RE: "Why is it reasonable to believe in prisons, but not in the hell?"
February 3, 2021 at 1:26 am
(This post was last modified: February 3, 2021 at 1:47 am by Ex-Muslim.)
(January 3, 2021 at 3:13 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: So, what do you think, what is the best response to the question "Why is it reasonable to believe in prisons, but in the hell?"? My first instinct was to say "Well, there are people who have been to prisons and have come back to tell us, but nobody has returned from hell to confirm us it exists.". However, I think a valid counter-argument to that is "But there have been some near-death-experiencer claiming to have been to hell.".
Another response I can think of to the question from the title is "How could hell ever be a just punishment? Hell is an infinite punishment, and all the crimes we can do on this world are finite.". However, I think a valid response to that is: "How is putting people into prisons justice? Nobody murders unless he or she is insane. And prison is not a place where a sane person will become sane, it is a place from which he will return with even more psychological problems. Besides, how is it justice when you have about 50% chance of getting away with a murder? Around half of murder cases are never solved. Justice means willful actions have predictable consequences. Furthermore, we are living in a society where nobody knows first-hand what is legal and what isn't. The laws we have are so complicated that nobody can fully understand our legal system. That is not justice either."
Another response I can think of to the question from the title is claiming that hell contradicts science, since one needs nervous system to feel pain, but that is all destroyed once one dies. However, it seems to me a valid counter-response to that is to claim that the existence of prisons contradicts one of the basic principle of all modern social sciences, that is the principle of rationality. One of the basic principle of modern social science, which one gets ridiculed for questioning (like Bryan Caplan is being), is that the society as a whole as if every individual was rational, because the irrationality of individuals cancels each other out. In other words, that systematic biases are impossible. But in order for prisons to exist, politicians would have to be systematically biased, since a rational person cannot believe prisons are a good thing.
So, what do you think about that stuff?
The purpose of punishment is to deter the criminal from repeating his crime and deterring other criminals from committing the same crime and not for wreaking vengeance, and non of these purposes is applied to hell. Are you going now to deter people who are already in heaven from imitating this criminal? Nope, they are already in heaven for ever! are you going to teach him a lesson by this punishment in order to not make him repeat his mistake again? nope, because he will be in hell forever.
So hell is meaningless and prison is meaningful.