Do atheist worry about eternal damnation?

[Frank Zipper]

He is a person on the internet.

And you, too?

Exactly.

[Gim]

And you, too?

Exactly.

Join CDT some time, and read on some of his posts. He's not downright stupid.

[Constantinopolis]

*hugs*

This is why I can get really tough on those Christians who preach a Calvinist or Calvinist-inspired view of God, which paints God as a malevolent entity, and is therefore blasphemous and heretical and can sometimes ruin people's lives. That is NOT the God of the Gospel, the God who lowered Himself to become man, and died, and rose from the dead for the salvation of all. Painting our God as cruel or uncaring is the worst kind of blasphemy.

Likewise, but less strongly, I would say that it is a mistake to attempt to clearly define or comprehend God. We know some things about God, but we do not really know God. His nature is, to a large extent, a mystery. After all, if we do not even fully understand the universe, how could we expect to fully understand He who created the universe? We only know a few things about Him, and those are enough for now. Perhaps in the afterlife, we will understand more. Or perhaps not. That's fine too.

In any case, I wish all the best for you, and I'm honestly sorry for the pain that some Christians have caused you. Forgive us.

There is one thing about God that I do need to be clearly defined in a comprehensible way, which I will under no circumstances allow to remain a mystery unchallenged. I need to know why an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving entity of any sort would allow this to ever happen.

(I didn't just pull that particular example, by the way, because it happens to be sufficiently shocking. I've physically been to places like that, and held suffering of that nature in my actual arms. In fact, it was my experience doing so which informed the cognitive dissonance leading to my flirtation with suicide, as previously mentioned.)

If God is omnipotent, it could prevent suffering of this sort immediately and at no cost. If God is omniscient, it must be aware that such suffering exists; it cannot claim ignorance. And if God is all-loving, then, given knowledge of suffering, and the power to prevent it, it must do so immediately from the beginning to the end of Time forever; any definition of "love" allowing an out in this regard is vapid, empty, pointless, and probably malevolent.

But suffering of this sort persists. Even if a just God does not condemn infants to eternal hell fire in the thereafter, it seems perfectly content to condemn them to a hell of pestilence in the present.

This example is particularly straightforward, however. The girl in that picture, along with the countless others like her, wasn't starving and suffering and dying due to some cosmic force, or some natural reasons beyond our power to deal with. No. What was the cause of her suffering? War. The civil war in Sudan, and the famine created by it.

This was not God's doing in the slightest. It was completely and entirely our doing. Humans did this. Humans alone. No one else. This is a picture of the evil in men's hearts, laid bare.

Could God have intervened to stop them? Of course. He could have melted all the guns of the soldiers into slag, or turned their bullets into butter, or rained down fire and killed them all. Or He could have rained down food on the famine victims, or instantly transformed their bodies into healthy, well-fed ones without them having to even eat at all. But... what kind of just God would do this for only one girl and her people in the Sudan in the early 1990s, and not for everyone else in a similar situation throughout human history? If God did this, He would have to do it for everyone, in all places at all times. He would have to erase all weapons of war from all human history, and provide miraculous food for all famine victims. Or even go further: Make human bodies incapable of hunger, immune to disease, and of course immortal.

To stop human beings from inflicting suffering and misery upon each other - in a consistent, universal, impartial way, not one that saves only a few - would require changing the nature of the human body and mind, and perhaps even the physical laws of the universe itself. To ask God to do this, means in effect to ask Him to have created a different universe instead of the one we live in, and a different species instead of Homo sapiens.

And who knows, maybe such an alternate universe DOES exist, but we just don't happen to live in it. Maybe God, being the Infinite Creator, has in fact created every possible universe whose existence is better than non-existence. Maybe there are some other sapient creatures, in another universe, who cannot starve or get sick, but who can kill each other, and maybe one of them is wondering why an all-loving God has allowed them to be mortal.

