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.

Being poor sucks

Well, it is the fourth of July. Happy Independence Day, America! I would have celebrated in my usual style by going out and buying a moderate amount of pyrotechnics to enjoy, but then I realized that I'm poor. I can barely pay my bills, don't know how I'll be able to buy my textbooks for the Fall, and am skipping meals to save some money.

A fourth of July without fireworks?

Awesome to the max? Not even close.

Condolences to Jimmy C.

According to Sunday's Captitol Journal, our very own dear Jimmy C. lost his mother on July 1. I and, I'm sure, the rest of the law school community extend our deepest regrets to Professor C.

The introduction

I've been working on my D&D game concept now for a few days. Between visits to my uncle (who is not doing any better, although, realistically he won't ever be doing better), and the stress of two gigantic assignments from the professor for whom I work, I have been doing my best to drown out the real world with heavy doses of fantasy.

I'm even forsaking my usual escape of "World of Warcraft" in order to write and plan, which shows how much I'm into the idea of creating a story like this. In many D&D games, players'
characters are natives of the fantasy world in which they do their adventuring, so very little in the way of introduction is necessary. A game-master can simply tell you that you wake up in your little farming cottage to the sounds of fighting outside and let you roll with the punches. Some do precisely that.

In this game, though, my characters are not natives of the world where I am taking them, and must be introduced to how they got to where I am taking them. This is the introduction to the game (in semi-final draft) and once read to the player, the game will begin.

The introduction is as follows:


You awake in a sweat. It’s been more than a year since the return from the other world, but the nightmares still won’t end. Time and time again, they’ve twisted through your thoughts, teasing sleep from your clouded mind, and you know tonight will be no different. You know you don’t have time for this. You glance over at your alarm clock and stare blankly at the time. 3:14 am. In just a little under 5 hours, you’re supposed to be taking the bar examination. Even with your future hanging on the results of today’s activities, you know you will get no more rest tonight.

This time, the dream was more vivid than usual. Even though now awake, you swear you can still hear the terrible screams echoing through the silent reaches of your head. The dreams started with the inexplicable events in Chicago a year ago. You know the details well. Will’s apartment was mostly undisturbed. Water was running in the sink, and a still uneaten bowl of soup was in the microwave. Everything in the apartment was right where it should have been except for the hole. In the middle of the living-room, it looked as if some strange physics experiment had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Where there should have been a couch, a table, and the other familiar objects of his life, there was only empty air. The couch hadn’t been moved, part was just... missing Half of it was still there, actually, with half of a book resting on the cushion. It was if a sphere of emptiness had been placed in the middle of the room and anything inside its borders simply erased. The edges of the invisible border had cleanly severed the couch, table, television, and even a houseplant had been cut perfectly smooth, as if by the sharpest blade ever conceived. And Will was gone.

The police were called. Radiological tests were conducted. National scientific agencies came and went with no explanation. Large reward sums were offered for any information, but to no avail. He left no note as to where he was going, no kidnapper asked for ransom, and no trace was ever found of his body.

Then the dreams started. Actually, they started the same day that he disappeared from his apartment, even before you knew he was gone. Strange how you remember the smallest details like that now. The dreams are rarely the same, and rarely make sense. Scattered images of the night he went missing flit through your nightmares. You were at his apartment for most of the day. You sometimes see the two of you playing cards. Sometimes listening to music. But always his smile. You left that night to drive back to Topeka, but in the dream, sometimes you see a dark figure standing in the parking lot as you get in your truck.

Then the images become jumbled and entwine with each other so that nothing seems clear. Sometimes there are bright flashes of light. Sometimes you smell a powerful incense on the wind. Sometimes the air around you seems to convulse in unheard and unfelt concussions while grey slowly replaces all the colors you see. But it always ends the same way.

