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9 Responses to Christian Hell (3 of 3)

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Let’s conclude our critique of the Christian idea of hell with one final response. This one’s a biggie.

I responded to William Lane Craig’s justification for hell here, and this series of posts critiquing Christian hell begins here. We’ll conclude with one final point.

9. Heaven is hellish

How can you be happy in heaven, knowing of the billions of people in torment in hell, especially if heaven gives you wisdom or enlightenment to more clearly perceive right and wrong? One response is that our human compassion must be deadened so that we’re no longer concerned about the suffering. Thomas Aquinas’s logic went like this: “Whoever pities another shares somewhat in his unhappiness. But the blessed cannot share in any unhappiness. Therefore they do not pity the afflictions of the damned.” By this view, heaven is so horrible a place that one must be anesthetized to endure it.

The opposite argument—that those in heaven will celebrate the torture—is also popular. To show how consistent this schadenfreude is throughout Christian opinion, I’ll share a number of quotes. First, from the early church fathers:

What a spectacle . . . when the world . . . shall be consumed in one great flame! . . . What there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? As I see . . . illustrious monarchs . . . groaning in the lowest darkness, philosophers . . . as fire consumes them!
— Tertullian (d. 240)

They who shall enter into [the] joy [of the Lord] shall know what is going on outside in the outer darkness. . . . The saints’ . . . knowledge, which shall be great, shall keep them acquainted . . . with the eternal sufferings of the lost.
— Augustine (d. 430)

From thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas:

The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy.

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks to God for it, a perfect sight of punishment of the damned is granted them.

From the First Great Awakening (early eighteenth century):

The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardor of the love and gratitude of the saints in heaven. The sight of hell-torments will exalt the happiness of the saints for ever. It will not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace of God in their happiness, but it will really make their happiness the greater, as it will make them more sensible of their own happiness
— Rev. Jonathan Edwards

The godly wife shall applaud the justice of the Judge in the condemnation of her ungodly husband. The godly husband shall say “Amen!” to the damnation of her who lay in his bosom. The godly parent shall say “Hallelujah!” at the passing of the sentence of his ungodly child; and the godly child shall from his heart approve the damnation of his wicked parent who begot him and the mother who bore him.
— Rev. Thomas Boston

Though Christian apologists usually have the tact to tap dance around this issue today, this “God’s plan must be perfect . . . somehow” attitude is sometimes confronted frankly. A Catholic Truth Society pamphlet from fifty years ago said, “What will it be like for a mother in heaven who sees her son burning in hell? She will glorify the justice of God.”

Besides abandoning the entire senseless jumble of claims, what option do they have? 

The God that holds you over the pit of hell,
much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire,
abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked:
his wrath towards you burns like fire;
he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else,
but to be cast into the fire . . .
you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes,
than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.
— Jonathan Edwards,
“Sinners in the hands of an angry god” (1741)

 Image via Quinn Dombrowski, CC license

9 Responses to Christian Hell (2 of 3)

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Let’s continue with a critique of the Christian idea of hell. I responded to William Lane Craig’s justification for hell here, and the first three responses to hell are here.

4. Substitutionary atonement

Substitutionary atonement (the punishment of Jesus substitutes for the punishment we deserve) is another way in which God is out of step with a modern sense of justice.

Christianity tells us that we’re bad. In fact, we’re so bad that we can never deserve heaven, no matter what good we do in our miserable little lives. But lucky for us, Jesus took on our sins-to-be in a Bronze-Age-style human sacrifice, satisfying God’s justifiable rage. Now we’re washed clean and can deserve heaven, but more questions arise. Why was Jesus an afterthought in God’s perfect plan? Shouldn’t Jesus have been there from the beginning? How can an all-wise and all-loving god get angry at imperfect beings’ imperfections? How can an omniscient god be angry at something that he foresaw before he even started the project?

But those questions are a tangent. Think of how wrong substitutionary atonement would be for Western justice. In cases where the justice system discovers that the wrong person was imprisoned for a crime, no one says, “Well, someone received punishment, and that’s all that matters.”

See also: Criticizing the Logic of the Atonement

5. Free will

Apologist Norm Geisler argued that atheists wouldn’t like a world with God as a cosmic nanny, always clearing any dangers from the path ahead. Atheists are outraged when God lets people die from injustice, he says, but what if God gave them their wish? The murderer’s bullet would turn to butter, the wall would turn into water just before the car crashed into it, and so on. There would be no moral consequences and no chance for moral development in such a world where free will is constrained to permit only good actions.

But our free will is already constrained. I can’t read minds, I can’t fly, I can’t see x-rays, I don’t have telekinetic killing power, and I don’t have laser eyes. Nevertheless, I muddle along despite all these constraints on my free will. There’s no evidence that a loving god carefully tuned the traits of our reality to give us a just-right Goldilocks world where we have some character-building challenge but not too much. Instead, this is just one more Christian attempt to paper over the lack of evidence for God.

