Monthly Archives: February 2021

When Christianity Actually Had a Sensible Idea but Discarded It

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Actually, the Catholics still have that sensible idea—it’s the Protestants that discarded it. The sensible idea is purgatory, the place where sins are accounted for. Purgatory is temporary, unlike hell, so the punishment can be in proportion to the sins.

Of course, very little of the made-up religion of Christianity is actually sensible. What I mean is: given that you must have hell, a purgatory with fair punishment for the bad done in life is a sensible alternative.

Encounter with purgatory

I was raised Presbyterian, and my first encounter with the idea of purgatory came from reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written around 1600. At the end of Act 1, Hamlet is confronted by a ghost who identifies himself as the spirit of his dead father, visiting the earth briefly to convey a message. The ghost explains that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle and demands revenge.

This depiction of purgatory is odd in several ways: if the ghost had a human shape, why wasn’t he recognizable by Hamlet as his father? How can ghosts get temporary passes out of purgatory? How is the goal of revenge noble enough to get such a pass, especially when (spoiler alert) almost everyone, including Hamlet, dies at the end?

This illustrates how the idea of purgatory has changed through time. But how is this possible? Isn’t purgatory clearly defined in the Bible?

Nope, and that’s where we begin our journey.

Where did purgatory come from?

Jesus tells a parable in Luke 12 about readiness. He uses servants who don’t know when their master will return to parallel Jesus’s followers who don’t know when the Son of Man will arrive. In 12:47–8, Jesus distinguishes between servants who commit greater and lesser misdeeds, saying that they will receive greater and lesser punishments. This parable has been interpreted as referring to the afterlife and a rejection of one-size-fits-all punishment.

Another passage comes from Paul (1 Corinthians 3:12–15). It imagines people building the foundation of their lives out of materials that are precious (gold, silver, and jewels) or cheap (wood or straw). Fire will test these foundations, burning up the wood and straw but leaving the precious materials intact. This trial suggested to the early church fathers a purification process, which gave support to purgatory.

A final passage is 2 Maccabees 12:41–45. (The contents of the Bible varies by denomination, and the first two books of Maccabees are some of the handful of books in the Roman Catholic Bible that are not in the Protestant Bible.) This book was written in the second century BCE and documented the remarkably successful revolt of the Jews against the Seleucid Empire.

At the end of 2 Maccabees 12, the Jews fight a battle. Afterward, the living begin to bury their fallen, but they discover that each dead man was carrying “objects dedicated to the idols of Jamnia.” Clearly these men were hedging their bets, not putting their full support behind Yahweh. Their surviving comrades then prayed for these sins to be forgiven and sent money to Jerusalem for a sacrifice to make amends. This acknowledged both an afterlife and the expectation that prayers and sacrifices from the living will benefit the dead.

But there’s another side to that coin

As we’ve seen many times, including the last post, the context of any Bible passage is the entire Bible. With almost 800,000 words in its English version, the Bible says lots of things, many of which are contradictory. A clear statement in one book often crashes into another clear statement elsewhere.

One passage that argues against purgatory is Luke 23:42–3, in which Jesus is on the cross with two other criminals. The first criminal mocks Jesus, while the other defends him.

Then [the second criminal] said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

This makes no mention of a prolonged period in purgatory.

Here’s another that rejects purgatory as a way station on the path to heaven.

Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. (John 5:24)

In the parable of the sheep and the goats, the king separates the good people from the bad ones. Jesus concludes:

[The bad people] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. (Matthew 25:46)

Again, there are just two choices. Purgatory isn’t a third option.

Where do these ideas come from?

Years ago, I listened to a series of Sherlock Holmes radio plays. These didn’t come from the official Conan Doyle stories but were new adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Each would end with an acknowledgement such as, “This story was inspired by an incident in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Scandal in Bohemia.’” The details of the mysterious incident that launched each story were never made clear.

That’s how it is with some of these points of Christian dogma like purgatory or the Trinity. The Bible gives no clear explanation of either; there’s little more foundation than “inspired by an incident.”

