nameandnature | Entries tagged with hell

How do you sell God in the 21st century? More heaven, less hell | Meghan O’Gieblyn | News | The Guardian: (tags: hell religion christianity evangelicalism evil)

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

In Heaven We’ll All Be Sociopaths: “One question I see tossed around sometimes is how people could be happy in heaven knowing that their loved ones are suffering in hell. It may seem odd, but I never even thought of this problem as an evangelical. It wasn’t until later that I came upon it, already an atheist myself. Curious, I decided to look up how Christian apologists respond to this problem. I have to admit to being kind of horrified by the answers I’ve found.”
(tags: heaven hell religion sociopath christianity)

Originally posted at Name and Nature. You can comment there. There are currently comments.

John Norman, the philosophy professor who created the barbaric world of Gor: io9 interviews John Norman, the famous complementarian and author of the Gor novels.
(tags: bdsm fantasy book scifi gordon-brown john-norman complementarianism)
Advice God: Like Advice Dog, but Advice God! I'm snaffling some of these: "UNCONDITIONAL LOVE/WITH CONDITIONS".
(tags: religion atheism funny god humour)
YouTube - Christopher Hitchens drops the hammer: "It's considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who are unbelievers and say 'Now are you going to change your mind?'" Well, yes, that's anticipating-as-if there's a Hell, say. But if we're going to apply the norms of discussion fairly, I like Hitchens' idea of atheists going round religious hospitals. :-)
(tags: christopher-hitchens death religion hell conversion)
Hell and linoleum | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "What would it feel like to believe that anyone really deserved eternal conscious torment? Is it even humanly possible?" I think that Georges Rey's "meta-atheism" is correct on this point: most Christians don't anticipate-as-if there's a Hell, though claiming to believe it and still worshipping a monster is bad enough. berneray's comment is good, read that as well.
(tags: hell christianity religion andrew-brown)
Random Thoughts on The Roles of Leading and Following « Swungover: Via CW at Lindy. There seems to be much more debate about this than there is in ballroom, perhaps because ballroom's more conservative anyway, perhaps because it's settled by "you're shorter, therefore you're going backwards so I can see over you".
(tags: dancing lindy leading following swing)
New Statesman - Making marriage harder: "the world would be a far happier place if marriage was harder and divorce easier" - an interesting proposal from the New Statesman's legal correspondent.
(tags: marriage funny law)
At last an IT supplier that tells it like it is - The Tony Collins Blog: "No platitudes, just straight talking on govt IT from Martin Rice of agile software company Erudine." I've heard tales of middlemen charging government the Earth to take an £100/year hosting account and install Wordpress on it. Glad to see someone speaking up.
(tags: government economics politics uk waterfall agile IT)

Over at Parchment and Pen, Michael Patton wonders why some people believe and others don't. He hews pretty close to the standard Christian answer that people know there's a God but don't admit it because they don't want to admit to God's authority (actually, it's educated Christians who know there isn't really a God but don't admit to it).

Moses and the Prophets

I was interested in his discussion of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in which the Rich Man ignores Lazarus, the beggar at his gate. The Rich Man ends up in Hell, while Lazarus ends up in Heaven. The Rich Man wants Lazarus to visit his brothers and warn them, but Abraham (who's in charge of Heaven and Hell in this story, in a sort of Jewish version of St Peter's role, I suppose) tells the Rich Man that "If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead." Patton says this illustrates that "we have a much bigger problem than the lack of evidence".

Well, maybe we do, but we certainly do have the problem of lack of evidence, and the Abraham of the parable is either irrational or encouraging the Rich Man's brothers to be so. People rising from the dead is strong evidence in a way that merely writing books is not, because many worldviews have books which advocate them and they can't all be right, and because the fact that your opponents write books isn't very surprising to a whole load of views. Resurrections, on the other hand, are very surprising to views which don't predict them.