After all, is existence not better than non-existence, under most circumstances? Which is better: For a little girl to be born, and suffer horribly for a few years, and die, and then to live forever in Heaven - or for her to never be born at all? Obviously the former is better. So it stands to reason that an all-good God would ensure that every person who can be born, will be born, and every life that can be lived, will be lived. Even the horrible ones. Because even those people are better off existing than not existing.

See, as far as I'm concerned, Richard Dawkins inadvertently provided the answer to the problem of evil when he said:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

Yes, Richard. Precisely. Those who are born are better off than those who never existed. So, then, how can anyone complain to God that he was born into a terrible life? Shouldn't he still thank God that he was born at all? Yes he should.

And no, God couldn't just have given that person a different and better life, because our experiences make us who we are. To give someone a radically different life is to make them a different person. To change things so that the bad things in my life never happened to me, would basically mean erasing me and replacing me with another man. This holds true for everyone, including those with horrible lives.

I will, to be diplomatic, concede for the moment that such apologetics as I've described above are the flawed attempts of imperfect humans to comprehend the will of the Almighty. I will in that case, however, require the Almighty to poke its head out here into spacetime and explain itself directly to me. Until it does, the best that this particular frail and imperfect creation can do is proceed as if its all on me.

Cause apparently it is.

YES IT IS.

It is absolutely on us. This world is ours. God gave it to us, to rule over it. And thanks to our scientific development, this world is now almost completely within our power. We could do anything we wanted with it. We could make it a Paradise on Earth. We have the ability. We have the technology. No one needs to starve. We already grow more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we just throw a lot of it away instead of distributing it to the people who need it, because of capitalism. Our medicine is already capable of eradicating most diseases and ensuring that most people live to a ripe old age, but we do not use that medicine to help the poor, because - again, capitalism. And of course, we are more than capable of ending war as well. But we do not do it.

This world is our mirror. What happens in it is a reflection of the good and the evil in Humanity. Look upon this planet, Mankind, and see yourself. Within this mirror, we have the power to build a reflection of Heaven, or one of Hell. What will we do with that power?

[Salandriagado]

No, eternal damnation is a laughable concept just as god is. There is a far greater possibility to be hit by a meteorite but you don't live your entire life in a nuclear bunker do you?

Why is the existence of God laughable when, without Him, we cease to exist?

The bold is false.

Are you sure?

Yes. Even if my toaster and I are merely simulations on an unseen computer of some sort, we both appear to exist in that condition, so our relationship is characterized by consistant and predictable factors. This is the essence of "existance" in any meaningful or practical sense.

By contrast, the cosmic programmer appears content to keep itself and its computer concealed from direct observation. Accoringly, they may as well not exist in any meaningful sense. And I am rational to proceed accordingly.

You could, however, just be imagining the whole concept of toasters.



At any rate, I think about it at about the same frequency (in recent memory: exactly once because of this thread) and with about the same results (clearly false) as I think about Santa.

If I was a Christian, I might be worried about where all the energy would come from, to keep the hell fires burning for eternity.

Don't worry about that, it's all a simulation running on biological storage buried under some rich dickhead's landing strips.

That reference. I get it.

Why would them?

inb4 someone mentions agnostics

You are 24 pages too late there.

Technically agnostic and atheist are not mutually exclusive terms.

Agnostic = Neutral when it comes to God existence.
Atheist = Denies God existence.

So yea, they are exclusive. Agnosticism =/= Atheism.

No. Specifically, an atheist is someone who does not believe in a god or gods. An agnostic is someone who doesn't make a claim of knowledge about the existence of gods. The two are entirely independent.

Atheists should be terrified of non-existence, which is what they believe will happen to them, and is far worse than damnation.

Why should I care? It's not like I'll experience it. And frankly, I'm not entirely convinced it hasn't happened to "me" (by which I mean "the entity or entities that have at some point inhabited my body) several times already, so who cares?

Why would I fear non-existence? By definition, I will never experience it.

Ha. That's precisely what everyone is afraid of. No longer experiencing things. Going to sleep and never waking up.