Why is this Catholic but not Protestant?

If you remember anything about the Reformation (also known as the Protestant Reformation), it’s probably Martin Luther’s publishing his Ninety-five Theses in 1517. One of Luther’s primary complaints was the Church’s sale of indulgences.

So how do indulgence work? The Roman Catholic Church imagines that the aftermath of a sin has a guilt component and a punishment component. If a Catholic is in a good relationship with God (up to date on confessions, for example), the guilt has been forgiven, but there’s still that punishment. If it’s not taken care of in life, it carries over into the afterlife. Living Catholics can reduce the burden of punishment on the dead through indulgences, which include prayers, good works, and financial donations.

Luther’s complaint was the sale of indulgences (though where a donation supporting the good work of the Church becomes a crass sale of a license to sin is not clear). Initially, Luther was merely cautious about indulgences but soon rejected them completely. He argued that the soul was insensate between bodily death and resurrection, and purgatory was an “unbiblical corruption.” This rejection caught on among other Protestant reformers, who argued “salvation by grace alone” rather than salvation by works.

This is what a manmade doctrine from God looks like

What does a doctrine cobbled together from a few cherry-picked Bible verses and wishful thinking look like? Here are some of the issues that theologians have debated about purgatory.

  • Is purgatory a physical place? The earliest notions were of a state of existence rather than a place, then it became a place about a thousand years ago. Lately the pendulum has swung back.
  • What’s the point of Jesus’s sacrificial death if people must be purified through torment in purgatory?
  • Is purification done with actual fire? How long is this process?
  • How much pain is caused? Augustine speculated that it is far greater pain than is possible on earth. Others imagine that those in purgatory are in peace because they are confident in their salvation.
  • Is punishment in purgatory correctly seen as vengeance by God?

Dante’s Inferno was just the most popular of a large number of medieval works in the afterlife-tourism genre that answered these questions with fiction. Trying to use theology instead, purgatory was addressed in three Church Councils. One conclusion that admits the flimsy foundation of purgatory was for the Church to avoid “difficult and subtle questions which tend not to edification.”

Society would be better off if the Church avoided entirely those questions it can’t answer, in particular every supernatural question.

See also:

The difference between education and indoctrination
is whether the person at the front of the room
welcomes questions from the audience.
Try it the next time your minister
is in the middle of a sermon.
— commenter RichardSRussell

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Image from osseous (license CC BY 2.0)
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“Never Quote a Bible Verse” Plus 7 Examples Where Christians Forgot This Advice

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It’s not like I go through life looking for arguments. I’m just a happy-go-lucky, tousle-headed scamp skipping through life and whistling a happy tune who unaccountably gets blindsided by nutty Christian arguments just begging for a good thrashing. It would be rude to ignore them.

In fact, I’m happy to agree with Christians when I can, and just to prove that, let me point out an article by Greg Koukl, “Never Read a Bible Verse.” His point is that you should never read just a Bible verse but rather read the entire paragraph or even the entire chapter to understand the context.

That’s good advice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It’s true that broadening your reading to the local context can clarify the meaning of the verse and is a fairer way to approach that verse. Unfortunately, this doesn’t assure us that the Bible doesn’t say something contradictory elsewhere—it’s a big book. Said another way, the actual context is the entire Bible. Don’t quote the Bible as an authority until you can assure me that the Bible never undercuts that message elsewhere.

The problem can be illustrated with a familiar source of simplistic Christian apologetics.

Chick tracts

Chick tracts are small comic pamphlets that use a story to illustrate conservative Christian principles (or attack evangelicals’ usual rogues of Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism, evolution, and so on). A typical story will have a sinner scared straight by a glimpse of hell, for example. The printed tracts are cheap enough that street evangelists can hand them out to potential converts.

Let’s use Chick tracts as examples where a broader biblical context would give a very different interpretation of the point they’re making.