This, then, is how you should pray

I was listening to the Christian philosopher Tim Mawson on a podcast recently. He thinks atheists should pray to God to reveal himself, which seems fair enough: I'd like to try it if I can think of what would be a fair positive and negative result. Any ideas?

Pre-commitment

Crucially, Mawson agrees beforehand that a negative result is evidence against Christianity, which makes him more rational than Abraham. As I mentioned previously, I've been following Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fun bit of creative writing which explores what would've happened if Harry Potter had been educated in science and rationality before the Hogwarts people turned up. Mawson's attitude is a bit like the alternate Harry Potter getting everyone to agree on the significance of possible outcomes before doing an experiment at the beginning of this chapter of the story.

Edited: Speaking of Hell, there ended up being a lively discussion on Hell on one of my previous posts, which you might also be interested in.

GMC | Determinations: The General Medical Council ruling on Dr Andrew Wakefield, where you can read why he was actually struck off (via Ben Goldacre).
(tags: medicine mmr uk wakefield andrew-wakefield vaccine vaccination gmc)
Searching for Jesus in the Gospels : The New Yorker: Adam Gopnik writes about the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith, bringing in people like Bart Ehrman and Philip Pullman. Interesting stuff.
(tags: religion christianity history jesus christ paul bart-ehrman ehrman adam-gopnik philip-pullman)
Failing The Insider Test: The Problem of Hell: One of the reasons I'm not a Christian any more is that I realised the God I was being asked to worship was evil. Jeffrey Amos explains what I mean with great clarity, and also addresses the "ah ha, but how do you know what's evil without God, eh?" argument.
(tags: hell god evil christianity religion morality)
The Swinger « Music Machinery: Turn anything into a jive (well, anything in 4/4 anyway): "The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect."
(tags: music python audio programming software swing jive)

Dr. Marlene Winell speaks about indoctrination by authoritarian religion: Dr Winell speaks to Valeria Tarico. Winell's experiences and those of her clients were much more traumatic than mine, because their churches really did deserve the "fundamentalist" label, but it's still an interesting video on the psychology of leaving a religion. The part about how if something doesn't work for you it's your fault and you must try harder rang some bells. Via Debunking Christianity.
(tags: video religion valerie-tarico indoctrination hell rapture psychology fundamentalism christianity)
txt2re: headache relief for programmers :: regular expression generator: Generate regular expressions from some sample text by clicking on what you want to match. Neat toy.
(tags: programming software tools regexp regex)
'An Apology' by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net: Dawkins apologises for the forum drama: "I would like to start by apologising for our handling of this situation. We have not communicated well with our forum volunteers and users (for example in my insensitive 'Outrage' post, which was written in the heat of the moment). In the process we have caused unintended hurt and offence, and I am very sorry about that. In a classic case of a vicious circle, some of the responses to our announcement also caused considerable hurt and distress to us, and in the atmosphere of heightened emotion that followed, some of our subsequent actions went too far. I hope you will understand the human impulses that led to this, and accept my apology for them. I take full personal responsibility."
(tags: drama internet dawkins richard-dawkins atheism)
Fallacies on fallacies : Evolving Thoughts: "Appeal to authority is not fallacious, so long as the authority cited is relevant and reliable. A principle known as the division of cognitive labor (I think due to Hilary Putnam) suggests that we literally must rely on authorities in the absence of time, resources and cognitive capacities to rerun all experiments and observations since the beginnings of science and history."
(tags: logic fallacy appeal authority putnam philosophy rationality)
Furious backlash from Simon Singh libel case puts chiropractors on ropes | Martin Robbins | Science | guardian.co.uk: "A staggering one in four chiropractors in Britain are now under investigation for allegedly making misleading claims in advertisements, according to figures from the General Chiropractic Council." Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch.
(tags: science simon-singh chiropractor guardian health pseudoscience quackery woo-woo libel legal law)
Photographic Height/Weight Chart: Self-submitted photographs of people, tabulated by weight and height. Interesting stuff. Via Metafilter.
(tags: health photos photography images height weight statistics photo biology)
Parchment and Pen » DO WE NEED TO TELL PEOPLE THE BAD NEWS BEFORE THE GOOD NEWS?: Paul Copan has some sensible thoughts on how to do evangelism. On no account should Christians put any of them into practice.
(tags: evangelism religion christianity sin gospel)
Heresy Corner: A Reading from the Book of Dawk: This is hilarious: "And some of the disciples said, O Dawk, our anger is not mixed against thee, but against thy servant Josh, who hath offended us. But others said, Hath not the Dawk deserted us? Come, let us depart the land of Dawk and hearken unto some other prophet, for the Dawk loveth not his people."
(tags: richard-dawkins drama internet forum atheism funny parody dawkins)