And anyone who denies being afraid of it is a liar.

No, I'm not. I have absolutely no reason to believe that I actually have continuity of consciousness from one day to another. Specifically, it is entirely plausible that every time I go to sleep, I never wake up. Why the fuck should I be scared of that?

Can we please stop pretending to know other people's thoughts better than they know themselves?

No. Some bullshit is too obvious to deserve the benefit of the doubt. "I'm not afraid of death" is an example of this.

It is very obvious that many people are not overly afraid of death, from their actions.

If this is true, wouldn't the wages of sin be non-existence? Or is burning in eternal fire the more merciful option, what with God loving us without limit and such?

Continued existence, under (almost) any conditions, is better than non-existence. As proof of this, notice that almost all atheists, even those who are suffering in horrible ways, generally do not choose to commit suicide. So, most people who [believe that they] are faced with a choice between pain and non-existence, typically choose pain as the lesser evil.

Of course, some people do choose suicide, but they are a very small minority.

Those people under very mildly bad conditions, compared to hell. Given actual hell, if it existed, I'd expect suicide rates (if possible) of basically 1. At any rate, most people choose not to visit Mongolia. That's not because we fear Mongolia, but just because there are other things that we'd rather do.

Do Christians ever worry that they may not be following the correct religion, or the correct interpretation of Christianity, and that by so doing they may be setting themselves up for some level of uncomfortableness in the afterlife? Could the Hindus be correct? Or the Jews? The Muslims? If you are Catholic, do you worry that perhaps Protestants or Mormons have the real interpretation?

In short, Pascal's Wager makes less sense when you take into account other religions than Christianity. For the atheist pondering the wager it quickly becomes obvious that there are more than two choices, for what if the religion that you choose is actually the incorrect one? How can you tell, as an atheist, which religion is the "true" path to salvation and the avoidance of damnation? Each one presents equally valid (or non-valid, as the case may be) evidence for its monopoly on salvation. And so instead of the simple 50/50 chance that Pascal offers you now have hundreds of chances for damnation, and perhaps only one that is the correct path. In that case you may as well remain an atheist, because the odds of you choosing the "correct" religion are much, much lower.

Assuming these religions all require that you be a member of their religion in order to get into their variation of eternal pleasure, and if you aren't then you go into a variation of eternal torment, then is there not a substantiated argument for choosing at least one of these religions as being an atheist automatically condemns you to the correct religion's eternal torment? Of course, this is operating under the thesis that one of them is correct, which I don't think we can either rule out entirely or accept entirely, and thus have to simply consider.

However, it's at least as likely that none of them are correct, and that instead there exists some deity that quite likes atheists, and actively punishes those who believe in false gods.

Well that is a correct line of thinking yes. But of course we know that not all religions require that you be a member of the religion in order to achieve salvation/"good afterlife things," nor do they all condemn non-members to damnation/"bad afterlife things." So that actually further skews the odds of the wager, because for many religions the atheist, at least by virtue of atheism, isn't doomed to damnation anyway. In fact, some religions are more punitive to those who choose to follow a rival religion than they are to atheists.

I am not aware of any such religions. Many religions are indifferent between atheists and followers or rival religions, but I'm not aware of any that would say being an atheist is better. Face it: As far as wagers are concerned, atheism is without question the worst bet you could make. Choosing a religion at random would be better.

But more importantly, different religions say different things about the nature of the afterlife. I think it's important to clarify what these beliefs are. Helpfully, they basically fall into just 3 categories:

1. Religions who believe that, after death, people go to another world/universe where they continue to exist forever, with cosmic justice being served by the fact that some people get a good eternal life and others getting a bad eternal life. These include the monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) as well as the small remnants of the dualist religions (Zoroastrianism etc).

2. Religions who believe in reincarnation: After death, your soul returns to this world again, in a new body, and doesn't remember its previous life. Cosmic justice is served by the fact that the type of new body you get depends on your actions in your previous life. Good deeds help you get a good reincarnation, bad deeds cause you to get a bad one. The religions who believe this are the Dharmic faiths: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and their offshoots.