You’d think that Christians would find the opportunity to show evidence for God, but here as with similar issues, Christian apologists are only eager to rationalize away the lack of evidence.

“What about here?” we ask. “Shouldn’t we see evidence of God here?”

“No,” the Christian replies, “there again things look just like there’s no God at all.”

And let’s not imagine God as a champion of free will. When God permits the murderer or rapist free will to carry out their actions, that imposes on the free will of the victims.

God as the champion of free will? Tell that to the person who is locked in hell against his will. The Bible itself tells of God deliberately trampling people’s free will.

  • He hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he wouldn’t yield to Moses (Exodus 9:12), and he hardened the hearts of the Jewish opponents of Jesus so that they wouldn’t believe (John 12:37–40).
  • “God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (Romans 9:18).
  • “The Lord foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples” (Psalms 33:10).
  • “For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses” (Joshua 11:20).

6. What’s the point of life on earth?

As explored in part 1, we know that our world isn’t the greatest possible world. Heaven is far better, so why didn’t God skip a step and make us in heaven? Or if life on earth is like heaven except without the wisdom to use free will, God could just give us that wisdom.

Earth as a winnowing test is a ridiculous notion. God already knows who’s naughty and who’s nice, and he could avoid making bad people in the first place. Sure, one could handwave that the good people only get that way because of the existence of the bad ones, but (1) there’s no reason to imagine that (this is the Hypothetical God Fallacy), and (2) again, God could’ve just made us in heaven and avoided creating earth.

7. God is a poor teacher

Jesus told his followers to choose the narrow road, because most people would take the broad road to destruction (Matthew 7:13–14).

Is God so bad a teacher that most of his students fail? Many human teachers pass all of their students. You’d think that an omniscient and omnipotent teacher would do a better job.

8. God’s responsibility

If everything happens according to God’s plan, then God makes most of humanity knowing that they’re destined for hell. This doctrine of predestination is made explicit in Calvinism. While the opposite view of Arminianism rejects predestination, it’s hard to imagine an omniscient God who is nevertheless surprised and saddened when anyone is sent to hell.

Concluded with one final arguments on the illogic of hell in part 3.

Talking with theists about religion sometimes—
and by sometimes I mean almost always—
feels like “Groundhog Day,”
a painful and monotonous slog
that simply travels the same territory over and over and over.
— Godless Mama

Acknowledgment: this post has been informed by the excellent Reasonable Doubts podcast (episode rd39 @37:50 – 50:30).

Image via gags9999, CC license

Houdini vs. Sherlock Holmes

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Sometimes the door to new insight is not only unlocked but opened, and yet one refuses to go through.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the ferociously rational Sherlock Holmes, was not so rational in his personal life. He was famously deceived by the 1917 Cottingley Fairies hoax, photos of palm-sized fairies dancing with two girls in the town of Cottingley, England (I’ve written more on Conan Doyle and that hoax here).

Perhaps sorrow overrode common sense. Conan Doyle had been pushed into depression by the deaths of a number of family members during and shortly after World War I, and he saw the new spiritualism movement as a way to contact them.

His friend Harry Houdini also spent much time with spiritualism, but his focus was on debunking it. Like magician The Amazing Randi today, Houdini knew how tricks were done and exposed the charlatans.

Harry Houdini once tried to defuse Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s passion for spiritualism. Houdini performs what must have been a baffling trick for Conan Doyle and then said:

Sir Arthur, I have devoted a lot of time and thought to this illusion. . . . I won’t tell you how it was done, but I can assure you it was pure trickery. I did it by perfectly normal means. I devised it to show you what can be done along these lines. Now, I beg of you, Sir Arthur, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily “supernatural,” or the work of “spirits,” just because you cannot explain them.

Obviously, Conan Doyle now can’t believe in spiritualism while at the same time believing that it’s all just fakery. So what does he do? He rejects the claim that it’s fakery! Given a plausible natural explanation from a reputable source, he concluded that Houdini must have been accessing real supernatural forces.

This is all the more puzzling when Conan Doyle himself took the magician’s role on at least one occasion. At a 1922 meeting of the Society of American Magicians, he previewed a test reel for an upcoming movie based on his novel The Lost World. The film showed stop-action dinosaurs feeding and fighting (video). It ain’t Jurassic Park, but it was astonishing at the time. Doyle knew that it was just artistry and technology, of course, but he kept his audience guessing. (h/t Bob Jase)

Do magicians not tell their secrets because it would violate the Magicians’ Code? Perhaps it’s more because the viewers’ excitement—the magic—would be lost when they peek behind the curtain. If Houdini had shown Conan Doyle how the trick was done, Conan Doyle would’ve responded as any of us do once we see the quite natural and even boring way a trick works.

