone other than major-league psychopaths, or something, then I agree that that makes it much harder to argue "hell is evil and unjust, therefore Christianity is wrong". So, for that matter, would annihilationism, which seems pretty unobjectionable theologically and is quite popular these days even among evangelicals. So, perhaps despite appearances in this thread, I'm not inclined to make a big deal about hell -- except in discussion with people who appear to be attached to the traditional idea of eternal torment for (more or less) everyone who doesn't join the club.

(Well, there's also the fact that for most of Christianity's history that traditional idea seems to have been more or less universally believed. If I'm right in thinking that the traditional idea of hell is disgustingly unjust, then I think that's evidence that God, should he exist, isn't all that concerned to keep Christians from near-unanimous error. How much that matters is debatable.)

From:

ex-robhu.livejournal.com

Cards on the table: I do think an eternal conscious torment is the most likely reading of the Bible, and I am committed to believing what God has written in the Bible. I don't think it's the only possible reading that is faithful to the text, but I do think it is the most likely. I went to a really good talk at Spring Harvest about this actually (the audio of which I could probably put somewhere if you wanted to listen to it).

I think there is room for saying people can come to the Father without knowing Jesus' name, etc, except that it doesn't really explain why Jesus sent his disciples out to preach the gospel in the knowledge that they would be persecuted and martyred. If salvation is universal and the gospel is more like an optional add-on that makes people have more fuzzy warm feelings in their life then it probably isn't worth being martyred over.

If it's not means "If it's not an inevitable consequence of the mechanics of it", i.e. if God chooses to add that on as a requirement. I don't think that's option 1 or 2 that you gave. Option 1 was what I was proposing about it being a mechanical / unavoidable consequence thing. In that case why hasn't God got the message out more clearly? I suppose trumpets from heaven might be better in that you don't have to sit around waiting for Christian missionaries to come to your country (which of course might not happen). There's the passage in Romans (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans%201:18-31;&version=31;) of course (which you may not find helpful). I think there are grey areas in all this - I don't deny that, but I think I'm being faithful to the general thrust of scripture here.

Is it wrong for God to punish us if he doesn't both provide an escape route and make us aware of it? I'm not sure that it is wrong. If our sinful actions deserve judgement it doesn't seem right to blame the judge for doling out justice. We should have no expectation that we will receive leniency, and that in some sense the judge is unjust if he does not provide such an escape for us.

From:

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com - Date: 2008-05-29 12:41 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

Which, I submit, is not so very different from your classic protection racket. There's a threat (shame if something happened to that nice soul of yours such as, say, eternal damnation). It's a very big threat. There's nothing remotely resembling a decent justification for it (please feel free to demonstrate that I'm wrong, but I'll take quite some convincing). There's a way out, which curiously has rather little to do with the actual threat (e.g., it doesn't involve, you know, actually not sinning any more). The fact that this way out is available suffices to show that God does, in fact, have a choice in the matter, so you don't get to claim that eternal damnation is just some kind of inevitable "consequence" of sin that God couldn't prevent.

I don't think it's as arbitrary and protection-rackety as you suggest:

* There are psychological laws which you can infer from observing yourself and others, such as "if I think mean thoughts about people all the time, I'll become a mean person" or "if I indulge my every desire, I'll end up with no self-control".

* It is at least possible (although I don't know) that these laws aren't contingent, but are necessary properties of any conceivable rational/sentient creature, and that God can't change them, in the same sense that (to use your example) God can't make a four-sided triangle.

* This is similar to what CS Lewis says about each of us gradually becoming either a heavenly creature or a hellish creature, by means of these kinds of little choices.

* Heavenly creatures end up in heaven and hellish creatures end up in hell - this almost certainly is a necessary truth that God can't change. If heaven were full of hellish creatures it would cease to be heaven.

* (Alternatively, some people think that heaven and hell aren't distinct, but that we all encounter God when we die, and those who have learned to love him experience this as bliss whereas those who reject him experience it as torment. I find this plausible.)