3. Religions who believe in a vague, not-really-defined afterlife that is held to be similar to this life in many ways, without any clear system of cosmic justice. These include most of the belief systems that are called "traditional" beliefs (Chinese, African, etc) or "pagan" religions.

It is important to note that religions in categories 2 and 3 generally don't hold that your beliefs make any difference to your afterlife. It's purely your actions that matter. The only religions that say you can get in trouble for wrong beliefs are those in category 1, and even then, in most cases your actions are still the primary deciding factor.

Most religions say that false beliefs are dangerous because they can cause you to choose the wrong actions and therefore end up with a bad afterlife, not so much because you'll get the bad afterlife due to the false beliefs themselves. For example: Most religions say that having sex outside of a certain kind of relationship (generally called "marriage") is a type of bad action that can contribute to you getting the bad afterlife. If you are an atheist, you will not believe this and you will not necessarily restrict your sexual intercourse to those specific relationships. But if you believe in any religion and follow its sexual rules, you will probably be fine according to most other religions too (the only major difference is that some allow limited polygamy while others only allow strict monogamy; but as long as you're in a monogamous marriage you're fine according to all of them).

Same goes for other things, like rules about charity for example. The various religions don't say the same things, but they are similar enough that if you follow one then you're probably okay according to most of the others too (if you donate at least 10% of your income to charity then you're fine according to all religions).

This whole argument only works if you rule out the possibility that there is a god, and it's not one of any religion currently existing on earth, which seems absurd to me, as that's by far and away the most likely of all hypotheses involving the existence of a deity.

TL;DR - It is possible to live in such a way that you'll get the good afterlife according to almost all religions. This would be very demanding, because it basically means following the strictest rules from each religion, but it can be done.

Only two major religions say that people who don't believe in their God may end up getting the bad afterlife because of their disbelief, and these religions are Christianity and Islam. So, from a purely Pascal's Wager point of view, if you pick either Christianity or Islam and also live your life in such a way as to satisfy the practical demands of the other religions (the ones that care about your actions and not your beliefs), you will have at least a 50% chance of getting the good afterlife.

Again, that only works if you first assume that religions that exist on earth (and don't contradict each other) are a large majority of all possible religions, which they very much aren't.

[Gim]

The bold is false.

How do we know, relatively speaking? Who knows if the BIble speaks the truth?

[Salandriagado]

The bold is false.

How do we know, relatively speaking? Who knows if the BIble speaks the truth?

The Bible is clearly false: it contains internal contradictions. That being the case, we can reasonably conclude that the God described therein probably also doesn't exist, and then the fact that I'm typing this refutes your point.

[Salandriagado]

The bold is false.

How do we know, relatively speaking? Who knows if the BIble speaks the truth?

The Bible is clearly false: it contains internal contradictions. That being the case, we can reasonably conclude that the God described therein probably also doesn't exist, and then the fact that I'm typing this refutes your point.

[Gim]

How do we know, relatively speaking? Who knows if the BIble speaks the truth?

The Bible is clearly false: it contains internal contradictions. That being the case, we can reasonably conclude that the God described therein probably also doesn't exist, and then the fact that I'm typing this refutes your point.

Internal contradictions like what?

[Constantinopolis]

This whole argument only works if you rule out the possibility that there is a god, and it's not one of any religion currently existing on earth, which seems absurd to me, as that's by far and away the most likely of all hypotheses involving the existence of a deity.

TL;DR - It is possible to live in such a way that you'll get the good afterlife according to almost all religions. This would be very demanding, because it basically means following the strictest rules from each religion, but it can be done.

Only two major religions say that people who don't believe in their God may end up getting the bad afterlife because of their disbelief, and these religions are Christianity and Islam. So, from a purely Pascal's Wager point of view, if you pick either Christianity or Islam and also live your life in such a way as to satisfy the practical demands of the other religions (the ones that care about your actions and not your beliefs), you will have at least a 50% chance of getting the good afterlife.

