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Re: [Provocateurs] War

From: Christopher
Sent on: Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 4:33 PM
Probably not.  There is plenty of evil in this world, even without Hell, to disprove the proposition that God is perfect-goodness-in-himself. But, of course, the enormous morass of misery encompassing the entire world--and, far more importantly, causing the incalculable suffering of individual human beings--would then be temporal, so that the problem of evil would necessarily lose something of its force. Positing that some entity is goodness-in-itself requires holding that thing to an infinitely high moral standard:  otherwise the claim that the entity is goodness-in-itself is absurd; to claim perfection for anything is to go out on a very precarious limb. 

In sum, even without Hell, I think that the problem of evil would probably remain insuperable.  Yes, I would be somewhat "less convinced" about the insuperability of the problem of evil if Christianity did not entail Hell.  But I surmise I'd still be sufficiently satisfied of its insuperability even on the basis of the evil that occurs in this life.  But Hell obviously takes the cake, and I do not believe it can truthfully be denied or rendered innocuous.

One major objection I have to your theodicy is that you tend to treat the suffering that God putatively inflicts on us as a communal, not an individual, problem.  You lump a lot of people--usually everyone in the world--together as if they should be considered as only one unit for the purpose of estimating their suffering. That seems to have the function of making suffering abstract, and insufficiently attuned to the terrible suffering of individual human beings.  At the most fundamental level, we experience suffering as individuals, and this makes it inappropriate to excuse God for inflicting suffering on large groups of people as a unit.  Here is an example:  when I told you of the extreme depression I have suffered on account of Christianity, you declined to consider it as a mark against God's perfect goodness on the ground that "the Holocaust it ain't." You seem to think that any individual person's suffering--no matter how intense and unbearable--isn't so important because it pales in comparison to the aggregate suffering of many millions of people in one historical and enormous crime against humanity.  That is a flagrantly improper comparison, and it totally misses the point. For one thing, each victim of the Holocaust suffered as an individual, although, of course, this enormity did have a corporate aspect. Second, why does the suffering of individuals have to be as appalling as the total Holocaust--as you once put it, to "rise to the level of the Holocaust"--to count as evidence against the perfect goodness of God?  Where does that rule come from?  Comparing an individual's suffering to that of the aggregate millions of victims of the worst crime in history, in order to disparage the former is offensive, although I didn't remark about it at the time.  This is characteristic of the way you tend to treat human suffering.  And again, this is a reason why I insist that you are too lenient on your god for the suffering he causes; and to top that off, you call this god perfect-goodness-in-itself.  Nothing could be more preposterous.

Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Eugene Curry <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12,[masked]:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the clarification.

Would it be fair to say that were Christianity not to entail the existence of hell you would be less convinced of the insuperability of the problem of evil?

Sincerely,

Eugene
From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12,[masked]:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

Are you seriously suggesting that life simply isn't worth living? That given the good and the bad that exists in our world, taken in the aggregate, bringing humanity into existence was a morally bad act in itself?

I am stating that if existence required all the evil that exists and will exist, then God would have refrained from setting up the whole state of affairs.  Existence is not worth that.  But it might well be otherwise if God had not created Hell. And the NT strongly suggests that most people are going to this Hell. According to the Bible, we all go to one of two places after we die:  a place of supposed infinite bliss or one of infinite torture.  If one's destiny is eternal torture, then surely non-existence would have been far better.  And, if we had never existed, we would not be around to suffer any sense of loss or deprivation from not existing.  Non-existence is infinitely better than any state of affairs in which people would be condemned to Hell.  This seems perfectly clear to me.

God's creating Hell--eternal torture that he knew most of his human creatures would be consigned to--is the ultimate disproof of his putative perfect goodness.  Period.
 
Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Eugene Curry <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12,[masked]:46 AM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

Hi Chris,

Are you seriously suggesting that life simply isn't worth living? That given the good and the bad that exists in our world, taken in the aggregate, bringing humanity into existence was a morally bad act in itself? That strikes me as rather extreme. To be sure, there is a lot of sadness and suffering in our world, but that the great majority of people don't simply commit suicide implies that the great majority of humanity (including the poor, the broken, and the oppressed) think that their existence is better than non-existence.

If you held the button for a doomsday machine in your hands, one that could annihilate all the universe in a painless instant, would you really press the button, activate the machine, and unmake the world? I can't imagine that you would--much less that you would regard such an act as a moral one, one that righted an ancient wrong.