1. Bogus prophecy

“The Greatest Story Ever Told” is the condensed gospel story, and it can’t resist repeating several of the five claims of fulfilled prophecy in the first two chapters of Matthew. It first quotes Isaiah 7:14, “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” Yes, I realize that the author thought this was a prophecy of Jesus, but it’s not. Simply following the “never read a Bible verse” rule, we can find from the context that this claim was to be fulfilled just a few years after it was spoken, in Isaiah’s own time. (More here.)

The tract also says, “The Bible prophesied that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:1–2).” Wrong again, and you’d discover that if you’d read the context. Those verses talk about a ruler who will turn back the Assyrians, who began conquering Israel in 740 BCE. Micah 5:9 says, “Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies, and all your foes will be destroyed.” Whose story is this? Certainly not that of Jesus.

2. Belief in Jesus is mandatory

“Back from the Dead?” is the hilarious tale of someone who visits hell during a near-death experience. In it, Jesus is quoted from John 14:6, “No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” “It’s Not Your Fault” quotes John 3:18, which makes a similar point: “He that believes not is condemned already.”

This is one where the whole Bible is the context. Romans 5:19 says, “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” That is, we didn’t opt in to get the sin of Adam, and we needn’t opt in to get the salvation of Jesus. No belief is necessary.

Christians seem endlessly eager to harmonize ill-fitting verses like these, but they’re still ill-fitting. An omniscient Creator would have made sure that his message got into the world clearly and unambiguously.

3. Works don’t get you into heaven

God turns revenge to love in “The Hit!” Someone says, “The only way anyone gets to heaven is through faith in Christ alone” with a reference to Acts 4:12. This is standard Chick: making a statement and then backing it up with just a Bible reference. I’ll agree that this verse does back it up (“Salvation is found in no one else”), but it’s just a context-free reference.

A character in “Back from the Dead?” says, “You can’t make it [to heaven] by good works” and cites Ephesians 2:8–9 and Titus 3:5. In “It’s the Law” we read, “[No,] good works will not take away our sins!”

But consider the entire Bible, and we find the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31–46), which makes plain that those who make it to the Kingdom do so through their good works. There is no mention of faith.

4. God hates slavery

“Kidnapped!” is about child slavery, and it tries to portray the Old Testament as anti-slavery by quoting Exodus 21:16, “He that stealeth a man, and selleth him . . . shall surely be put to death.” (Unsurprisingly, Chick prefers the King James Version.)

Nope. God has no problem with slavery. In fact, biblical slavery was pretty much identical to American slavery.

5. God hates fags

In “Birds and the Bees,” a little girl lectures us about homosexuality. Referring to the people of Sodom: “Today those same kind of people are back, but now they’re called Gays!” with a reference to Genesis 13:13.

Sorry, little girl, read the story. The “sin of Sodom” was rape. Yes, that’s a bad thing, but it’s bad whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual.

Little Girl then says, “But God still says being Gay is an abomination!” with a reference to Leviticus 18:22, but she needs to “never read a Bible verse.” Read more widely, and it’s clear that Leviticus 18–20 are full of ritual abominations. Don’t plant your field with two kinds of seed or wear clothing woven of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19); don’t cut your hair (19:28); don’t use fortune tellers (19:31) (and kill them, by the way—that’s in 20:27); the death penalty is the punishment for cursing your father or mother (20:9); and don’t forget your kosher food laws (20:25).

Today, we ignore these ritual abominations. You can’t go back to retrieve one you’re fond of.

6. Only through Jesus can sins be forgiven

A gang killing gone wrong is the tale in “Gomez is Coming.” In the thrilling conclusion, we are told, “Only someone who was sinless could pay the price for our sins” (1 Peter 3:18).

Not really. In Matthew 16:19, Jesus tells his followers, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Binding means to forbid and loosing means to permit, both by an indisputable authority. The parallel verse in John 20:23 is, “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” Apparently, forgiving sins isn’t that big a deal.

If Christians today say that the Great Commission doesn’t just apply to Jesus’s original disciples but applies to today’s Christians as well (it doesn’t), perhaps they’re bold enough to tell us that they can forgive sins, too.