Again, that only works if you first assume that religions that exist on earth (and don't contradict each other) are a large majority of all possible religions, which they very much aren't.

That possibility is irrelevant, since a god that hasn't bothered to start a religion on Earth is logically a god who doesn't care whether you worship him or what things you do in your life. There is no point worrying about the need to follow gods who don't want followers.

The gods with actually-existing religions are the only potential gods that are relevant.

[Frank Zipper]

Exactly.

Join CDT some time, and read on some of his posts. He's not downright stupid.

I am definitely not saying he is. Maybe the UK is the part of Protestant world he is talking about, because what he says doesn't coincide with my experience.

[Salandriagado]

The Bible is clearly false: it contains internal contradictions. That being the case, we can reasonably conclude that the God described therein probably also doesn't exist, and then the fact that I'm typing this refutes your point.

Internal contradictions like what?

As a few random examples: there are two different orders of creation given (plants before/after humans), Aaron died on both Mount Hor (Numbers) and Mosera (Deuteronomy), and almost anything that Christian theology generally calls "mysterious" or "unknowable".

[Gim]

Join CDT some time, and read on some of his posts. He's not downright stupid.

I am definitely not saying he is. Maybe the UK is the part of Protestant world he is talking about, because what he says doesn't coincide with my experience.

I'm sure he'll understand.

[Salandriagado]

This whole argument only works if you rule out the possibility that there is a god, and it's not one of any religion currently existing on earth, which seems absurd to me, as that's by far and away the most likely of all hypotheses involving the existence of a deity.


Again, that only works if you first assume that religions that exist on earth (and don't contradict each other) are a large majority of all possible religions, which they very much aren't.

That possibility is irrelevant, since a god that hasn't bothered to start a religion on Earth is logically a god who doesn't care whether you worship him or what things you do in your life. There is no point worrying about the need to follow gods who don't want followers.

The gods with actually-existing religions are the only potential gods that are relevant.

Not true: it's very plausible that a deity doesn't want to be worshipped, but does care what you do. In particular, the entire universe could be designed to produce interesting perspectives for this deity to argue with. Hell, you can make a strong argument that this is the only ethical way to go about being a deity: anything else you try to do will inevitably make things worse for someone.

[Constantinopolis]

How do we know, relatively speaking? Who knows if the BIble speaks the truth?

The Bible is clearly false: it contains internal contradictions. That being the case, we can reasonably conclude that the God described therein probably also doesn't exist, and then the fact that I'm typing this refutes your point.

I have a book about Australia. Based on my interpretation of some things in it, I might come to think that it contains internal contradictions and factual inaccuracies. And besides, that "platypus" thing is completely ridiculous. Would it therefore be reasonable to conclude that Australia probably does not exist?

Sure, millions of people claim to have seen Australia, but just because they claim to have seen it that doesn't make it true. They could be lying, or hallucinating. I have never personally seen Australia, or any evidence that it exists, besides people saying that it does.

[disclaimer: This is meant as a silly analogy, not a serious one. The point is merely to illustrate the absurdity of the argument "my source of information about X is imperfect, therefore I think X probably does not exist."]

[Constantinopolis]

That possibility is irrelevant, since a god that hasn't bothered to start a religion on Earth is logically a god who doesn't care whether you worship him or what things you do in your life. There is no point worrying about the need to follow gods who don't want followers.

The gods with actually-existing religions are the only potential gods that are relevant.

Not true: it's very plausible that a deity doesn't want to be worshipped, but does care what you do.

But if he hasn't bothered to tell us what he wants us to do, that's still irrelevant.

[Salandriagado]

The Bible is clearly false: it contains internal contradictions. That being the case, we can reasonably conclude that the God described therein probably also doesn't exist, and then the fact that I'm typing this refutes your point.