This time, the images that flooded your mind had a new element. Or at least, new to your waking memory. Amid the swirling colors and images of the last night you spent with your brother, you’d swear you heard the sound of several voices raised in a loud chant. They spoke in an sharp, alien tongue, but power almost palpably dripped from their words. As their voices raised in pitch and fervor, a single voice barked a harsh, strange word in the same language. As if releasing all the tension of the accumulated power in their voices in a single instant, that word blasted all other images from your mind. As your mind floated in the empty blackness where the images once danced, you sensed, rather than felt, a nonexistent wind rushing past your face. There were a few seconds of silence and then the world seemed to reverberate and shudder with a silent, violent shift, and then you hear Will.

His painful screams fill your nights with terror.

Sighing, you know that dwelling on the dream won’t get you anywhere. You used to keep a journal of the dreams, as if you could use them to solve his disappearance, but you long since stopped writing them down. The futility of the journal finally caught up to you, and since then, you’ve started seeing a psychiatrist and attending counseling sessions. You lie and tell them that the dreams come less often now, but no treatment seems to have taken the edge off of the weekly nightmares.

It wasn’t so hard when you first returned. When you stepped out of the mists, you’d found yourself in your own apartment, and indeed less than a day after you’d left Earth. Your phone voicemail had been filled with worried messages from the girls. After you and Dunavan left the study session to investigate the strange smoke in the building, neither of you had returned. Knowing that you couldn’t tell them the truth, you said that the smoke was actually just somebody playing year-end pranks with smoke-bombs left over from the fourth of July. You told them that you’d accidentally inhaled too much of the smoke, and had felt ill. Perhaps you’d been a bit disoriented from the smoke inhalation and drove home. It was a plausible enough cover story.

But you know the other world was real. You might even have believed your concocted story yourself, but for the fact that when you found yourself laying prone in your apartment, you were wearing leather armor and still had your bow slung over your shoulder. As if that weren’t proof enough to make you recall your bizarre experience, a short sword still hung at your hip. Aside from a few hiccups, you were able to resume your life where you’d left off.

Of course, some things hadn’t been so easy to explain. While you’d found yourself in your apartment, Dunavan had never surfaced. His parents hadn’t seen him. While your brother’s disappearance gained national news coverage because of the odd circumstances, Dunavan’s disappearance got a blurb in the Capital Journal under a missing persons column in the police reports. You could have sworn that he’d been right behind you as you entered the mists, and sensed, rather than saw, him behind you for most of the walk through the swirling grey fog. Then you were falling... and found yourself in your apartment. Why hadn’t he appeared too? If not in your apartment, why not in his? If not in his, then why not elsewhere either? Even if he’d been returned to Earth somewhere else, it had been more than a year. Someone should have heard from him by now.

Resigning yourself to your early morning, and the trials of the day to come, you head into the bathroom to splash a little water on your face. Looking up from the sink basin to the mirror, you stare deep into your own eyes. You can’t bear to look elsewhere anymore, because you know what you’ll see. Finally forcing yourself to look away from your own eyes, you see him standing behind you.

You slowly trace the familiar lines of your brother’s face in the mirror. He’s standing behind you in the mirror, but you know from experience that if you turn around, you’ll be met with empty air. He never speaks, or moves, but simply meets your eyes with what seems like a mute appeal. A thin trickle of dried blood stains the corner of his mouth, and his clothes are ragged and dirty. While his aspect is familiar and comforting, something about his posture and demeanor is deeply unsettling and alien. You know you are hallucinating him. It’s just like the dreams. The psychiatrist gave you medications, and you know time is supposed to heal all wounds, but the hallucinations are becoming more frequent. You wish you could stop the images, but you know that you cannot tell the doctors. They’ve already discussed hospitalizing you and pursuing more drastic chemical solutions. That’s the trouble with law. There’s always a deadline that you just have to meet. After today, though, you have all the time in the world to recover your sanity.

Looking once more into his silent eyes, you turn away and prepare for your day, chills running down your spine.

Suddenly, the world erupts around you. Every fiber of your being screams in agony as the physical universe around you appears to disintegrate in a blinding flash of shimmering light. A deafening detonation immediately follows the light and you feel energy pass through you, knocking you backwards onto the ground. You drift out of consciousness.