* The "way out" is not God arbitrarily choosing to pardon a subset of people when he could just as easily have pardoned everyone. I think evangelicals sometimes overemphasise imputed righteousness at the expense of imparted righteousness. Salvation means God can actually make me fit for heaven, if I let him; it doesn't mean merely that he states that I am. (I'll be the first to admit there are non-Christians who are way better people than me, but I believe over time - probably extending beyond this life - my derivative is positive and theirs is negative.)

From:

nameandnature

I think evangelicals sometimes overemphasise imputed righteousness at the expense of imparted righteousness.

That's because imputed righteousness is what the Bible says, you heretic.

(Seriously, I'd be interested to see whether you could find anything to support your view other than the relevant passage in C.S. Lewis. Lewis doesn't quite count as scripture yet, I think, although he's getting pretty close).

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

Gosh, I'm surprised. I didn't think imparted righteousness was disputed, just that people gave it different emphasis. I feel a bit like if I'd said "Evangelicals sometimes overemphasise Easter at the expense of Christmas" and you'd said "What is this Christmas you speak of?"

But I'll try:

(It could be that we're using the terms differently. I might be getting them wrong, but as I understand it imputed righteousness means God declares that we're righteous even though there's no ontological change in us, and imparted means that God actually changes us, transforming us into his likeness and making us righteous.)

* 2 Cor 3:18 "And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."

* Galatians 5:22 - fruits of the Spirit - suggests actual observable righteous behaviour, not just imputed, and that it comes from God['s Spirit]

* Philippians 1:9-11 "And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God." - he's describing observable changes in behaviour, and saying it comes through Jeses

* Romans 2:12 "be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

* 2 Cor 9-10 "Now he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will also supply and increase your store of seed and will enlarge the harvest of your righteousness."

Romans 6:16 "Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness?" suggests an actual ontological righteousness, I think

* Ephesians 5:8-10 "For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light 9(for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) 10and find out what pleases the Lord." It's phrased as a command, but seems to imply that we don't have to do it without help (which would be inconsistent with a lot of other scripture anyway)

* Ephesians 4:24 "the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness."

And if hymns and songs count:

* Away in a Manger "And fit us for heaven..."

* Breathe on me, breath of God: "...that I might love as thou dost love, and do as thou wouldst do"

* Various worship songs that say things like "Make me holy" or "Make me like you"

Of course imputed righteousness is very much there in scripture too - I was never denying it, just trying to argue that both exist.

Lewis doesn't quite count as scripture yet, I think, although he's getting pretty close
Yes - a friend once sent me a quote from Screwtape, saying "A deuterocanonical quotation for you..." :)

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Yes, I agree that the salvation-and-damnation story is less arbitrary and protectionrackety if you switch from the standard evangelical version of the story to one that involves being actually made better. I think the fact (and it does seem to be one, though I'm not sure anyone's really done a proper study) that in this life -- which after all is the only one we can actually observe -- Christians don't seem to be markedly nicer, more generous, more honest, etc., etc., than non-Christians, does make it a lot less plausible.

Christians seem to be awfully willing to postulate necessary truths for which there's no evidence other than "if this were true it would make it easier to believe what Christianity says" :-). I don't find it at all plausible that sentient creatures get limitlessly better or worse over time, which seems like it's what you need to get your proposal to work.

Neither does it appear to be the case that when they die Christians are all heavenly creatures who could and should be admitted straight to heaven while non-Christians are all hellish creatures for whom it's clear that nothing other than eternal torment is appropriate. But if that isn't true, I don't see how your justification for hell is supposed to work. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that Paul is one of those non-Christians who are way better than you (note: I have absolutely no reason to believe either that he is or that he isn't, other than a vague guess that in fact you're probably about as good as one another), and that you both get killed in a freak accident tomorrow. It seems to me that either (1) nothing happens at that point to change your relative merits, in which case your attempt to justify hell fails, or (2) something does happen which dramatically changes those relative merits, so dramatically that you become a Heavenly Creature and Paul becomes a Hellish Creature, in which case I think you're missing an account of why that happens and why it's either fair or inevitable that it does so.

