RE: What God's justification for eternal torment?
December 1, 2020 at 9:19 am
(This post was last modified: December 1, 2020 at 9:33 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Do you think that there's no way to know...or no way for you personally to know... which, if any of these guesses is accurate, or more or less accurate, than another? More or less probable, plausible, desirable, moral?
If it's a black box I have to wonder what made you come up with these specific things, and if it's not a black box - then I see no reason why a person would have to die before answering any or all of those questions. The faithful obviously haven't - it's a proviso that only seems to turn up when they consider that their beliefs may be wrong..and I suspect it's more about shielding them from being proven wrong than it is about a dry appraisal of the possibility of knowledge.
I suspect that we have different commitments and criteria for knowledge - as you're yet to suggest something which would be unknowable in principle or in practice, in this life, as I see it.
For example, assuming that this life is a soul forge, and assuming that we're somewhere near the beginning - then it's an incredibly slow soul forge. I can know that. There have been human beings getting pounded for a quarter million to fifty thousand years..and we're still at the beginning. OFC the idea that we're at the beginning betrays a commitment to how you view humanity. What if, instead, we're at the end of the soul forge - or it ceased to improve us in any way some time ago? Can a soul forge cook finished products, and damage those products, as any other forge would? Are all objects equally forgeable, even? All of these questions about soul forges are derived from things I know about forges of any other kind, natural and artificial. If we run through them (and, mind you, these are rhetorical..you don't have to answer though obviously you can if you like) and it turns out that this soul forge business is an incoherent mess riddled with beliefs and assertions contrary to facts and grounded by no facts - then by my own commitments..in this case to knowledge, I would say that I know that the soul forge assertion is false, and demonstrably false, in this life. I consider gods with that same commitment, in direct contradiction to your assertion that we can't know in this life. Even at the meta level, it would seem that one or the other assertion is true, one or the other assertion is false.
If it's a black box I have to wonder what made you come up with these specific things, and if it's not a black box - then I see no reason why a person would have to die before answering any or all of those questions. The faithful obviously haven't - it's a proviso that only seems to turn up when they consider that their beliefs may be wrong..and I suspect it's more about shielding them from being proven wrong than it is about a dry appraisal of the possibility of knowledge.
I suspect that we have different commitments and criteria for knowledge - as you're yet to suggest something which would be unknowable in principle or in practice, in this life, as I see it.
For example, assuming that this life is a soul forge, and assuming that we're somewhere near the beginning - then it's an incredibly slow soul forge. I can know that. There have been human beings getting pounded for a quarter million to fifty thousand years..and we're still at the beginning. OFC the idea that we're at the beginning betrays a commitment to how you view humanity. What if, instead, we're at the end of the soul forge - or it ceased to improve us in any way some time ago? Can a soul forge cook finished products, and damage those products, as any other forge would? Are all objects equally forgeable, even? All of these questions about soul forges are derived from things I know about forges of any other kind, natural and artificial. If we run through them (and, mind you, these are rhetorical..you don't have to answer though obviously you can if you like) and it turns out that this soul forge business is an incoherent mess riddled with beliefs and assertions contrary to facts and grounded by no facts - then by my own commitments..in this case to knowledge, I would say that I know that the soul forge assertion is false, and demonstrably false, in this life. I consider gods with that same commitment, in direct contradiction to your assertion that we can't know in this life. Even at the meta level, it would seem that one or the other assertion is true, one or the other assertion is false.
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