One stock objection which atheists raise to Christianity is the doctrine of hell. Hell is unjust, we are told, because the punishment is disproportionate to the crime. The underlying notion is that guilt diminishes over time.
I was reading an article by A. C. Grayling on the Roman Polanski affair. Grayling is a prominent philosopher as well as militant atheist. It’s striking to see him use arguments in the Polanski affair which could be easily adapted to defend the traditional doctrine of hell–inasmuch as he challenges the facile assumption that guilt has an expiration date. Although his argument includes an appeal to deterrence, his argument goes deeper than a purely pragmatic appeal:
The Polanski arrest prompts us to revisit the question of the passage of time and the execution of justice, especially as most people seem to think that Polanski’s offence was committed so long ago, and he has made so many valuable cultural contributions since, that the matter should be dropped. What use, they ask, would it do now to send him to prison? Is it even fair, after all this time?
As so often in thinking about such matters, the answer is that it depends on the nature of the case. Few people would be inclined to forgive and forget in the case of Nazi SS officers who committed atrocities during the Second World War. If a former Nazi mass murderer is found, he is arrested and prosecuted no matter what his age and condition of health. Why? Because the Nazi crimes are the kind that we cannot forgive, and we try to prevent them happening again by stating clearly that perpetrators of them will never be safe from prosecution: for such crimes there is no forgetting, no time limit and no hiding place.
The point is that prosecuting such crimes has a point and purpose now and for the future. It is a matter quite independent of how long ago the crimes were committed. We prosecute and punish in order to maintain our determination not to countenance such crimes.
Rape, murder, child abuse, genocide and crimes against humanity are too serious to allow the mere passage of time to weaken a society’s stand against them…for serious crimes against the person — rape, murder, genocide — there is every justification for a robust and unyielding refusal to let anyone ever escape punishment for them. This holds even when the victims of such crimes, long afterwards, say that they no longer wish to see the perpetrator punished. In their kind and forgiving attitude towards the criminal, they inadvertently forgive the crime; that is something society should not do.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6852996.ece
So a life sentence, say, eighty years (let's be generous) in jail, is comparable to an eternity (an infinite number of years) in torment? I admit that my math is rusty, but it seems to me that infinite torment is somewhat worse than eighty years of jail. In fact, I say, and I suspect that Grayling would say, that your comparison of Hell with life imprisonment is off by a factor of infinity.
ReplyDeleteSo a life sentence, say, eighty years (let's be generous) in jail, is comparable to an eternity (an infinite number of years) in torment?
ReplyDeleteDepends on how you look at it. A life sentence is only limited by the mortality of the perpetrator. The fact that he served 80 years is irrelevant, unless you think the 80 years absolves one of guilt. But that misses the point of a life sentence. It could be 81, 82, etc. The point is, there is no point in time where the amount of time served eradicates the guilt.
The concept of retribution is that the evildoer should be deprived of happiness to in proportion to the wrongfulness or harmfulness of the act. The proportionality objection to hell would not be that a certain amount of time passing is going to take the guilt away, but rather that no action is infinitely bad or infinitely harmful, and so the proporitionality requirement can be met in a finite length of time, and the eternity of hell isn't necessary.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't imply that guilt diminises with time, it just says that after a certain amount of happiness is deprived from the wrongdoer, the punishment can end, because the crime has been paid for. So the reasoning in the Polanski case doesn't apply here.
There are two standard responses to it. One if that in the case of sin, the offended party is God, and therefore sin, (unlike crime) can and always does deserve an infinite punishment. That seemed more plausible back when people were thought of as standing on different levels of the Great Chain of Being, and a crime against a nobleman was thought more heinous than a crime against a commoner, for that reason only.
The other response is to say that the damned are unrepentant sinners who continuously reoffend. I think that is surely the more plausible response, but this has little to do with the reasoning in the Polanski case.
What is more, there is a statute of limitations for many crimes, but no statute for the most heinous crimes. But hell, presumably, is for sinners of every type, and Protestants at least reject the idea that some sins are "venial" and do not threaten a person's salvation.
So I don't think that this is the right way to meet the proportionality objection to the doctrine of everlasting punishment.
The "eternal" sentence only makes sense if we refer to sin as a state of being rather than an action committed in time.
ReplyDeleteOne notion of Hell is that it is a matter of perception ("our God is a consuming fire"). What is eventually bliss to the heaven-bound serves to torment the damned. If God's presence purifies, I could see where some might find this experience horrific, even among those who fancy themselves His chosen.
It's not a matter of being punished eternally for some trivial offense, but rather, it may be that some are so bound to what is evil that they fear what is good, loving the imagined safety of the darkness instead.
I found the following to be somewhat insightful.
http://www.stnectariospress.com/parish/river_of_fire.htm
On the "our God is a consuming fire"... I think this is helpful. The only thing left out of this is the mediator. What is it like to be in the presence of God without a mediator? It would literally be hell for the sinner. Rejecting the mediator would then preclude any escape from eternal punishment.