Why It's So Tricky for Atheists to Debate with Believers | Belief | AlterNet: Greta Christina lists some "heads I win, tails you lose" arguments against atheism: not criticising serious theologians, fatwa envy ("you wouldn't say that to Muslims"), "atheism is a religion" and so on.
(tags: religion atheism argument debate abiogenesis greta-christina)
Airbrushed for change - MyDavidCameron.com: Remixed Tory campaign posters. I like Hoodie Cameron.
(tags: politics funny uk government election david-cameron conservatives tory)
Stephen Meyer's Bogus Information Theory: Criticism of Stephen Meyer's "The Signature in the Cell" based on Meyer's mistakes in information theory (or rather, the way he uses a made up definition of "information"). HT to Leonard Richardson, who rightly says it's a good introduction to what "information" does mean, regardless of what you think of Meyer's book.
(tags: information shannon entropy mathematics maths kolmogorov signature cell stephen-meyer intelligent-design creationism)
Pat Robertson is not unchristian: "This Jesus dude, and the new testament in general, is not all sweetness and light and "love thy brother" though those things definitely appear in more abundance than in the Old Testament. But still, according to the Gospels, Jesus spoke more about hell than about any other subject."
(tags: haiti pat-robertson hell christianity religion jesus)
Know Your Godless Heathen Positions: "It has become common, especially for the critics of atheism, to conflate atheism, materialism, naturalism, evolution, and natural selection. Then, an objection to one of these positions is taken to undermine all of them. This would be a mistake since there are several distinct positions here that the atheist may or may not also accept. And much of the energy that has been expended to knock them down is wasted because several of them turn out to be compatible with theism. Let’s clarify:"
(tags: science philosophy atheism matt-mccormick materialism naturalism evolution)
Russian Commuters Treated to Free Roadside Pornography: According to FOX News, "traffic jerked to a standstill". Via comp.risks.
(tags: funny traffic russia road porn pornography)

Chris Wood - atheist spiritual - Come Down Jehovah: Chris Wood's atheist spiritual/folk song, which I quite liked. HT to Andrew Rilstone.
(tags: youtube video music atheism folk religion jehovah)
Belle De Jour Is The New Pretty Woman - The Rumpus.net: "when somebody like Belle de Jour shows up, an astonishing amount of energy seems to get spent on rushing to remind the general public that she is not representative of prostitution"
(tags: media prostitution uk)
Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com: Bruce Schneier: "When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense."
(tags: security terrorism politics travel news bruce-schneier)
Rebutting Reasonable Faith: Remembering the Lost: "William Lane Craig addresses a question from a Christian who's troubled by one of the most wicked doctrines of that theology, the dogma of Hell. Craig's correspondent wonders whether the saved will feel compassion for the damned, but also worries that it would be a violation of free will for God to erase their memories of their lost loved ones."
(tags: atheism christianity heaven religion hell william-lane-craig)
Salvaging Santa « de-conversion: "If we are to save our Santa culture from this insidious secularism that makes mockery of our faith, we need to acknowledge our weaknesses, and adapt to the changing cultural climate. Here are a few suggestions."
(tags: parody funny religion christianity santa christmas)
Kurt Vonnegut Motivational Posters | Sloshspot Blog: Motivational posters with Vonnegut quotes on them. I like: "PURPOSE: I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." (hat tip to andrewducker).
(tags: vonnegut quotations funny posters quotes)