You don’t know how long you’ve been insensate, but you feel as if it has only been a few seconds... A minute at most. Though your eyes are closed, you get a powerful sensation of movement... as if you were flying at a high rate of speed, though you feel no wind passing over you. Groggily, you manage to sit up.

You appear to be floating in midair, along with parts of the objects that were close to you when blacked out. You gaze blearily into the sky around you and see that silvery beams of light ripple through this space in all directions, extending far out of your sight. Between the sky and yourself, though, are the bars of a cage. These bars form a hemisphere around you, but don’t appear to be made of any material like you’ve ever seen. They shimmer with a strange, almost iridescent, glow, and appear to be as thin as paper. Crawling to the edge of your platform which you now recognize as the part of the floor of your apartment, you peek over the edge. The bars complete the sphere below you, trapping inside the bottom half a thick chunk of your floor, almost surgically severed from the larger floor of which it was once a part. Incredibly far below where your spherical cage is floating you see what appears to be land, but you can make out few details aside from more silvery bands snaking across the landscape. The land far below does appear to be moving though, as mountain chains and oceans slide away behind you.

A glint of light catches your eye as you turn toward what you presume is the front of your spherical cage. It seems to be reflecting off of a thin filament attached to the bars at the front of the platform. The hair-like fiber stretches away into the distance and appears to be pulling the sphere toward some unknown location.

With no warning, you are suddenly enveloped in a thick fog, as if you passed through a cloud, though you could have sworn that the sky in front of you had been completely clear. No sooner did the cold mist surround you than you pass through it, continuing forward toward a distant mountain range.

Not five minutes have gone by when you feel as if you are descending. You crawl to the front of the sphere and peek down. Sure enough, the ground appears to be rising to meet you very quickly. The filament is angling down toward a large flat area on the top of a dark mountain. As you descend even further, a large stone building seems to appear on the plateau, though you’d swear that you can see through its walls. The translucent battlements seem dangerously close to you now, and you suddenly realize that you still seem to be moving at a very fast pace, on a sure collision course with the seemingly insubstantial castle, and if not it, then certainly with the mountain on which the phantom citadel rests.

You fling yourself backward against the rear bars of the cage (thankful at their seeming solidity despite their desperately thin appearance) and brace for an impact. With a faint sensation of nausea, your sphere slides through the walls of the stronghold as if they were nonexistent. In the last moment before impact with what appears to be an inner chamber’s stone floor founded on the mountain itself, you see a very solid, non-translucent, dark figure with his hand outstretched only feet away from where the sphere will strike the earth. The figure leaps out of the way of the sphere, and then sways on his feet. Your sphere, and you inside it, crash with what seems like terrible finality into the mountain as the dark figure collapses to the floor unconscious.

You awake to find yourself in a dark cell, seemingly underground. You have been stripped of all belongings, but appear to be no worse for wear despite what surely must have been a horrific crash. What few minor abrasions and bruises you appear to have sustained have been bandaged and treated. A stationary torch somewhere outside the cell casts a flickering light through the bars at the door, allowing you to make out what seems to be a surprisingly clean and well maintained jail cell. Fresh straw covers the floor, a large barrel of water sits in the corner, and a simple cot bed runs along one wall. You yourself are propped up on a simple straw-filled pillow, against a wall. When you stand up, you quickly realize that your ankles have been chained together in a simple but effective leg iron. The chain is long enough to allow you to walk without difficulty, but running or climbing would pose a serious challenge.

After what seems like a few hours, an elderly man comes to your cell door. Unlocking the heavy metal door with keys at his belt, he opens the door and motions for you to follow him. He speaks to you in a low, guttural language, but his voice sounds friendly, though authoritative. Any hesitation to follow him is lost when two hulking figures appear on either side of the cell door. With a bit of trepidation, you notice that they have wicked looking blades slung from their belts and each carries unsheathed a plain dagger.

