RE: Eternal punishment is pointless.
November 28, 2014 at 4:57 am
(This post was last modified: November 28, 2014 at 4:59 am by ManMachine.)
(November 16, 2014 at 2:32 pm)Ryantology (╯°◊°)╯︵ ══╬ Wrote: Punishment can take on two forms. There is the kind that a parent might administer to a naughty child in order to teach them right from wrong and help them grow into a better person, and the kind that a parent might administer to a naughty child mostly because they are stupid and brutal people who can only soothe their own crippling emotional flaws by physically beating people who are too small to fight back.
The Abrahamic religions seem to take the view that there is no such thing as an unjust punishment, because the person who makes the rules cannot, by definition, break any rules. That is why I am curious to get the opinion of a follower or two, what is the justice in eternal punishment? When a person is dead and goes into the afterlife, what is the material (or immaterial) gain of subjecting that person to an eternity of misery and horror in revenge for whatever acts that allegedly justify it?
If there is no good here, and it is just revenge for the sake of revenge, if God is inflicting pain and anguish just because he got pissed off, how can this possibly be justified as anything other than the most petty and brutal sort of revenge?
I'm not sure I'd agree entirely with the first paragraph - which seems to be a bit leading - but OK, I see where you're going.
This 'punishment' is a feature of censorship that is central to the function of any system of belief, including 'science' - if you don't follow the censorship rules, you don't get to be in the 'club'. I attract a lot of negative posts from other atheists for not following what I see as scientific orthodoxies, concepts and ideas that to me make no sense but form the basis of a lot of people's thinking. I find people's behaviours towards me pointless. When I challenge scientific orthodoxies I am in turn attacked in exactly the same way Christians attack when Christianity is challenged, I find that incredibly fascinating and more than a little telling. For me, people who exchange science for religion are simply exchanging one system of belief for another, I have no problem with that, but the delusion that somehow science delivers a better 'truth' is absurd.
Let's not jump all over Christians for this, it has been a feature of our systems of belief since we have been able to record them. It's convenient to pin these notions onto abstractions like 'religion', but they are much more universal than that (in human terms). These systems are born of human nature, we must look to ourselves for the answers.
MM
"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions" - Leonardo da Vinci
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
"I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one ... etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously." - Douglas Adams (and I echo the sentiment)