'Good Reasons for 'Believing' in God' by Dan Dennett: Dennett talks about why it's sensible to profess belief in God. He lives up to his reputation of being a bit fluffier than Dawkins.
(tags: daniel-dennett philosophy religion atheism)
Valerie Tarico: Christian Belief Through The Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 6 of 6: The final part of Tarico's series, which links to the others. "Despite its boundaries, cognitive science, does offer what is rapidly becoming a sufficient explanation for the supernaturalism that underlies organized religion."
(tags: christianity science religion brain psychology cognitive-bias cognition)
WHY DOES THE UNVIERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES: A Conversation With Sean Carroll: "Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now. That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else."
(tags: physics cosmology big-bang universe inflation string-theory)
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - Stack Overflow: "If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes." Quite right: you should use Beautiful Soup like everyone else does.
(tags: funny programming humour xml parse lovecraft stackoverflow regexp regex html)
The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality: Alex Rosenberg argues that scientism is a good thing, and puts forward a very reductionist naturalism which he applies to consciousness, morality and a bunch of other stuff philosophers like to worry about. His fellow naturalists disagree in the comments (notably, Richard Carrier and Tom Clark produce good arguments against him).
(tags: naturalism philosophy science reductionism morality consciousness)
Riffs: 11:14:09: Patrol Magazine and Evangelicals Who Won’t “Get Over It”: "It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers."
(tags: evangelicalism christianity)
I’m Belle de Jour: Former blogging prostitute Belle de Jour reveals her real identity to the Times. She was an impoverished PhD student.
(tags: culture sex identity anonymous science prostitution)
What Stormtroopers do on Their Day Off: Funny photos of stormtroopers at play.
(tags: humour funny scifi images starwars toys photo photography)
Valerie Tarico: Speaking Evangelese: Tips for Politicians: Tarico's article on evangelical jargon phrases and dog whistles. Some of these sound familiar
(tags: evangelicalism christianity politics religion jargon language)
Experimental Theology: Christians and Torture: Part 6, Hell and Torture: Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology has been doing a series of posts on Christian and torture. His survey said: "Christians who believed in a horrific and never-ending hell were more likely to endorse torture. As God tortures so we torture." Unsurprising, perhaps, but interesting to see it backed up by research. In the comments, Beck notes the correlation is not strong, but is significant.
(tags: hell torture politics religion christianity morality)

I recall reading the description of CUWoCS in the Freshers' Handbook a decade or so ago. Like many religions, they said, we believe that our god will return and condemn people to horrible torture; unlike other religions, however, we don't claim that this somehow means our god is good.

I mention this partly because there's a bit more discussion on C.S. Lewis and Timothy Keller's view on Hell in a thread on my last posting.

However, I mention Great Cthulhu because of a vision that has been given to, no, vouchsafed unto, me, of the time when the Stars are Right and He returns. You can see the full horror. This is a stark reminder of the choice we all face: who will be eaten first?

Thanks to

scribb1e, the D&Ders, and the Cthulhu Crochet blog.

Timothy Keller is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a successful church in New York. He's written a book, The Reason For God, which he says is for people doubting Christianity, and for Christians wanting to answer questions from their non-Christian friends.

nlj21 lent me the book, and I read it while on holiday recently. If you'd like to see Keller in action, you can watch his talk at Google, which rehearses some of the arguments from the book.