ReplyDeleteZILCH SAID:
ReplyDelete"So a life sentence, say, eighty years (let's be generous) in jail, is comparable to an eternity (an infinite number of years) in torment? I admit that my math is rusty, but it seems to me that infinite torment is somewhat worse than eighty years of jail. In fact, I say, and I suspect that Grayling would say, that your comparison of Hell with life imprisonment is off by a factor of infinity."
You're confusing two different issues:
i) What punishment is appropriate for a particular offense?
ii) Does the passage of time diminish the culpability of the offender?
Sorry, but you're arguing with a strawman, against a point that no one is making! Either you're unaware of what we who reject Hell are actually saying or, perhaps, purposedly distorting it. I hope it's the former.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, here's the REAL argument: What is usually taken to mean "justice,' as the justification for God causing people to suffer pain in Hell, is the idea that they deserve to suffer for the pain they caused others. However, "justice" and "revenge" are normally distinguished by the notion that the pain inflicted is equal to and not exceeding the pain the guilty caused others.
Now, since there is no such thing as a human who could have ever caused an INFINITE amount of suffering, then to inflict an infinite amount of suffering in return upon any human would be impossible IF God were going to be truly "just," at least, according to the common understanding of "justice." No matter how much hurt a human caused (and to be sure, there are some who did a LOT), if he were to suffer the exact amount of suffering in return, there would come a point when he would have suffered an equal amount, given enough time. If Hell were a place, therefore, where justice is meted out, then it could NOT be ETERNAL.
This has NOTHING to do with a statute of limitations! You're confusing a legal limit which our laws have because it's so difficult to preserve the evidence needed to justly convict someone after long periods of time. Quite different from how long a punishment for the justly convicted ought to be! Presumably, if God were inclined to hurt people in return for every hurt they committed, in equal measure, He would have no such problem as his memory failing, and forgetting or distorting what happened.
But the point you're really missing is that Jesus, not only rejected the idea of exceeding the Old Testament "eye for an eye,' put taught that God did not want to hurt anyone, but to FORGIVE!
I've actually written an entire book on this topic--"Hell? No! Why You Can Be Certain There's No Such Place As Hell," (for anyone interested, you can get a free Ecopy of my book at my website: www.ricklannoye.com), but if I may, let me share one of the many points I make in it to explain why.
If you'll re-read the words of Jesus in the gospels, and look for where HE said his purpose for coming was to die as a blood sacrifice to PAY for our sins, guess what? YOU WON'T FIND IT. In fact, the one place where he does talk about sacrifice is where he says God doesn't want it! He quotes Hosea, saying that God desire MERCY instead.
Look in the book of Acts, at all those first Christian sermons. One would think that would be a real good time to explain what was Jesus' main reason for coming, right? But in none of those sermons, do any of the apostles say Jesus was a blood sacrifice to pay for our sins!
No, all these stuff about blood sacrifice was superimposed later on. Jesus actually said that God just forgives when we own up to our sins and repent. That's it!
If not, then Jesus/God asks us to do something he, himself, cannot do, to forgive others without demanding any sort of payment or to suffer some painful punishment.
Rick Lannoye said:
ReplyDeleteIn any case, here's the REAL argument: What is usually taken to mean "justice,' as the justification for God causing people to suffer pain in Hell, is the idea that they deserve to suffer for the pain they caused others. However, "justice" and "revenge" are normally distinguished by the notion that the pain inflicted is equal to and not exceeding the pain the guilty caused others.
That's very interesting, but what is the biblical concept of justice? Appealing to popular opinion is hardly useful for the determination of what is actually true.
since there is no such thing as a human who could have ever caused an INFINITE amount of suffering, then to inflict an infinite amount of suffering in return upon any human would be impossible IF God were going to be truly "just," at least, according to the common understanding of "justice."
That's why we need to concentrate on the biblical concept of justice rather than a "common" understanding.
No matter how much hurt a human caused (and to be sure, there are some who did a LOT), if he were to suffer the exact amount of suffering in return, there would come a point when he would have suffered an equal amount, given enough time. If Hell were a place, therefore, where justice is meted out, then it could NOT be ETERNAL.
And so false premises lead to false conclusions.
But the point you're really missing is that Jesus, not only rejected the idea of exceeding the Old Testament "eye for an eye,' put taught that God did not want to hurt anyone, but to FORGIVE!
Please make some exegetical arguments rather than vague assertions.
If you'll re-read the words of Jesus in the gospels, and look for where HE said his purpose for coming was to die as a blood sacrifice to PAY for our sins, guess what? YOU WON'T FIND IT. In fact, the one place where he does talk about sacrifice is where he says God doesn't want it! He quotes Hosea, saying that God desire MERCY instead.
It sounds like you are pitting Jesus against Paul, as well as Old Testament vs. New. Can you please explain why John the Baptist referred to Christ as the lamb who takes away the sin of the world? What is all that old testament blood sacrifice all about? Why did Jesus have to die? You sound like a Marcionite.