I have a book about Australia. Based on my interpretation of some things in it, I might come to think that it contains internal contradictions and factual inaccuracies. And besides, that "platypus" thing is completely ridiculous. Would it therefore be reasonable to conclude that Australia probably does not exist?

No, because other sources exist. If your book was the only source, then yse.

Sure, millions of people claim to have seen Australia, but just because they claim to have seen it that doesn't make it true. They could be lying, or hallucinating. I have never personally seen Australia, or any evidence that it exists, besides people saying that it does.

[disclaimer: This is meant as a silly analogy, not a serious one. The point is merely to illustrate the absurdity of the argument "my source of information about X is imperfect, therefore I think X probably does not exist."]

No, it's "my source of information is demonstrably full of lies, therefore we should conduct our reasoning after first dismissing it and all reasoning based on it, which turns out to remove absolutely all support for its core premise".

[Salandriagado]

Not true: it's very plausible that a deity doesn't want to be worshipped, but does care what you do.

But if he hasn't bothered to tell us what he wants us to do, that's still irrelevant.

No it isn't. Maybe it's a test to see if we can figure it out for ourselves.

[A Humanist Resurrection]

This example is particularly straightforward, however. The girl in that picture, along with the countless others like her, wasn't starving and suffering and dying due to some cosmic force, or some natural reasons beyond our power to deal with. No. What was the cause of her suffering? War. The civil war in Sudan, and the famine created by it.

This was not God's doing in the slightest. It was completely and entirely our doing. Humans did this. Humans alone. No one else. This is a picture of the evil in men's hearts, laid bare.

An evil which God created, being the creator of both men, and men's hearts. Since God willingly created men with this nature, and could have reasonably anticipated the result (what with being omniscent), God is responsible for the outcome.

...
But... what kind of just God would do this for only one girl and her people in the Sudan in the early 1990s, and not for everyone else in a similar situation throughout human history? If God did this, He would have to do it for everyone, in all places at all times.
...

I believe I made that exact claim, yes.

And who knows, maybe such an alternate universe DOES exist, but we just don't happen to live in it. Maybe God, being the Infinite Creator, has in fact created every possible universe whose existence is better than non-existence. Maybe there are some other sapient creatures, in another universe, who cannot starve or get sick, but who can kill each other, and maybe one of them is wondering why an all-loving God has allowed them to be mortal.

Maybe, mystery, cop out. Blah.

After all, is existence not better than non-existence, under most circumstances? Which is better: For a little girl to be born, and suffer horribly for a few years, and die, and then to live forever in Heaven - or for her to never be born at all? Obviously the former is better.

Living in peace and prosperity, and then upgrading to eternal Heaven with a just God is better still. But apparently not what God chose, when he put his own plan (of suffering and misery, entirely its own choice under its own control) into motion.

And, of course, we're seriously begging the question in presuming that Heaven is even a thing.

See, as far as I'm concerned, Richard Dawkins inadvertently provided the answer to the problem of evil when he said:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”

Since I know how to use Google and can find information about the book from which the above quote was taken out of context, I can peruse (admittedly quickly) the general message Dawkins was actually trying to get at. I suspect that his real intention was to argue against the idea that human life is meaningless in the absence of the divine, that human life is still exceptional and unique (precisely because it is so unlikely) and that the "[whining] at our inevitable return to that prior state" is actually a reference to the practitioners of religion who fear the embrace of simple non-existence so much that they have to invent a Heaven whereby they think they can somehow escape death. Rather, he doesn't think he is entitled to any thing more than the same non-existance from which all human life arises and inevitably returns.

Mind you, I haven't actually read the book. Just about it.

And no, God couldn't just have given that person a different and better life, because our experiences make us who we are. To give someone a radically different life is to make them a different person. To change things so that the bad things in my life never happened to me, would basically mean erasing me and replacing me with another man.

Or God could have created you not broken from the start, and gotten it right the first and last time.

**shrug**

No one needs to starve.