And many of us insist on sticking with the exciting supernatural rather than the mundane natural.

I conclude [that this fallacious reasoning]
must be a product of a brain unsatisfied with doubt;
as nature abhors a vacuum,
so, too, does the brain abhor no explanation.
It therefore fills in one, no matter how unlikely.
— Michael Shermer

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/18/14.)

Image via Zastavki

 

A “Personal Relationship” With Jesus? I Doubt It.

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Imaginary friend

Think about someone you know well—a friend or relative, say. Now list the attributes that make them unique. You could give the physical attributes that would help me find them at the airport—gender and age, height and weight, hair color and style, and so on—but you know much more than that.

You might know how they shake hands and if they like to hug. You might know their favorite music and sports, their favorite foods and food allergies, which TV shows they like and which they hate, their annoying habits, the names of their pets, their medical issues, where they went to school and where they’ve lived, and their past jobs. You may have helped them through tough times in life or vice versa.

You recognize their voice and their laugh. You have funny stories you could tell at their birthday party and poignant stories for their funeral—or vice versa.

If you have a “personal relationship with Jesus,” can you say the same thing? Can you list attributes about Jesus? If so, do you imagine that they’re the same as those of other Christians? If not, why call this a relationship?

Christians today only know Jesus from the artwork. But give your Jesus a haircut, a shave, and modern clothes. As Richard Russell (whose essay inspired this post) observed about Jesus, “You couldn’t pick him out of a 1-person lineup.” Jesus is nothing but a costume.

The many flavors of “relationship”

Consider a sequence of relationships, ranked from strongest to weakest.

  1. Start with the one described above, an intimate, long-term relationship with a family member or close friend.
  2. Now we begin to degrade the relationship. Consider a less-intimate relationship with someone you’ve met face to face. This might be neighbor, co-worker, acquaintance from a party, or the parent of one of your kid’s classmates who you recognize but whose name you’ve forgotten. You have strong evidence that you met someone, though you have few intimate details.
  3. This is a voice- or text-only relationship such as that with a pen pal or online friend. Though these relationships can be intimate, no one would consider them equivalent to a face-to-face relationship. They can be spoofed (I wrote about the unfortunate Manti Teʻo here).
  4. Finally, drop even this channel of communication so that there is no objective evidence of any intelligence on the other end of the relationship except a mirror of yourself. You can fool yourself quite easily (and if you’re responding, “No, I can’t!” then you see how unassailable your own ideas can be). Maybe there really is an intelligence that refuses to communicate any way except this one, but this is indistinguishable from an imaginary friend or delusion.

We know what person and relationship mean. We can look them up. “Relationship” #4 is unlike any actual relationship with an actual person. What we’re seeing is an instance of Shermer’s Law: smart Christians using their substantial intellect to defend beliefs they adopted for indefensible reasons. They might be Christians who adopted that worldview from their environment, but as adults, they know that “cuz I was raised that way” is no intellectual justification for their Christian belief. They can’t admit to having an imaginary friend. Instead, they handwave that they have a relationship with an actual person, no less real than their relationships with close friends in other parts of life.

We see this definition fiddling with other positive attributes—good, just, and merciful, for example. These are great words to apply to their favorite deity, but, given some of God’s shenanigans, Christians must “improve” the definitions to address God’s hateful acts in the Old Testament. Sorry—that’s not how words are used.

Perversely, relationship #4 is the one that apologist William Lane Craig insists is the strongest and the least in need of evidence (I’ve written more here). Only in religion, where every day is Opposite Day, could a lack of evidence be heralded as a virtue.

The only reason you keep [claiming
your “deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ”]
is because it’s the slogan of the club
that some con artist or charlatan has suckered you into believing
you really want to be a member of.
— Richard S. Russell

This post was inspired by “That Deep, Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ” by Richard S. Russell.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/9/14.)

Image credit: Don Addis

 

Christian Nonsense from People Who Should Know Better

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Tom Gilson was provoked to produce his book True Reason because of the 2012 Reason Rally (which I attended). He demands: Why allow the atheists to seize control of the word “reason”?

He said, “The atheists claim to be the party of reason, but they don’t do it that well. Christianity on the other hand has a strong claim to be reasonable and based in reason.”

World famous apologist William Lane Craig agrees:

Christians are genuinely deeper, more thoughtful people than unbelievers are because Christians do wrestle with and think about these very profound, ultimate questions. . . . We do encourage hard thinking and self-reflection.

Respect for reason

We’re off to a good start. Christians embrace reason, and Christians are eager to wrestle honestly with tough questions their faith raises.

Let’s turn to Craig’s book, Reasonable Faith to see if Craig continues as the strong advocate of reason.