Yes, I agree that the "encounter with God is either blissful or unbearable" approach has more promise. But, again, it really doesn't seem terribly plausible that Christians when they die are all such that encounter with God would be blissful, nor that non-Christians when they die are all the reverse; and the question remains of why God wouldn't do anything for those non-Christians (like, say, actually letting them know he really exists) before zapping them with the consuming fire of his presence.

The key points here: (1) if it's really inevitable that Not Being A Christian leads to hell -- whether directly, or indirectly by e.g. not having that opportunity to be gradually transformed into a heavenly being, as you are and I'm not -- then it seems odd that the god who supposedly loves us all enough to die for us wouldn't take the elementary steps that would enable far more of us to *know* (as opposed to "be told, not very credibly") about the problem and its solution. And (2) the arguments that it might be inevitable all seem to require postulating (what seem to me to be) tremendously improbable and inexplicable and unevidenced necessary truths, such as to constrain even omnipotence (or whatever approximation to omnipotence God has), which makes them difficult to believe.

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

if you switch from the standard evangelical version of the story to one that involves being actually made better.
I think that's implying a false dichotomy - I don't think most evangelicals would dispute the account I gave. It's just differing emphases. They don't put it in tracts, but that's because tracts are necessarily brief introductions aimed at people unfamiliar with the message.

Christians seem to be awfully willing to postulate necessary truths for which there's no evidence other than "if this were true it would make it easier to believe what Christianity says" :-).
It was admittedly speculative - I said "it's possible" and "I don't know". Sorry if it was sloppy of me to do it even with those caveats. Is it a general trend? Where else have you noticed it?

or (2) something does happen which dramatically changes those relative merits, so dramatically that you become a Heavenly Creature and Paul becomes a Hellish Creature, in which case I think you're missing an account of why that happens and why it's either fair or inevitable that it does so.
So - this is also speculation - but it could be that when we die we end up outside time, as God is sometimes thought to be - or at least somewhere where "a thousand years is as a day". That would have two consequences: 1) the upward or downward trajectory could be continued to its conclusion instantly, even if it would have taken millennia of our time; and 2) it may be that the direction can no longer be changed, because there's no longer time to change it.
Or, it could be that after death (with or without time-contraction) God perfects people, but can only do so in those who are willing to let him, i.e. those already positively disposed towards him, because he still will not override anyone's will.

it really doesn't seem terribly plausible that Christians when they die are all such that encounter with God would be blissful, nor that non-Christians when they die are all the reverse
I think it's certainly plausible, although I can't argue that it's certain. I think some souls are fundamentally aligned in the right direction, and the mistakes they make don't change that, and others aligned in the wrong direction, and the things they get right by luck or their own strength don't change that. King David is a good example of the former - he did some terrible things, but I'm sure that when he met God he was delighted. (There's some stuff at the end of Screwtape, and also elsewhere in Lewis, about how there is pain even for the saved when they meet God, but it's a welcome kind of pain, like removing a scab or a diseased tooth. I imagine that pain is proportional to sins committed on earth. But perhaps the unsaved are those who don't welcome it, who want to keep their scabs and diseased teeth.)

it seems odd that the god who supposedly loves us all enough to die for us wouldn't take the elementary steps that would enable far more of us to *know* (as opposed to "be told, not very credibly") about the problem and its solution.
*sigh* Yes. I admit I struggle with that. I think if I had one question to ask God it would be something like "Why don't you make yourself more visible to people? Especially my non-Christian friends?"

I don't know the answer. There are proposed answers, and I expect you know them. Ironically, one of them is roughly what you've been saying on the other branch of the thread: that if we knew with absolute certainty we'd be guaranteed to choose right and then it wouldn't be a free choice.

Something which I think is true - although I find it difficult to believe when I'm having doubts, and you may find it difficult to believe too - is that it is fundamentally our disobedience rather than our incomplete knowledge that prevents us coming to God. The evidence for this is various people in the Old Testament, who had much better evidence that God existed and still disobeyed him. Adam and Eve walked with him in the garden; the Israelites in the desert saw the Red Sea part and the pillars of cloud and fire, and then made their golden calf. I kid myself that my doubts and sins are due to incomplete knowledge, and would disappear if God revealed himself; but in reality I'd probably have been helping build that calf.