Slight correction -- no one needed to starve to begin with, if God possesses the omniscience, omnipotence, and love to create such a universe to begin with, from the start. Instead, it created a broken universe of pestilence and disease, tossed us into the middle of it, and then said "you figure it out."

And I'm supposed to conclude that this entity is not at least wholly indifferent? Rather, such actually sounds like the very definition of malevolent.

[A Humanist Resurrection]

Yes. Even if my toaster and I are merely simulations on an unseen computer of some sort, we both appear to exist in that condition, so our relationship is characterized by consistant and predictable factors. This is the essence of "existance" in any meaningful or practical sense.

By contrast, the cosmic programmer appears content to keep itself and its computer concealed from direct observation. Accoringly, they may as well not exist in any meaningful sense. And I am rational to proceed accordingly.

You could, however, just be imagining the whole concept of toasters.

At any rate, I think about it at about the same frequency (in recent memory: exactly once because of this thread) and with about the same results (clearly false) as I think about Santa.

Well, sure. Whether toasters are real, or a complex computer simulation, or the frenetic product of a diseased imagination, they still make an enjoyable breakfast accessory when you put bread into them. They continue to do so consistently and predictably, whatever their ultimate cosmic nature.

But when I put a piece of bread down onto the table and pray for toast, all I've got is some crumby bread.

[Constantinopolis]

This example is particularly straightforward, however. The girl in that picture, along with the countless others like her, wasn't starving and suffering and dying due to some cosmic force, or some natural reasons beyond our power to deal with. No. What was the cause of her suffering? War. The civil war in Sudan, and the famine created by it.

This was not God's doing in the slightest. It was completely and entirely our doing. Humans did this. Humans alone. No one else. This is a picture of the evil in men's hearts, laid bare.

An evil which God created, being the creator of both men, and men's hearts. Since God willingly created men with this nature, and could have reasonably anticipated the result (what with being omniscent), God is responsible for the outcome.

Nonsense. Does omniscience upgrade your responsibility to such a degree that you become personally responsible for everything done by sapient, free-willed creatures that you brought into existence?

Suppose you became omniscient. Would that make you entirely responsible for every bad thing done by your children, and their children, and all people descended from them, forever?

Not in my view of ethics, it wouldn't. Your children and so on would still be responsible for their actions. The fact that you know what they're going to do doesn't mean you forced them to do it.

...
But... what kind of just God would do this for only one girl and her people in the Sudan in the early 1990s, and not for everyone else in a similar situation throughout human history? If God did this, He would have to do it for everyone, in all places at all times.
...

I believe I made that exact claim, yes.

So you believe that God should have never created that little girl? Because this is basically what you are saying. In your universe, everything would be radically different, and that little girl - along with you, me, and everyone we know - would have never been born.

And who knows, maybe such an alternate universe DOES exist, but we just don't happen to live in it. Maybe God, being the Infinite Creator, has in fact created every possible universe whose existence is better than non-existence. Maybe there are some other sapient creatures, in another universe, who cannot starve or get sick, but who can kill each other, and maybe one of them is wondering why an all-loving God has allowed them to be mortal.

Maybe, mystery, cop out. Blah.

Not cop out. Speculation. If you don't like speculation, you'd better not ask any questions about the nature of the universe, because they all lead to speculation of various kinds.

After all, is existence not better than non-existence, under most circumstances? Which is better: For a little girl to be born, and suffer horribly for a few years, and die, and then to live forever in Heaven - or for her to never be born at all? Obviously the former is better.

Living in peace and prosperity, and then upgrading to eternal Heaven with a just God is better still.

It's not better for you if it means that in this alternate universe you never get to exist in the first place.

That was my point.

And, of course, we're seriously begging the question in presuming that Heaven is even a thing.

No, because we're talking about the case in which God exists. In that case, Heaven exists as well.

See, as far as I'm concerned, Richard Dawkins inadvertently provided the answer to the problem of evil when he said:

Since I know how to use Google and can find information about the book from which the above quote was taken out of context, I can peruse (admittedly quickly) the general message Dawkins was actually trying to get at.