The three men escort you down the hallway and up a flight of stairs. They continue to lead you through the castle, through hallways and up staircases. Gradually, the rooms through which you pass become more richly apportioned. Finally, you emerge through a side door in what appears to be a luxurious throne room.

One end of the room is dominated by an ornately carved throne, and the walls are covered with tapestries depicting terrible battles with fearsome beasts, the likes of which you’ve never seen before. Some appear to be monstrous lizards with horns and crab-like pincers. Others seem to be almost human, but with bloody tusks and long prehensile tails. As the men lead you to the front of the hall, your attention again turns again toward the throne. Richly made of a dark burnished wood, the throne seems ornately carved and inlayed with precious gems and crystals. A great silver eye is engraved into the wood on the chair’s back, as if to say that the absent person who sits the throne is still watching over the room and his subjects. The men lead you directly toward the front of the great hall, but walk around the throne and through a small wooden door directly behind it.

You enter what seems to be an impossibly large room and stare about in wonder. You are in the most fabulous library you have ever seen. The stone and mortar room is easily a dozen stories high and the walls are pierced by glass windows several stories up, but every inch of wall-space is covered with bookshelves, floor to ceiling. Walkways encircle the inner walls of the towering library allowing access to books in the upper reaches, and you can see a few men in grey robes shelving books two stories up. As the elderly man leads you to the rear of the library, you pass through a veritable maze of bookshelves and scroll cases. Reminding you once again of the truly unfamiliar surroundings, you notice the writing on the bindings seems to be in a variety of languages, including a few that appear to be in Earth’s languages. You approach a small wooden door marked with the same silver eye you saw engraved on the throne. The elderly man stops at the door and knocks. A third guard opens the door from inside and steps out of the way, motioning for all of you to enter this room.

The room appears to be a relatively small, though well furnished, study. Scrolls and books lie stacked in piles on tables, in chairs, and on the floor. Parchment leafs with schematic drawings for machinery are scattered on a table nearby. A fire burns in a stone hearth at the end of the room, both heating and lighting the study. Your attention is drawn however to a darkly robed figure hunched over at the desk, scribbling on parchment with a quill pen, and pausing to study a book on the desk beside him.

The elderly man clears his throat and speaks in his low guttural voice to the figure at the desk. Without looking back, the figure at the desk replies in the same harsh language. Finally looking up from his work, the figure glances up at you, and meets your gaze. In a soft whisper, the deeply cowled figure utters a word and all three guards and the elderly man kneel, kiss the cold stone floor in reverence, and retreat from the room, closing the door behind them.

The cowled figure slowly stands up and reaches for a wooden staff beside the desk. With great effort, he stands up and pulls back the cowl of his hood. Involuntarily, you step back. The figure underneath the mantle is clearly not human. His body is crooked and bent, and huge bony knobs appear to protrude from the back of his neck and continue down the back of his spine, causing his robe to bulge out in awkward positions. His skin is grey, almost matching the stone of the walls, and his thin, swept-back, pointed ears are beyond doubt not the result of some aberrant surgery. He brushes his thin black hair away from his vaguely reptilian yellow eyes, and searches your face. With a startling realization, you discern that this creature is very old. Wrinkles line his face, and the staff appears to be more of a cane and aid for walking than a weapon. As he breathes heavily from the mild exertion of walking partway across the room, you notice that his mouth is an array of dulled rows of teeth with a forked tongue flicking over them.

Despite this being’s obviously inhuman mouthparts and great difficulty with human languages, it blinks its yellow eyes and says clearly, “It is good to see you again, Matt. It has been a long time… So very long… since we crossed the mists together.”

(Begin play)

I know that it has some rough edges, but I'm relatively pleased with how some of the text came out. It is intended to be more of an internal monologue for the player character, so I deliberately used some 'stream of consciousness'-style writing as part of the descriptions. I know that I'm waffling back and forth between various modalities of communication in the piece, and I'll have to go back and re-write it with a unifying style, but overall, I think the concepts work for what I'm wanting to have them do. It's not all that great, but I still think it has at least some merit.