Thoughts on Justice, Brimstone, and Moral Psychology
I have been reading a lot recently about a man who seems to have made it his life’s mission to rile up more than a few feathers by writing concerning a topic about which he feels quite passionately. Like myself, this fellow was raised in a religious household and believed as per the religion of his birth. When he was around 30 years old, he left his religion behind and embarked upon a new life of evidentialism. I, myself, made that trip (though not to evidentialism – I’m a foundationalist) at a much younger age when I was first forced to deal with the concept of death firsthand.
This incorrigible fellow’s name is Bob Smith, and he runs one of the most popular websites on atheism (though it isn't as if he speaks for atheists). His site is devoted to explaining his own atheistic beliefs, how he came to them, and what he views as the nonsensical beliefs of many who base their understandings of the world on faith. He is so popular, in fact, that a google search for the word “Jesus” turns up in the #1 spot a (probably terribly blasphemous) website he designed.
While I disagree with some of his methodology and the way in which he responds to some of his critics (I read my way through his multiple-hundred pages of hatemail), I have to admit that he provided me with some new and interesting arguments and concepts to ponder.
I have long held that the traditional biblical idea of hell is proof enough that there is no god, or that if there is a god, that the god is a god of iniquity who should not be worshipped. Rather a god that would create and maintain the traditional hell is one who should be shunned and rebuffed as the villain he would have revealed himself to be.
Built into the idea of justice is the concept that a punishment should be commensurate with the wrong that was committed by an individual. If an individual steals a candy bar, we generally would find it unjust for the person to be put to death. If a person is a serial infant rapist, we would likely find a $100 fine to be too lenient of a sentence.
With the concept of hell, we have classic injustice. First of all, no matter the wrong committed – whether a serial infant rapist, adulterer, betrayer, idolater, nonbeliever, or just someone born into the wrong religion – the punishment is identical: never-ending torment being tortured for eternity in the lake of fire. To say that this is unjust is to barely touch the edge of the iceberg. Imagine how much it would shock the conscience if human justice systems treated crimes similarly. You kill someone and we torture you to death. You rape someone and we torture you to death. You get caught going 37 mph in a 35 mph zone, and we torture you to death. Something definitely seems amiss.
That punishments are identical for wrongs of differing magnitudes is only one of the problems associated with the traditional idea of hell. A second idea is that no matter the punishment hell metes out to someone, eventually it will be more than enough punishment for whatever wrong they committed. Let us suppose that Tom was a terrible person who was a drug-dealer who intentionally hooked kids on cocaine and then abused them for sexual favors in exchange for drugs. He deserves punishment, and the traditional idea of hell is going to ensure that he gets punished. Oh, boy, will he ever get punished.
But even though his acts were very, very wrong, there is some limit as to how wrong they actually were. He deserves to be punished, sure, but only to be punished to the extent that he did wrong and no more. To punish him more than his ‘earned’ time is to do him an injustice. Yet that is precisely what the traditional idea of a hell does. Hell doesn’t last for only a short amount of time. Hell goes on forever. Eventually, no matter how light or heavy his torture, no matter how frequently or infrequently his torture would take place, given an infinite length of time, he will be tortured more than he deserves.
Well, Bob Smith has added an argument to my traditional arsenal of the previous objections to hell. Bob approached this situation from a different angle than one I had ever considered. What if, Bob postulated, you were good enough/believed enough to make it into heaven? What then?
Well, the traditional idea of heaven is that everything is a perfect paradise where there are no pains, no suffering, and no worries. How is this possible, Bob asked, when you know that there are human beings suffering in the worst agonies imaginable down in the burning pits of hell? How could we be truly happy knowing that our brother and sister human beings are being tortured? It isn’t as if these people are all somehow strangers. They might be your mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers. People you knew from your neighborhood, school, work, or social groups. They could be your husband or wife, lover, child, or teacher. And it isn’t as if all of them would have been terrible, awful people. Perhaps your sister secretly didn’t believe in what she considered to be superstitious bunk, but pretended for the sake of family togetherness. Perhaps your aunt converted to a different religion after finding the one she was in to be less fulfilling.
You can either believe that you know about these people and A) care that they are being burned alive forever, or B) don’t care about that.
If A is true (that you know these people are in hell, and care about them burning forever), then heaven cannot be a paradise. How could you enjoy a world and call it paradise when you knew that your own father was being tortured in nearly unimaginable ways for all eternity? If B is true (that you know about the torture of people about whom you care, but simply don’t care) then you are a sociopath, and thinking of a heaven filled with sociopaths is pretty far from a paradise. Could you honestly think about someone you love continually being sent through agonizing pain with a grin on your face?
It is an interesting thought experiment. Of course, there are many ways to skirt around this argument (such as denying the existence of a hell while still maintaining the idea of a heaven, for instance), but each way I have heard so far suffers from otherwise fatal flaws of reasoning. I’m still trying to work out whether there is any escape from this argument that seems palatable, but either way, it is a fascinating argument.
This incorrigible fellow’s name is Bob Smith, and he runs one of the most popular websites on atheism (though it isn't as if he speaks for atheists). His site is devoted to explaining his own atheistic beliefs, how he came to them, and what he views as the nonsensical beliefs of many who base their understandings of the world on faith. He is so popular, in fact, that a google search for the word “Jesus” turns up in the #1 spot a (probably terribly blasphemous) website he designed.
