RE: What God's justification for eternal torment?
December 1, 2020 at 7:29 am
(This post was last modified: December 1, 2020 at 7:50 am by The Grand Nudger.)
In the soul forge scenario the divine isn't limited to gods, but..yeah..sure, we (in the grandest sense) don't seem to be doing great...if this is a soul forge - it's not a very good one. You can take that for it's normative content or for it's descriptive. IMO, ofc.
What prevents a person from knowing something in this life, and what relevance do a person's individual preferences have for a hypothetical next? These are the sorts of things about beliefs that always fascinate me. They're statements which we see often, they get dropped off-hand as though they're assumed to be shared. The soul forge scenario, for example - that sounds like something that can be known - and not like something that takes into account how much I love hotwings. It either is or it isn't a forge, and if it is, it's certainly not placing me in the next life based on who has the best sauce as I see it. That much can be known by definition.
Then we run into the normative trickiness of imposing the forging act on souls. If you don't have any interest in being forged, but the soul forge beats away at you with a hammer anyway - it seems as if the soul forge fails at consent....which seems like an important thing for soul improvement. The very notion that a soul can be improved implies that a soul can degrade, as well. How many souls have been ruined or otherwise harmed by this meatgrinding rock, if you had to hazard a guess?
On the descriptive end, if this is a soul forge, where is the product of it's work? Point to an improved soul or a bad soul yet to be improved. A general trend one way or the other in human soul? Point to a single soul, for that matter, to be forged by this as yet unidentified forging force. The assertion (or suggestion) that this life is a soul forge is not an assertion about some next life that can evade questions of observation in this one - it's an explicit claim on this life. Whatever is true of this life, would be true of the soul forge by default. If things don't work, the soul forge is malfunctioning. If we have no souls, then the soul forge is applying pressure to no end. Etc etc.
What prevents a person from knowing something in this life, and what relevance do a person's individual preferences have for a hypothetical next? These are the sorts of things about beliefs that always fascinate me. They're statements which we see often, they get dropped off-hand as though they're assumed to be shared. The soul forge scenario, for example - that sounds like something that can be known - and not like something that takes into account how much I love hotwings. It either is or it isn't a forge, and if it is, it's certainly not placing me in the next life based on who has the best sauce as I see it. That much can be known by definition.
Then we run into the normative trickiness of imposing the forging act on souls. If you don't have any interest in being forged, but the soul forge beats away at you with a hammer anyway - it seems as if the soul forge fails at consent....which seems like an important thing for soul improvement. The very notion that a soul can be improved implies that a soul can degrade, as well. How many souls have been ruined or otherwise harmed by this meatgrinding rock, if you had to hazard a guess?
On the descriptive end, if this is a soul forge, where is the product of it's work? Point to an improved soul or a bad soul yet to be improved. A general trend one way or the other in human soul? Point to a single soul, for that matter, to be forged by this as yet unidentified forging force. The assertion (or suggestion) that this life is a soul forge is not an assertion about some next life that can evade questions of observation in this one - it's an explicit claim on this life. Whatever is true of this life, would be true of the soul forge by default. If things don't work, the soul forge is malfunctioning. If we have no souls, then the soul forge is applying pressure to no end. Etc etc.
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