Oh, I KNOW his message was not the same as mine. Of course it wasn't. My point was that his own thinking contains within in the seed of my argument. Though of course Dawkins himself was not aware of it.

And no, God couldn't just have given that person a different and better life, because our experiences make us who we are. To give someone a radically different life is to make them a different person. To change things so that the bad things in my life never happened to me, would basically mean erasing me and replacing me with another man.

Or God could have created you not broken from the start,

Then He would not have created me. He would have created someone else.

No one needs to starve.

Slight correction -- no one needed to starve to begin with, if God possesses the omniscience, omnipotence, and love to create such a universe to begin with, from the start. Instead, it created a broken universe of pestilence and disease, tossed us into the middle of it, and then said "you figure it out."

And I'm supposed to conclude that this entity is not malevolent?

Yes, because this universe is the one which makes us exist.

In the other universe, the one with no pestilence and disease, we don't exist. There are no humans there. The creatures in that universe are not human, and they are certainly not us.

Really, I thought it would be a very simple point to grasp. Suppose someone went back in time and killed Hitler so as to erase WW2 from the timeline. You know, standard movie plot. You do understand how this would probably result in you and me never being born, yes? Now suppose someone went back in time and made the FAR greater change of erasing all evil from human history.

[Constantinopolis]

I have a book about Australia. Based on my interpretation of some things in it, I might come to think that it contains internal contradictions and factual inaccuracies. And besides, that "platypus" thing is completely ridiculous. Would it therefore be reasonable to conclude that Australia probably does not exist?

No, because other sources exist. If your book was the only source, then yse.

I have great news, then! Other sources about God do exist!

First of all, the Bible itself is not one source, but a collection of sources. There are between 66 and 73 books in the Bible (depending on the version), and these are separate texts written by separate authors over a period of about 1000 years. So that's a bunch of different sources right there.

And then there are countless other texts which affirm the basic fact of the existence of the Biblical God, but were not made part of the Bible itself. They sometimes say very different things about God, but all agree that He exists.

Then there are thousands (if not millions) of people who claim to have had personal experiences that proved to them that God exists. Again, they say different things, but one thing they agree on is that this God exists.

[Calladan]

Atheists should be terrified of non-existence, which is what they believe will happen to them, and is far worse than damnation.

How? For me - not existing, and not knowing I am not existing, is probably better than flames and demons and pointy sticks for the rest of time.

Non-existence seems kind of fine.

[Grave_n_idle]

Ha. That's precisely what everyone is afraid of. No longer experiencing things. Going to sleep and never waking up.

That's silly.

The point at which I would no longer be experiencing anything is not going to be a trauma to me - because I won't be experiencing it.

I don't think everyone IS afraid of it, although I'm guessing you are. I don't want to die - because I have so much stuff I still want to do while I'm alive - but death itself doesn't scare me, and neither does what comes after it. Because nothing comes after it.

And anyone who denies being afraid of it is a liar.

An even sillier claim - good going, I wouldn't have thought it possible.

[Grave_n_idle]

Atheists should be terrified of non-existence, which is what they believe will happen to them, and is far worse than damnation.

It's not really that terrifying. Sad, yes, but not terrifying.

Sad for other people.

Ecclesiastes 9:5-6 "For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun"

Or, as Cole says in Sixth Sense "They don't know they're dead".

[Constantinopolis]

Well, good thing no one believes that infants go to hell, then.

As for those who believe that innocent people may go to hell simply for being non-believers, they are a minority of Christians (specifically, they are a subset of Protestants), and a very small minority of theists in general.

Citation needed.

Sorry it took so long, got carried away with those other conversations, but this is a really basic fact. And I already provided the first citation before.

Citation 1: Orthodox Christians do not believe that all non-Christians go to Hell (or that all Christians go to Heaven, for that matter).
Citation 2: Catholics don't believe that either.

So that's two thirds of Christians right there.

And with this, I must bid everyone goodnight. Until next time!