7. The Ten Commandments

“It’s the Law” cites Exodus 20 and 34 in its references to the Ten Commandments. Whoops—here’s where being honest about the context bites them. Exodus 20 lists the original set of Ten Commandments. But remember that Moses smashed them in anger and went back up to get another set, which was put in the Ark of the Covenant. The second set is listed in Exodus 34, and it’s a very different set.

Let’s rephrase the advice we started with: never quote a Bible verse to pass along God’s position on a matter unless you’re certain that it is unambiguously what the entire Bible says on that subject.

See also: Christians’ Damning Retreat into “Difficult Verses”

Anyone who actually does everything the Bible commands
would be a criminal in every country on this planet.
— Aron Ra

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/24/16.)

Image from Kamil Porembiński (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Long Time Gap from Original New Testament Books to Oldest Copies

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Arguments for the reliability of the New Testament are built as a chain of claims—the reliability of oral history, the short duration between events and documentation, the large number of Greek copies, and so on. We’ll look at one of these links, the time from original authorship to our best copies, to see how well it stands up.

Where the data came from

Making a spreadsheet of the time gap for every chapter in every book in the Bible was a tedious task, though not a difficult one. The oldest manuscript with a complete New Testament is the Codex Sinaiticus, written in about 350 CE. For 57 of the New Testament’s 260 chapters (22 percent) this was the oldest source, but the remainder have papyrus copies that are older. These papyri vary in size. For example, P46 contains more than eight epistles (letters), while P52 has just a few verses of John 18. (“P46” is papyrus number 46, and so on.)

That gave an oldest date for each chapter, and this list has the date of authorship for each book (from the 50s for Paul’s authentic epistles to 90 and beyond for John, Revelation, and some of the epistles). Subtract the two to get the time gap from authorship to oldest copy for each chapter.

Time gaps for gospel chapters

The chart above shows the gospel chapters in order for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The red bars indicate the first chapter in each book. The height of each bar is the time gap from the original to our best copy for that chapter.

Matthew and John each have 18 papyrus sources, Luke has 6, and Mark only 2. Though Mark is thought to be the oldest gospel, scholars have speculated that once churches had Matthew and Luke (which were basically second editions of Mark), Mark lost its value and wasn’t copied as much by the early church.

The time gaps for the chapters in John look pretty good compared to the others because it was the last gospel to be written and because papyrus P66, dated to 200 CE, is a complete copy. P52 (written as early as 125 CE though probably later) has bits of John 18, and P90 (late second century) has bits of John 19.

Two papyri dated to 200 CE cover most of Luke. Nevertheless, 22 of these 89 gospel chapters have no papyrus copies that improve on the Codex Sinaiticus (350 CE). This problem is particularly obvious in Matthew, where it must rely on Sinaiticus for 43 percent of its oldest chapters. The average chapter time gap for Matthew is 200 years, making it particularly unreliable. Mark is even worse, at 230 years.

The height of each bar is the length of the dark period during which no one knows for sure what happened to the content of these books. We have enough data to repair some errors, but we don’t know how many errors remain and how bad they are. How much confidence can we have in a copy written centuries later than the original?

You wouldn’t believe a supernatural story if it was claimed to have happened yesterday, but with the gospels we have supernatural stories about Jesus passed on as oral history for decades. They were then written, but we don’t have the originals but only copies from centuries later.

A note how the dates are chosen: if a chapter’s oldest copy holds just a fragment of one verse, that’s enough to assign that copy’s date as the oldest for that chapter. Since most of the earliest papyrus collections are made of pages that are each fragmentary, this is a generous concession in favor of the Bible.

Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians

(Remember that red columns are chapter 1.)

Acts and Romans both have a decent number of papyrus sources (8 and 7, respectively), but continuing down the list, it’s 4 sources, then 1, 1, and 3. Fortunately for these epistles, they are mostly in P46, which is dated to 200 CE.

Ephesians (the last six chapters on the right) looks unusually good, but that’s only because it’s a pseudo-Pauline epistle, one that falsely claims to have been written by Paul but was actually written about 30 years later than Paul’s actual epistles.

