On Hell and Forgiveness

[robvalue]

This thread has drifted wildly from the OP.

"Hell" is entirelly imaginary place and now we are arguing number theory for reasons unexplained.

None of the godly protagonists can remotely point to any hell, so they are reduced to the distraction of "what does 4 mean".

Watching the flailing is sheer comedy.

Indeed. They’re trying to show that “non physical” things can exist. It instantly fails on many levels, not least of which being that physical means existent. It’s an attempt to hide god in a semantic gap, which then requires several layers of special pleading to get to the point where god can actually do anything.

I don’t know why anyone would assume a controlling force from outside our section of reality would just be “a mind”, even if that concept made any sense. If we’re in a simulation, for example, objects outside our simulation are effectively non-physical to us. They have no physical status within the simulation. They don’t need one, because they can affect the simulation directly using their physical status in their own section of reality via the computer (or whatever generates the simulation).

But of course, the cry is, “Those things aren’t gods!” This is a No True Scotsman of sorts, and kind of a pointless observation because these things could still potentially have full control over us and our environment. It’s just that they don’t provide instant answers to difficult existential/moral questions; instead raising more, and so aren’t convenient. So any scenario where anything outside our environment has any qualities at all we would actually associate with “existing” must be removed from consideration. This leaves us, paradoxically, with a supposedly existent non-existent entity.