The success of Keller's church sounds surprising when you learn that the church is pretty evangelical in theology, because (going by the people he quotes objecting to Christianity) New York is apparently full of the American equivalent of Guardian readers. But having seen Keller's style, I can see why he's successful. He deals sensitively with the human problems people might have had with the church or with conservative Christians as well as the factual arguments. He admits where arguments are only suggestive rather than conclusive, and he mentions the arguments against his position. He admits that there's no argument that will persuade everyone, so the best thing is to look for arguments that will persuade most of the people, most of the time.

Ultimately, though, I think Keller shows more good will than reason, which makes the title a bit of a misnomer. Keller shows that you can construct a Christianity that hangs together, that a belief in God isn't completely crazy. That's certainly necessary, but hardly sufficient, for a reasonable person to believe it. A lot of the book is assertions without evidence for them, when evidence is precisely what is required.

That said, since the book is better than most Christian attempts at evangelism I've read or seen lately, I thought I'd do a couple of posts on it, of which this is the first.

Arguments against God

The book is divided into two parts: one dealing with the arguments against God, which Keller wants to show are faulty; and one dealing with the arguments for God. We'll look at his responses to objections, using the chapter headings from the book.

There can't be just one true religion

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How could a good God allow suffering?

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Christianity is a straitjacket

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The Church is responsible for so much injustice

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How can a loving God send people to Hell?

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Science has disproved Christianity

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You can't take the Bible literally

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Summing up

Some of the objections Keller gets from New Yorkers are ill considered, and Keller bats them aside easily. In other cases (theodicy and Hell), his method is to argue that there's still a chance that Christianity is true, so the objections aren't completely conclusive. I don't find this that impressive, because the sensible objector isn't claiming that their objections are conclusive, merely that they're strong evidence. To defeat that, one must produce stronger evidence, which as we'll see in the next part, Keller fails to do.

A while back,

robhu was looking for Bible study courses, and

nlj21 recommended TEAM, a course which is run by the vicar of an offshoot of my old church (you might remember my posting about his sermon on The God Delusion).

I poked at the media site. Surprisingly, I didn't make a bee-line for the sex one: anyone who has been in an evangelical church for any length of time has heard 1 Cor 7 preached to death, and knows that sex is a Good Thing if you're married (but if you're very keen on evangelism, or merely very bad at talking to girls, you can be "single for the gospel"). Instead, I picked on the evangelism one, specifically the Q&A session (that's a link to the audio, which you may want in a minute) on how to convert your friends. Know your enemy, right? :-)

~~John Richardson~~(edited: I got the name wrong initially, apologies to Richardson and Woodcock should either read this)Pete Woodcock, the speaker, is a straight-forward sort of bloke. He's also pretty funny. The Q&A starts with a worked example of how to talk to various types of people about Jesus, which says sensible stuff about working out where people are coming from, sensitivity and suchlike, while also having a slightly cheeky approach (he talks about how he gave the residents of a new estate flyers saying "your foundations are crumbling", for example).

There were a couple of bits which stood out as quick shocking. Looking at it from the evangelical viewpoint, I'd say Woodcock is being consistent with it, and that this is so much the worse for the evangelical viewpoint. See what you think.

( Pray for your well off friends to have an accident, pray for obstructive liberal vicars to be converted or to die )

It's lucky this chap isn't a Muslim, or he'd have his own Channel 4 documentary team doing a programme on him. We're not quite in Undercover Mosque territory, as there's no suggestion of giving God a helping hand with the brake lines (not worrying about a "dead vicar" here probably refers to a spiritually dead vicar, i.e., one who is not an evangelical Christian): at least praying for something gives God the option of saying no.

These are off the cuff responses to questions. I imagine the poor chap never thought they would turn up on some atheist's blog. But the important thing to realise is that, as far as I can tell, Woodcock is perfectly consistent with evangelicalism, consistent in a way which even many evangelicals are not (the lack of consistency in the other evangelicals is possibly a manifestation of belief in belief: they think it's good to believe in hell, so they say they believe in hell, but they don't anticipate-as-if there's a hell). If you ask your evangelical friends where you're going when you die, if you're not a Christian, they'll tell you're going to Hell. Hell is the worst thing ever, so keeping you out of it is pretty important. What are horrific injuries in the temporal world compared to an eternity in hell? What is the death of one man if it leads to the salvation of many?