All the rest: Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1–3 John, Jude, and Revelation

The one-chapter books stand out here.

Hebrews (thirteen chapters, each 115 years tall, near the center) has 8 papyrus sources, including the excellent P46. Revelation has five sources, mostly poor. The remainder have three or fewer sources, and four books have zero sources and must be completely backstopped by Codex Sinaiticus.

Every link in the chain that builds to the conclusion, “And that’s why the New Testament is historically trustworthy!” must be reliable. When the average chapter-by-chapter time gap from original to oldest New Testament copy is 171 years, this link in the chain clearly isn’t.

See also:

If the Bible and my brain
are both the work of the same infinite god,
whose fault is it that the book and my brain
do not agree?
— Robert G. Ingersoll

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/22/16.)

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Tolerating Hell While in Heaven: 4 Lessons

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Let’s distill out four lessons from the last two posts (here), which considered how knowing of hell would burden the souls in heaven.

Those two posts surveyed popular Christian rationalizations about hell, from the first few centuries of the church to the present day. Many concluded that the thought of loved ones in perpetual torment would be impossibly distressing to those in heaven. Therefore, those in heaven must either have their memories erased or be so overawed by heaven that they have no mental bandwidth for compassion. Either way, you must be changed into someone else to endure heaven.

Our first takeaway is a biggie:

Lesson 1: God is immoral, God doesn’t exist, and the Bible is contradictory

Let’s start by agreeing that morality is a good thing. (It may seem odd that we must back up this far, but you’ll soon see that we must in this “up is down and eternal torment is good” environment.) Our best examples within society of honesty, compassion, selflessness, or any other moral trait are examples that are often highlighted for us to emulate. It’s not that we don’t know what is morally good. We do know; our problem is our inability to consistently strive for moral goodness.

While we do our imperfect best to be moral people, Christians tell us that God perfects that. God is morally like us but better; he’s what we strive to be but perfectly so. But the view of heaven we’ve been discussing is not that. God isn’t a vastly better moral being like us. This God doesn’t have more morals but less because God’s view of hell is radically different than ours.

Take a step back to the foundational idea of Christian salvation. Count the ways it offends our moral instincts.

  1. It’s a human sacrifice
  2. needed to satisfy God’s justifiable rage
  3. at humans being imperfectly moral despite the fact that he made them that way
  4. when he could just forgive any sin, like we do (and like he has done himself).

Now add:

  1. hell as eternal torment for our finite crimes.

This justification for hell doesn’t just seem crazy, it is crazy. A savage because-I-said-so god might have worked for an Iron Age tribe, but today the flaws are too glaring. When Christians also insist that their brutal god is love, the delusion breaks. God can’t be both loving and the author of hell; therefore, he doesn’t exist.

(The Christian response will be, “But you haven’t proven that these are incompatible.” That’s true, but the burden of proof is not mine. An open-minded person, like I try to be, can evaluate Christianity’s claims, but when they don’t satisfy the burden of proof, we’re obliged to reject them.)

Salvaging the idea of God?

A popular defense of God’s good name cites Isaiah 55:9, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” If we’re talking about understanding reality, that makes sense. The author of the universe would understand physics, chemistry, and other aspects of nature vastly better than we do. That’s an understandable intellectual gulf.

But the topic is morality. We’re not talking about how God’s love for someone who is homeless, depressed, or lonely is a million times more profound than ours. The issue here is that, when it comes to hell, God’s morality is radically different than ours. It’s contradictory. It’s preposterous. It’s insane. You would think we share a moral awareness with God. Remember who we’re talking about—it’s the “God is love” guy. But as we’ve seen, the response to heaven and hell by Christians themselves show that God’s morality is different, and, since human morality is the standard, God is immoral. (More here.)

When I say that human morality is the standard, that’s simply because “moral” and “immoral” are words with definitions. If God’s actions match up with what passes for human morality, then he’s moral. If instead God’s actions would be called immoral if a human did them, then God is immoral.