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter. (Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, p. 48)

Record scratch. The “witness of the Holy Spirit” beats reason? How can you tell the Holy Spirit from wishful thinking? Dr. Craig seems eager to parrot support for reason when pressed, but his true evaluation gives it a secondary role. More from Craig:

It is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role. (Reasonable Faith, p. 47)

Why bother showing the grounding of his belief? That’s really hard! So he just assumes it and declares it self-authenticating. (I wonder why science never takes this shortcut? Maybe because it’s not a reliable route to the truth.)

We do find some rationalization for this position:

It seems to me inconceivable that God would allow any believer to be in a position where he would be rationally obliged to commit apostasy and renounce Christ. (Source)

Wow—the guy’s got two doctorates and this is what he comes up with? Just assume God and fit the facts to that assumption?

Even [people] who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God’s Holy Spirit. (Reasonable Faith, p. 50)

Did you see that coming? That’s impressive blame shifting—now it’s the atheist’s fault! Craig elaborates with an analysis of their motivations:

When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God. (Reasonable Faith, p. 47)

Aha—so I love darkness. Got it. Yeah, what else could explain it?

More sources of delusion

William Lane Craig has plenty of company in Crazy Town. Are you a Christian who needs a pat on the head and assurance that you’ve backed the right horse? You can check your reason at the door, believe whatever the pastor tells you, and have confidence that you’re right.

  • Martin Luther said: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”
  • The Bible says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).
  • Apologist Greg Koukl said, “Intuitional truth doesn’t require a defense—a justification of the steps that brought one to this knowledge—because this kind of truth isn’t a result of reasoning by steps to a conclusion. It’s an obvious truth that no rational person who understands the nature of the issue would deny.”
  • Philosopher Alvin Plantinga said, “But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism.”
  • The statement of faith of Answers in Genesis begins: “The scientific aspects of creation are important but are secondary in importance to the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ as Sovereign, Creator, Redeemer, and Judge.”
  • Kurt Wise has a PhD in geology from Harvard but is a young-earth Creationist. He has an unusual relationship with evidence: “If all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.”

An appeal for reason

But the Bible makes clear that Jesus intended his miracles to be evidence of his claims. He said, “Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works” (John 14:11). Demanding evidence is actually biblically supported.

To paraphrase physicist Paul Dirac: in science one tries to tell people, in a way understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in religion, one tries to tell people, in a grand and mysterious way, something they have no reason to believe—that an invisible God actually exists, that prayers are really answered, and that there is an afterlife.

Continue with “More Sloppy Thinking from William Lane Craig”

[The White Queen said:]
“When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as
six impossible things before breakfast.”
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/4/14.)

Image credit: joseloya, flickr, CC

 

WWJD? The Question with a Thousand Answers

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What Would Jesus Do?

The WWJD acronym became popular in the nineties as a way to imagine Jesus approaching a moral problem. Would Jesus smoke that joint? Would he skip his homework? Would he stop to help that person? Many young Christians wore a WWJD bracelet to keep the question in mind.

The problem is that this question delivers contradictory answers. Ask Fred Phelps what Jesus would do, and he would’ve said with confidence that Jesus would be preaching, “God hates fags.” Ask Harold Camping, and he would’ve said that Jesus would be warning people about the coming end. Pro-lifers think that Jesus would be picketing abortion clinics. Televangelists say that Jesus would want you to give them lots of money.

Many conservative Christians think that Jesus would reduce taxes, demand Creationism in public schools and prayers in city council meetings, make same-sex marriage illegal, and deny climate change. Many liberal Christians think that he’d welcome gays to church, celebrate the scientific consensus, encourage sex education to minimize unwanted pregnancies, and help the neediest people.

Pick any contentious social issue—abortion, same-sex marriage, gun rights, euthanasia, our obligations to the needy, and so on—and you’ll have millions of thoughtful Christians taking each of the many contradictory positions.

What good is it?

WWJD is a useless slogan because it’s ambiguous. It’s a synonym for “In your most moral frame of mind, what would you do?” The Jesus of the Bible is a sock puppet who says whatever you want him to say.

BOB: Say Jesus, I was thinking of putting a little extra in the offering plate on Sunday for the food bank collection.

JESUS sock puppet (in squeaky voice): Good for you, Bob! After all, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

BOB: And speaking of church, I thought that Frank from across the street was a decent guy until I found out that he’s gay. I think I should give him the silent treatment from now on.

JESUS: You’re right there, Bob! Remember that “I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.”

The problem is pretending that Jesus really is feeding you lines. Dropping this pretense may feel like tightrope walking without a net, but “Jesus” in this case is just a synonym for “conscience.” Yes, you should pause to ask if your action is something you can be proud of, but don’t delude yourself that the source of your morals was ever anyone but you.

Two hands working
can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
— Unknown

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/2/14.)