As for hell, I grant that it is a difficult subject. Nevertheless, there are models of hell that respect the biblical material concerning it but avoid notions of genuine torture. Further, there are theories of "hell" that see the fate of the incorrigibly rebellious as mere non-existence... the very thing that you've implied is a better state of affairs that life itself. I'm not overly familiar with the arguments for annihilationism, but I eagerly await the publication of Rethinking Hell (http://www.rethinkinghell.com/2013/12/rethinking-hell-book-announcement/) and the chance to read it with an open mind. (I think our conversation and your arguments have made me more sympathetic to such a view, though I remain unpersuaded as of yet.)

Sincerely,

Eugene
 
From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

Eugene,

One thing to add:  If God could foresee how this world has turned out, and all the squalor and suffering that we would experience, then, if he were perfectly good, he would simply have refrained from creating us.  He is responsible for infinite evil, because he created a state of affairs that he knew would end up this way, and went so far as to devise Hell--the place of eternal, extreme torture--knowing that this would be the destiny of most human beings.  And we are supposed to love him freely for his perfect merits, according to the rules he set up?  There could be nothing more preposterous.  This is a demand to love, admire, and worship brute force.  I could never do this.

Of course, we know that God is responsible for evil, even even aside from these observations, because he explicitly and proudly tells us that he himself creates evil.  Is creating evil consistent with perfect goodness-in-itself?  No, it is impossible.
 
Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

Eugene,

I don't have time to integrate this into my previous e-mail to you, so I send it as is:

It is remarkable that you refuse to call God perfect benevolence--or even perfectly benevolent--although you insist on calling him perfect goodness. Why?  I think that at least one reason is that this allows God to commit enormities, as he clearly does, while remaining perfectly good.  But I challenge the idea that perfect goodness can commit unaccountable enormities (and I'm not relying on the OT for this observation). However good God may be, he acts--or at least remains at leisure-- in ways that terribly harm us:  and that is what matters in any practical way.  If he tortures us, or allows us to be tortured, then his abstract perfect goodness is absolutely vacuous, meaningless, and irrelevant to us. (I will discuss the full nature of this torture later.) Again, this is one consideration that causes me to assert that your moral standards for God are unjustifiably lax. On your account, whatever evil God does to us pathetic, powerless, perfectly vulnerable creatures, whom he himself created, is not only acceptable but even praiseworthy. In fact, it is incalculably worse than a wanton boy who enjoys pouring salt on snails, drowning an ant farm, or disemboweling pets. You make wanton cruelty a distinct feature of perfect goodness, and that more than offsets the benefits of whatever goodness God may demonstrate toward us. Calling this goodness-in-itself flagrantly insults every reasonable principle and perception of goodness, however dim, that we have acquired.  If you tell us that God does not have to conform to our ideas of goodness, I ask "Why not?"  Our human way of understanding goodness and evil is all we have to go by.  
 
Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Christopher <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

Eric,

Does God want his human agents to commit such enormities, or does he want to reserve that pleasure for himself? Or do you not consider them enormities?  Even if they are enormities, is it all right for God to commit them? Jesus certainly seems to enjoy talking about punishment by fire, but he defers its occurrence to the Last Judgment.  However that may be, these verses, even on their own, are sufficient to belie the claim of the Christian god's perfect, absolute goodness; and there are, of course, numerous others like them. 


Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: eric <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

For the answer, see John 15:6 or Galatians 1:8-9.

Eric

On 3/11/2014 4:22 PM, Christopher wrote:
Is Jesus the God of the Inquisition and the burning and torture of "heretics," too?
 
Christopher M. Riels
1332 Crosswinds Court Apt. 2
Lawrence, KS 66046
Telephone: (785)[masked]

From: Eugene Curry mailto:[address removed]
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:05 PM
Subject: Re: [Provocateurs] War

Hi David,

I haven't forgot to get you the additional slides you requested; I'll have them to you soon.

As for your question--to the extent that there is a God of war, it is Jesus.

Sincerely,

Eugene
From: David mailto:[address removed]
To: [address removed]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11,[masked]:58 PM
Subject: [Provocateurs] War

Is Jesus a god of war?
If so, why do you think that?
DaveN
Agnostic I.e not wearing Christian colored glasses




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