Let me give a parting challenge to Christians who refuse this conclusion: tell us what moral rules you think God is bound by. In God’s calculus, it’s okay to drown the world, it’s okay to bring into existence people that his omniscience knows are destined for heaven, and it’s okay to support slavery by making rules for it. He clearly doesn’t follow conventional Western morality. He even breaks most of his own Ten Commandments. Is God’s guiding principle “might makes right”? Is it arbitrary, driven by what annoys him at any moment? Or is there some logic behind it that we can understand?

Lesson 2: You become a grotesque, unrecognizable creature in heaven

I once thought that when one gets to heaven they become acutely compassionate. Silly me! No, Christians themselves tell us that you must be less so. You must be anesthetized or lobotomized by removing any loving memories of friends and family who are in torment in hell. Because given the two important priorities, our comfort in heaven and just punishment in hell, why would God bother fixing hell?

The other bright idea is that somehow those in heaven come to understand that it’s all part of the Plan—and, despite the revulsion that any person with a functioning conscience would feel, that’s a good thing. Who cares what humans’ God-given sense of right and wrong says?

Someone who could look from heaven at their children in agony in hell and not immediately feel overwhelming horror, compassion, and sorrow has become a different person. Only by inverting society’s moral rules can heaven be made tolerable.

Lesson 3: God doesn’t support free will—he suppresses it

This was discussed in the last post.

God is hidden, which is odd because we’re told that he longs for a deep relationship with each of us. Christians rationalize this by saying that God making his existence plain would step on our free will. (No one else’s existence seems to offend our free will, but let’s ignore that.) We must freely give our love to God. But what kind of champion of free will is God if he must override your honest response to hell?

(More on the problem of God’s hiddenness here, here, here, and here.)

Lesson 4: You should reconsider Christianity if it seems like BS

What does it say about Christianity that a fundamental doctrine—God administering justice in the afterlife—falls apart with a little examination? And that the same is true for the Trinity. And the virgin birth prophecy. And lots more foundational claims of Christianity.

Many Christians who hit these speed bumps take no notice. Others notice but don’t want to. And an open-minded few keep track of these rather large problems that don’t make sense—the Bible’s contradictions, prayer that doesn’t work as promised, attributes of God that are beneath a deity, how God is pretty much like every other deity, how this looks like a world with no God, and so on. These thoughtful Christians are the ones that could find a more sensible world outside of Christianity, one held together with more than cognitive dissonance and wishful thinking.

This is what happens when you squeeze a normal, compassionate human brain into a Bible-shaped box. Repeatedly, “But it doesn’t make sense” is pounded down with “God must have his reasons.”

Stumbling over a nonsensical claim can be an opportunity to wake up and reevaluate whether Christianity makes sense or is just another manmade construct.

See also:

[Heaven is like] when you hear
someone talk about Hawaii
like they’ve been there,
but they only read about it in a brochure.
— commenter Kodie

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Image from John Verive (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Silver-Bullet Argument #28: Because Heaven Is too Horrible to Endure (2 of 2)

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How could you enjoy heaven knowing of the agony of loved ones in hell? Or the billions of strangers in hell? Christian defenders of God (God knows he can’t defend himself) hypothesize that heaven’s inmates lose their memories of them, or maybe they’re overawed by God so that hell doesn’t trouble them anymore. That’s right—heaven is so horrible that you must be anesthetized or changed into someone else to endure it. This is discussed in part 1.

How to deal with a hideous heaven, part 2

Let’s move on to another rationalization, that those in heaven will see hell clearly but come to accept that it’s actually a great plan. With this, we’re told God has insights we just haven’t thought of.

Preacher Jonathan Edwards, a key figure in the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s, rationalized the delight of those in heaven this way:

They shall see the dreadful miseries of the damned and consider that they deserved the same misery, and that it was sovereign grace, and nothing else, which made them so much to differ from the damned.

So you don’t deserve heaven and you know it, but you’re going to take delight seeing the damned who might’ve been just as moral as you. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out the flaw:

According to Edwards’s own theology, moreover, he was no less deserving of eternal torment himself than are those who suffer in hell. [Nineteenth-century theologian Friedrich] Schleiermacher and many others therefore find it hard to understand how those who receive special favor in this regard could be so deliriously happy in the knowledge that some of their own loved ones do not receive a similar special favor.

