Volker

Lets take a close look at the christian ethical belief from a final point of view - death. I apologize if this has been done before, and I apologize for my bad grammar and spelling, too.

Some day, all people will have died. I think both christians and atheists can agree on this point. But what than? I can think of the following possibilities:

(1) We all die, but we will resurrect and we will all live forever, with no exceptions (universalism).

(2) We all die, but some of us (with the right belief or no wrong-doing) will live forever, some will burn in hell forever (standard christian belief).

(3) We all die, but some of us (with the right belief or no wrong-doing) will live forever, the rest won't get resurrected but will stay dead forever (roman-catholic belief).

(4) We all will die and stay dead.

(1) has some absurd consequences - it will make it impossible to murder someone. The better living in paradise is, the bigger is the favour you do someone if you kill her or him. It will justify abortion, too, because you send someone to paradise without letting her or him suffer before that.

(2) will imply a mean and unjust god. Eternal torture is worse than killing someone, making god the worst monster you can imagine. Basing ethics on someone that cruel will render your ethics useless.

(3) makes god the biggest mass-murderer of all times. And like (2), it ist worse to kill an atheist than to kill a believer. You can't end the life of a believer, because he will live forever, but you can end the life of an atheist. So while killing a believer can hardly be called a crime on that ground, killing an atheist is the worst thing you can do. So god is the worst murderer of all times, because, in the end, HE does all the killing.

(4) isn't compatible with any christian belief I've heard of. It is an atheistic viewpoint, and the only alternative without morally wrong or absurd consequences.

(2) and (3) isn't compatible with an all-loving and mercifull god. ANY view involving the permanent death or eternal torture isn't a good basis for ethics. (1) leads to an absurd result.

I don't know which of these (1) to (4) is true - the evidence points to (4). (1) to (3) is against the evidence. Basing a moral system on the ethics of a mass-murder doesn't seem right to me. This rules (2) and (3) as an ethical point of view definitely out.

You can think of other variants of (2) and (3), but they are no good.

That leaves either (1) as a basis which rules evangelical christianity out, or (4), which is the atheics point of view. Therefore, I find only a believe in (4) justifiable.

What do you think?

Volker

This, of course, is a short version of the argument from disbelief. It is easier to understand, because it has very devastating consequences. Except for universalism, it renders belief in an all-loving and mercifull god impossible. It is based on undeniable facts and every possible solution.

It is not so easy to construct a way out of this. There ist no free will defense, no unknown purpose defense, no afterlife defense.

We have no free will - we will die. If there is an unknown purpose for our death , it does not matter. The afterlife defense will only work with universalism - this is hard to accept for evangelical christianity.

It makes christians worship a mass murder.

Jobar

Hello, Volker. I'll have to say that I do not see your #3 as being reason for calling God a mass murderer- after all, if God decides to agree with atheists that they have no immortal soul, and let them die for ever and always, well, is that any worse than never having created them at all?

Of course, the fundamentalist God, who throws sinners into the fires of Hell, can easily be shown to be malevolent by your argument.

Volker

Well, yes, I've decided that I have no immortal soul, I get what I believe. Fair deal.

But what about those who didn't know a thing about god? Will they get eternal life or not? If they don't get eternal life, this is unfair and unjust. This is massmurder, after all.

But if they get eternal life, why tell them about god? Missionaries are really, really bad people: They tell others that god exists. Without that knowledge, those people will get eternal life anyway. But now they know about god and they could decide by their own free will to become atheists. The missionary has effectively killed them ... no missionary, no risk.

And the same is true if you have kids. You tell them about god, you risk that they'll be killed forever. So you're better off if you shut your mouth and don't tell them about god, hoping they never will come to that knwoledge. Because, free will might kick in, they will decide to become explicit atheists ...

Free will seems to be a very bad idea, a diabolical influence. Free will might kill you forever!

Jobar

Volker, we have actually had Catholics here who agreed with you about missionaries. His view was that people who had never heard of *and understood* the Christian religion were not held to the same standards as those who had; he was even willing to extend this sort of non-judgement to us, because we as atheists obviously did not understand the full import of what we had heard. (Albert Cipriani was an interesting theist, with unique notions.)

I still don't think we can call non-salvation, to coin a term, the same thing as murder, though. A person who never hears or thinks of religion is a functional atheist, wouldn't you say? They have no expectation of life after death. If consciousness is extinguished at the end of such a life, perhaps we might say that is wasteful from God's point of view (presuming he wants the companionship of enlightened souls) but I don't see it as malevolent. And if you add in reincarnation, it's not even wasteful- but that translates into universalism, I suppose.

beastmaster

Hi Volker. I think you are making an invalid assumption about Xnty here. Under Xnty, murder is wrong, *not* because the murderer harms another human, but because the murderer defiles the image of God. Murder is a crime against God for Xnty, not a crime against humans.

Remember, Xnty is the opposite of humanism. Humanism measures right and wrong by and against the welfare and well-being of humans; Xnty patterns right and wrong after the nature and will of God and man's relationship with and alienation from God.

Thus, murder is still "possible" under universalism, even if it could be said that killing a person is "doing him or her a favor" by getting him or her to Heaven faster, because murder is repugnant to God, alienating from God, and, thus, a sin under Xnty.

Volker

Think of a person who lives in an area where nobody will live longer than 40 years (there are some areas in this world where it ist highly unlikely to get that old). That is, naturally, he won't expect to get older than 40 years.

But now, due to some lucky events, he gets 40 years old and has still some time left. He has the chance of getting much, much older. You can't kill him because he didn't expect to get that old.

God is expected to be all-loving. But if he lets some people live and some not, this can hardly be called all-loving.

Volker

I think you are right with this one.

Still, the argument is strong against evangelical christianity.

reddhedd

Jehovah's Witness's believe that when you die, you stay dead until Judgement Day. Then ALL are ressurected and get to see that Jah is real and was watching all the time. At that time, the individual gets to choose forever being dead, in which case he dies again, or eternal life, at which time he is put back on earth to make the planet into a world wide Garden of Eden.
The "earthies" (other flock) will live forever unless they displease God, at which time they will die forever, no more chances. The 144,000 that got to go to heaven to be middle management will be made over into immortals, unable to be destroyed.

K.

parkdalian

You could use that statement to justify parents killing their chidren.

And isn't that a case of "what they don't know won't hurt them" kind of reasoning. Our expectations have little to do with the intent of God and whether it is behaving morally. The atheist belief on this matter boils down to acceptance that we are all killed off eventually by the unthinking nature of the universe and our own physical selves. Bring a God into it and God is damned on two counts-- He creates a situation where we live and die, and once having done so, continues to allow it in at least certain cases, depending on belief in and adoration of God.

Just because we are acclimated to our own uniform mortality as atheists doesn't mean that we can excuse supposed deities from imposing or allowing death part of the time. Even if we expect death, we embrace life and have no expectation of dying tomorrow. Once we face an apparent bonus situation where some of us are potentially immortal and happy, it is only the awareness that has changed. The unfairness of that situation was always there to begin with and--in a way--the inequality of some living, some dying is worse than the solidarity of everyone dying. At face value, I think that such a god, allowing death in some instances is guilty of at least something between murder and criminal negligence.