From:

gjm11.livejournal.com

Yes, I think it's a general trend. You can see it all over this discussion. You can also find it, e.g., in discussions of the problem of evil. (For instance, one of Plantinga's famous papers proposes that maybe it's a necessary truth that every possible created sentient being with free will does evil in all possible worlds. He calls it the "principle of trans-world depravity", I think. I remark that the existence of such a principle would make it *even more* unjust to inflict eternal torment on anyone as a punishment for doing something it was *metaphysically necessary* that they would do, but that's a separate issue and no one is under any obligation to believe Plantiga's silly principle.)

It doesn't seem obvious (or even plausible) to me that every Christian's moral trajectory at the moment of death is upward, or that every non-Christian's is downward.

Thank you for the suggestion that I have a fundamentally evil soul. (It's no worse than the suggestion, implicit in every defence of eternal torment, that all things considered it would probably be best for me to suffer torture for all eternity. Which is, I think, a more abominable thing for anyone to say about anyone else than the worst insults spouted by racist bigots and the like. One of the things I dislike about Christianity is that it encourages basically decent people to say such things and consider themselves to be acting reasonably in doing so.)

It's nice (note: I'm not being sarcastic here) that you "struggle" with the idea that perfect goodness and mercy and justice require that people like me suffer eternal torment and not be given a credible way out even though supposedly there is one. I'm afraid it seems to me that something more than struggling is really called for, though. It's a bit like saying "I struggle with the knowledge that my employer is building torture chambers and encouraging governments to buy them" but not actually making the step from there to "er, that's just *wrong* and I should blow the whistle".

The fact that the Old Testament *says* that various people had really good evidence but still disobeyed is not, in fact, good evidence, at least not for those of us not already committed on other grounds to believing everything in the Old Testament. I also remark that the OT doesn't say that Adam and Eve and those naughty Israelites decided that God didn't exist at all.

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

I'm genuinely sorry if I've offended you.

Is it still bigotry if it's said about everyone indiscriminately? I don't think you have an evil soul any more than I have, and I don't think you deserve hell any more than I do. I may have been unclear with the stuff about souls' alignment, but what I meant was something like this:

All souls are partly good and partly evil. But, by default (since the fall), they are aligned the wrong way: inwardly, towards themselves; they look to themselves for ultimate authority and rely on themselves. However, some have made the decision to align towards God: to look to him for authority and to rely on him (however imperfectly they carry this out). God is able to work in this second group of souls, transforming them and bringing about genuine moral improvement, both before and after death (I think), and eventually making them fit for heaven. But he cannot do so in the first group of souls without overriding their wills, which he's committed to not doing.

(I think some Christians, myself included, are guilty of talking too glibly about hell. I don't know if I've said this yet or not, but I find annihilationism quite plausible; so when I say hell I'm thinking of a kind of superposition of states that's about 2/3 annihilation and 1/3 torment. But even then I ought to be much more careful what I say about it.)

I also remark that the OT doesn't say that Adam and Eve and those naughty Israelites decided that God didn't exist at all.
Yes, exactly; that's what I mean. They had such visible demonstrations of his presence that they couldn't possibly doubt his existence - and still they disobeyed. This implies that people are inclined to disobey God even if they have irrefutable evidence of his existence; and therefore, in our case who do not have irrefutable evidence, that lack of evidence is not the only thing preventing us doing God's will; even if we had irrefutable evidence we would continue to disobey.
I'm trying to argue that if someone met God after death and said "It's not my fault; if only you'd given me more evidence of your existence, I'd have followed you" they may be mistaken.

at least not for those of us not already committed on other grounds to believing everything in the Old Testament.
You don't have to believe it very much; I think you just have to believe that the people described in it were convinced of the existence of their God, which I think is a reasonable conclusion for an atheist to draw from the text as a historical document.