The clumsy rationalizations continues into our day. Let’s critique a few.

From the popular Christian site GotQuestions:

Perhaps we will have come to understand how our loved ones’ absence glorifies God.

Glorifies God? A petty tyrant might want to be glorified, but an omniscient god? (Compare God’s need for praise to Donald Trump’s here.)

You must be changed upon entering heaven

From Stand to Reason:

God is doing this as an expression of his own morally perfect nature and his judgment is just and it’s therefore good. When we are changed, we will see things the way God sees them. We will see that this action is appropriate and we will be satisfied in our hearts that goodness is done, and we will honor God for the goodness of judgment (podcast @9:35).

“When we are changed”? This is another admission that an ordinary, moral, loving human couldn’t withstand heaven’s cruelty. Apparently, it’s better to be a God-praising zombie than be forced to deal with the reality of life in heaven. And this is all given without evidence. Faith alone supports the idea that those in heaven will be comfortable with the ongoing torment of billions or even that heaven and hell exist.

And consider, “[God’s] judgment is just and it’s therefore good.” This is just an assumption with no evidence. In fact, it’s claimed in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. The last thing God’s judgment looks like is justice.

Free will is important . . . but God isn’t its champion

Let’s return to that God-praising zombie. One of Christian apologists’ many unevidenced claims is that God is the source of human free will. And why is God hidden? They tell us it’s because God respects free will so much that he wouldn’t want to impose (as if making plain his mere existence would impose, but never mind). We must give our love to God freely, not be forced out of fear or awe (as if the problem were people withholding love rather than God not deserving love, but never mind).

But why do people need to be “changed” as they get to heaven? What does it say that their natural instincts, their expressions of free will, must be overridden? So much for people in heaven freely giving their love to God.

As an aside, do Christians ever stop to think that the guy behind the idea of hell doesn’t look like the good guy anymore? I wonder if, at the end of the Christian story, there’s a plot twist at the pearly gates.

Let’s return to Christian rationalizations for hell. From Eternal Perspective Ministries:

In a sense, none of our loved ones will be in Hell—only some whom we once loved. . . . I cannot prove biblically what I’ve just stated, but I think it rings true, even if the thought is horrifying.

I know we’ve seen it many times already, but I must again highlight what this author admits. This is a Christian saying that heaven is horrifying. You can sense the strain of cognitive dissonance as they justify two opposing ideas—God is good and yet he invented hell. It’s like holding the tails of two angry bulls.

So what have we learned? Getting a ticket to heaven is unmerited, so there’s no good reason for you to be there. You must to be changed into someone else to endure heaven. Human free will is vital to God and yet he must suppress it in heaven. And the need for people to be changed—that is, for their natural instincts to be overridden so they can tolerate heaven—undercuts one of Christian apologists’ favorite arguments, that only God can ground free will.

Have you heard of better rationalizations? Or more ridiculous ones? Share them in the comments.

Wrap up these ideas: Tolerating Hell While in Heaven: 4 Lessons

If you have to explain,
“I’m doing this out of love,”
it ain’t love.
— seen on the internet

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Image from Faisal Akram (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Silver-Bullet Argument #28: Because Heaven Is too Horrible to Endure

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Could you enjoy heaven knowing of the agony of those in hell? What if those in hell are your loved ones?

Medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas turned the problem around by embracing that torment:

In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.

Many Christians have seized this lemons-to-lemonade opportunity. Thinkers from the early church such as Tertullian and Augustine down to Jonathan Edwards in his famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry god” and beyond have not avoided but celebrated the pain of hell, imagining those in heaven looking over the ramparts and delighting in the anguish of those far below (more).

That doesn’t provide much support for C.S. Lewis’s famous claim, “The gates of hell are locked from the inside.”

(This is argument 28 in a list that begins here.)