One might quibble about the advice to pray for this stuff, rather than, say, praying for God to convert the person or get the vicar out of the way and letting God sort it out. For some reason, it's usually thought to be better to pray for specific stuff rather than generalities. If we concede that it would be right for God to do this stuff, it's surely right to pray for it. So would it be right for God to do it? Recalling that whatever God does is right, that the Bible is inerrant, and that the Bible says that God isn't averse to killing people that get in the way of his chosen people, it's hard to say that smiting recalcitrant vicars isn't something God might do (it's right to pray that the vicar gets converted, but recall also that God doesn't force himself on people to make them converted, so the smiting is a useful backup plan if the vicar won't become a real Christian). In the case of the car accident, we know from C.S. Lewis that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Speaking of car accidents, this sort of thing does make you want to have a Barlet moment, doesn't it?

In the comments on a recent posting of mine, there are several discussions on the subjects of consciousness, Hell, whether a choice is free if the chooser is subject to threats, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

robhu is speaking for the "we sinners all deserve to burn, but God is so super that he saves some people" side,

gjm11 for the opposition. I've been busy all day so haven't had much chance to contribute. I think it's shaping up to be the post of mine with the most comments. Have fun.

Channel 4 recently screened a documentary called God's Next Army about Patrick Henry College, an evangelical Christian college in America. You can watch it over at Google Video. Why not download it using the Google Video Player thingy so you can still watch it when Channel 4 finds out?

Channel 4 also brought us Richard Dawkins and the Root of all Evil (why not get part 1 and part 2?) God's Next Army lacks the pugnacious presenter, preferring instead to give the ~~rope~~floor to the college's staff and students. The college aims to produce people who will take part in some sort of Christian version of The West Wing, where the staff of the White House will successfully battle to prevent gay marriage while engaging in snappy but incomprehensible dialogue. Luckily, it seems that evil contains the seeds of its own undoing.

While I was reading Rilstone on Dr Who (I am firmly in the "Fear Her was crap, less soap and more science fiction, please" camp), I ran across Helen Louise, a Christian wrestling with the idea of Hell. She'd linked to The Gobbledygook Gospel, which pretty well describes the dissonance at the heart of the evangelical gospel (but which then goes on to argue that God is like a big friendly dog: it takes all sorts, I suppose).

I also found The Shock of Your Life and downloaded the first chapter, which is about what non-Christians can expect when we die, told in the first person by a non-Christian who is about to be unpleasantly surprised. It's sort of really bad Christian fan-fiction. The author gets special extra bonus points for juxtaposing a partial quote of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats with an assertion from the narrator's angelic guide that it's not what you do that gets you into heaven; unfortunately the partial quote is one that leaves out the bit where Jesus says that it is what you do that gets you into heaven. It's a good thing that Revelation 22:19 strictly only applies to the Book of Revelation itself, I suppose. One cannot judge the canon (geddit?) by the fan fiction, but I find myself slightly worried that this sort of stuff is being marketed to teenagers. Why can't they read more wholesome stories about Snape having sex with Hermione instead?

"Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your Deity made you in his own image, I reply that he must have been very ugly." -Victor Hugo

I've been emailing one of my Christunfrends on the subject of hell. Hell is the dark underbelly of orthodox Christian belief. Christians are, with some notable exceptions, a nice bunch. Remember the natives of the planet Krikkit? In Life, the Universe and Everything they believe in "peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms." As I've said before, evangelicals are sometimes a bit like that. Only instead of the obliteration of all other life forms, we have the eternal conscious torment of non-believers in Hell (annihilationism being viewed as suspiciously liberal by people like Reform).

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