While I disagree with some of his methodology and the way in which he responds to some of his critics (I read my way through his multiple-hundred pages of hatemail), I have to admit that he provided me with some new and interesting arguments and concepts to ponder.
I have long held that the traditional biblical idea of hell is proof enough that there is no god, or that if there is a god, that the god is a god of iniquity who should not be worshipped. Rather a god that would create and maintain the traditional hell is one who should be shunned and rebuffed as the villain he would have revealed himself to be.
Built into the idea of justice is the concept that a punishment should be commensurate with the wrong that was committed by an individual. If an individual steals a candy bar, we generally would find it unjust for the person to be put to death. If a person is a serial infant rapist, we would likely find a $100 fine to be too lenient of a sentence.
With the concept of hell, we have classic injustice. First of all, no matter the wrong committed – whether a serial infant rapist, adulterer, betrayer, idolater, nonbeliever, or just someone born into the wrong religion – the punishment is identical: never-ending torment being tortured for eternity in the lake of fire. To say that this is unjust is to barely touch the edge of the iceberg. Imagine how much it would shock the conscience if human justice systems treated crimes similarly. You kill someone and we torture you to death. You rape someone and we torture you to death. You get caught going 37 mph in a 35 mph zone, and we torture you to death. Something definitely seems amiss.
That punishments are identical for wrongs of differing magnitudes is only one of the problems associated with the traditional idea of hell. A second idea is that no matter the punishment hell metes out to someone, eventually it will be more than enough punishment for whatever wrong they committed. Let us suppose that Tom was a terrible person who was a drug-dealer who intentionally hooked kids on cocaine and then abused them for sexual favors in exchange for drugs. He deserves punishment, and the traditional idea of hell is going to ensure that he gets punished. Oh, boy, will he ever get punished.
But even though his acts were very, very wrong, there is some limit as to how wrong they actually were. He deserves to be punished, sure, but only to be punished to the extent that he did wrong and no more. To punish him more than his ‘earned’ time is to do him an injustice. Yet that is precisely what the traditional idea of a hell does. Hell doesn’t last for only a short amount of time. Hell goes on forever. Eventually, no matter how light or heavy his torture, no matter how frequently or infrequently his torture would take place, given an infinite length of time, he will be tortured more than he deserves.
Well, Bob Smith has added an argument to my traditional arsenal of the previous objections to hell. Bob approached this situation from a different angle than one I had ever considered. What if, Bob postulated, you were good enough/believed enough to make it into heaven? What then?
Well, the traditional idea of heaven is that everything is a perfect paradise where there are no pains, no suffering, and no worries. How is this possible, Bob asked, when you know that there are human beings suffering in the worst agonies imaginable down in the burning pits of hell? How could we be truly happy knowing that our brother and sister human beings are being tortured? It isn’t as if these people are all somehow strangers. They might be your mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers. People you knew from your neighborhood, school, work, or social groups. They could be your husband or wife, lover, child, or teacher. And it isn’t as if all of them would have been terrible, awful people. Perhaps your sister secretly didn’t believe in what she considered to be superstitious bunk, but pretended for the sake of family togetherness. Perhaps your aunt converted to a different religion after finding the one she was in to be less fulfilling.
You can either believe that you know about these people and A) care that they are being burned alive forever, or B) don’t care about that.
If A is true (that you know these people are in hell, and care about them burning forever), then heaven cannot be a paradise. How could you enjoy a world and call it paradise when you knew that your own father was being tortured in nearly unimaginable ways for all eternity? If B is true (that you know about the torture of people about whom you care, but simply don’t care) then you are a sociopath, and thinking of a heaven filled with sociopaths is pretty far from a paradise. Could you honestly think about someone you love continually being sent through agonizing pain with a grin on your face?
It is an interesting thought experiment. Of course, there are many ways to skirt around this argument (such as denying the existence of a hell while still maintaining the idea of a heaven, for instance), but each way I have heard so far suffers from otherwise fatal flaws of reasoning. I’m still trying to work out whether there is any escape from this argument that seems palatable, but either way, it is a fascinating argument.
posted by The Academian | 8:56 PM
2 Comments:
Disappointingly elementary and thoroughly unoriginal.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the criticism. If you're suggesting that Bob Smith is elementary and unoriginal, you probably have a valid point. He tends to beat certain points into the ground with a lot of regularity, but in part that is because none of his hate-mailers ever seem to read the parts of his site where he's addressed the very concerns they raise.
If you are referring to the argument of his that I am pondering, you may also have a pretty valid point. The argument is simple and relies on an awful lot of assumptions. The argument totally fails if 1) there is no hell, 2) there is a hell but it doesn't last forever, 3) there is a hell but it isn't really all that bad (the separation from God theory rather than torture), 4) if there is a system like purgatory to deal with the justice issues, etc. There are quite an awful lot of ways to deny basic premises on which his argument rests. So far, though, I've looked at each of those arguments and found most (not all, now) to be somewhat problematic.
If you are referring to me being disappointingly elementary and thoroughly unoriginal, I stand guilty as charged.
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