Such thinking continues today. Popular Christian theologian R.C. Sproul told of one of his teachers saying,

In heaven, you will be so sanctified that you will be able to see your own mother in hell and rejoice in that, knowing that God’s perfect justice is being carried out (video @19:35).

Who’d want to go to heaven if you’ll turn into that?

How to deal with a hideous heaven, part 1

Christians often rationalize hell by pointing to Revelation 21:4, where “[God] will wipe every tear from their eyes . . . [and there will be] no more mourning or crying or pain.” If God will remove all sorrow in heaven, then somehow hell won’t bother us. It’s not clear how (the Bible doesn’t even admit the problem), but Christians have come up with various ideas to insulate those in heaven from hell.

Christianity StackExchange cites a popular though childish rationalization:

A common argument goes: There is no sadness in Heaven. If I knew that this person I loved was in Hell that would certainly make me very sad. Therefore it must be that I won’t remember them.

That the doctrine of hell isn’t fully explained and justified in the Bible is a clue that the Bible comes from simple people rather than God, but let’s let that pass.

The Stand to Reason podcast (here @12:11) expands on this:

So we are not going to spend eternity reflecting on the anguish of our loved ones who have not received the mercy of God through the love of Christ. That would put a damper on things. But those things are going to be forgotten. . . . [Even if there were a fleeting memory of them,] it will be a reflection from God’s perspective, that they are getting judged justly, and that’s a good thing, and we have escaped justice and received mercy instead, and that’s a good thing, too.

Yeah, thinking of billions in torment in hell—or even just a handful of loved ones who didn’t make the cut—would put a damper on your pleasure in heaven, wouldn’t it? We certainly can’t have a loved one’s anguish ruining our picnic. But don’t imagine God would actually solve the problem and eliminate the injustice of perpetual conscious torment in hell. Instead, we either lose memories of those loved ones or smother any tender memory with the thought that, but for the grace of God, that could be us.

This is the “Sucks to be you” approach to justice. I got mine, and you’re burning in hell. God approved both placements, even though no human merits heaven. But of course if the tables were turned (you in heaven and me in hell), the justification would be equally valid—one of us is where justice demands they go, while the other subverted justice and lives in heaven.

Heavenly justice?

What about the importance of absolute, celestial justice? I’ve read many Christians who are incredulous that anyone could be an atheist because then Hitler got away with it. For example, here is Bobby Conway, the One-Minute Apologist:

Suppose we were to step into atheism—I’d have a harder time living with the [lack of] ultimate justice than I would with . . . the Problem of Evil (STR podcast @10:20).

I think he’s saying that the problem of no ultimate justice would be a greater burden to him as an atheist than the Problem of Evil is to him now as a Christian.

He claims ultimate justice for his worldview but now has a new problem, how to make sense of God violating that fundamental principle by letting unworthy Christians into heaven. Is justice in the afterlife essential or not? If it is, why give some subset of Christians a pass? And if mercy is being given to some people, why not all?

I guess Christians set it aside when they can exploit a loophole to get to the Good Place. (More on the Christian claim of ultimate justice here.)

William Lane Craig (WLC) has something to offer on this topic. He is quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

[Craig hypothesizes] that God could simply “obliterate” from the minds of the redeemed “any knowledge of lost persons so that they experience no pangs of remorse for them.”

The Encyclopedia ticks off a couple of puzzles this brings up and then rests on this one:

The main issue to be resolved here is whether blissful ignorance qualifies as a worthwhile form of happiness at all.

“Welcome to heaven! It won’t be so bad once we erase your memory.”

WLC tosses out another possibility.

The experience of being in Christ’s immediate presence will be so overwhelming for the redeemed that they will not think of the damned in hell (Source).

So where does that leave us? Christians themselves tell us that heaven is so hellish that to endure it, one’s memory of loved ones must be erased. Alternatively, one must be distracted, forever.

I think this is the point where someone with a heart says, “If that’s heaven, I want nothing of it.”

Concluded in part 2, where we explore another way to make heaven less hellish.

 He’s your god;
they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.
— Unknown

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Image from note thanun (free-use license)
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