rhutchin

Should a person be free to choose to go to hell?

In the above example, the father throws a lifeline to each child that is drowning. The children each see the lifeline and purposely push it away and begin swimming (as best they can) away from the lifeline.

To what degree should God interfere with a person who does not want to go to heaven? Should God force the person to go to heaven or give the person the freedom to choose what he will do?

Is it wrong for God to give a person the freedom to destroy himself?

Toto

This is more suited for GRD.

ForensicAtheist

These are such loaded questions and the analogy is also poor so the best answer is a question in return. Isn't it better to ask "god"?

aa5874

Are you refering to Allah or the Hindu Gods? As far as I understand your Gods do not exist.

Biff the unclean

If a murder/thief/madman holds a gun to your head and says “do everything that I demand or I’ll blow your brains out,” should the police not arrest him for murder because he gave you the freedom to destroy yourself?
It’s not like Hell is something that just happened that is beyond God’s control. It’s not like you decide to spend eternity in Hell. God created Hell. Every torture, every horror, every gnashing of every tooth God made that as a weapon to use against you.
Who are you being saved from when you are saved from Hell?
God.
How can you worship a God that you need to be saved from? That's sick.

trendkill

The problem with the whole lifeline analogy is that to make it accurate, the father has to have designed his child, perhaps through some sort of super-advanced genetic engineering, to push away the lifeline and drown himself. This makes a great deal of difference.

Bottom line, meaningful freedom requires actions to have reasons behind them, and it also requires that agents have the power to act; another way to say this is that freedom requires causal determination. If there is a God, then God is the source of all causal determination. So God is responsible for everything his creations do. True, they are responsible for their various actions as well, but God's responsibility is prior to theirs; they are responsible, but ultimate responsibility for their actions belongs to God. And ultimate responsibility has a great deal of moral significance. It doesn't get God off the hook to put him farther back in the causal chain; if anything, it increases his culpability.

Ubercat

You're leaving out part of the story. First of all, the father deliberately pushed the kids into the water. Second of all he put blindfolds on most of them beforehand, so that they couldn't even SEE the lifeline.

At least TRY to make your analogies match your shitty worldview, Rhutchin.

-Ubercat

Ojuice5001

Maybe. But I'd like to ask a related question: If God gives a person the freedom to destroy himself, and this person does, then is he responsible for this person's destruction?

Suppose that a doctor in a mental hospital has a suicidal patient in a padded room. The doctor knows that if he were freed from his cell, he will almost certainly kill himself at the first opportunity. However, this doctor is a psychopath, basically the kind of person who belongs on the other side of the bars. And he gets to thinking that he would get a kick out of watching a man kill himself; it's just one of those things he's always wanted to see. So he leaves a dagger lying around, and releases the patient from his cell. The patient takes the dagger and slits his own throat.

Now, I think it's self-evident that the doctor is responsible for the patient's death. He would be stripped of his license, and most likely the other doctors would judge him to be a psychopath, and force him to be a patient until such time as he has developed a minimal degree of conscience.

So is there any way to argue that this doctor isn't responsible for what has happened? Even if the patient is to blame for his own descent into suicidal depression, the doctor still has responsibility for his suicide. And just think how much harder it would be to think that the doctor is blameless if it turned out that the doctor is the patient's father.

Hooboy !!

Great question.

The interesting thing about the problem that Satan outlined for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was this...

- Choose to know good from bad and to become like God and die.
- Or to be without this knowlege remaining the servants of God and live.

Satan was a hero in the Garden of Eden and if Satan is the ruler of Hell, then I choose Hell.

JerryM

Just like what Milton wrote: "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n..."