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April 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:34
188 Religious Context Part 2 - Exploring Hell
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
We are going to take a tour through the history of hell itself.
And I think this is interesting because this came up with a discussion with our friend Christian on the board, who is talking about some moral justifications for hell.
Now, hell, of course, has always been slightly problematic for staunch moralists, and this is true of both Christian moralists and non-Christian moralists, because
Kind of the idea that you're supposed to choose God out of your own free will, and God doesn't interfere or intervene but gives us free will to make moral decisions, but at the same time there's this eternal hellfire if you don't accept God's power and grace, and this eternal heaven, if you do, seems to be stacking the deck just a little bit.
So, I'd like to have a quick tour through the history of Hell, just here, while I've got some documents so I don't try and use the Wikipedia when I'm on the road, and then we'll have a chat about some of the moral issues around the concept of Hell this afternoon, which I think are very interesting.
So, of course, as you know, Christianity took a lot of its philosophy from the Hellenic world, and there was the Hellenistic afterlife known as the Tartarus, And Judaism, at least initially, believed in something called a Sheol, a shadowy existence, to which all were sent indiscriminately.
Sort of maybe a poetic metaphor for death.
And I've heard that Judaism is with the afterlife and not with the afterlife, so who knows for sure, but hey.
Um, and the Hebrew Sheol was translated in the Septuagint as Hades, which is the name for the underworld in Greek mythology, of course, and it's still considered to be distinct from Hell by Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Now, there are some commonalities about how Hell is described in several mythologies and religions.
I mean, generally it's commonly inhabited by demons who torture and the souls of dead people.
Now, some accounts of hell describe it as a series of numbered layers, or levels.
Now, these levels are different from religion to religion, but there are some numbered layers that have some coincidences.
So, for instance, there's a layer of intense flames that is numbered 54 in several religions.
Or, this one is pretty cool, a layer where the world looks like the earth, but is inhabited by demons.
But the soul experiencing it is never sure enough that it is in hell to reveal their suspicions because they don't want to look insane.
And this layer is numbered 78 in at least three distinct religions.
I think that's actually pretty cool.
That really gives you goosebumps.
That's so creepy, like you're in hell.
But you're not sure that you're in hell and you're not going to say that you're in hell because you don't want to be thought of as insane.
That's pretty nice when it comes to the creation of a sadistic world.
Now, of course, different religions describe it a different way.
In rabbinic literature, in Judaism, it's called Gehenna, of course.
It's sometimes translated as hell, but that does not exactly what it means in Judaism.
It's not really hell in Judaism, Gehenna.
It's a kind of purgatory.
So, you're kind of judged on your life's deeds, and the Kabbalah describes it as a waiting room, commonly mistranslated by Madonna as an entryway for all souls, not just the wicked.
Now, the overwhelming majority of rabbinic thought maintains that people are not in Gehenna forever.
The longest you can be there is about 12 months, and don't you love it when the entire universe's time structure is based on the orbit of one planet in a small galaxy in the middle of nowhere?
Now, some people say it's a spiritual forge where the soul is purified for its eventual ascent to Ulam Haba, the world to come, often viewed as analogous to heaven.
And this is also mentioned in the Kabbalah, where the soul is described as breaking like the flame of a candle, lighting another, the part of the soul that ascends being pure and the unfinished piece being reborn.
And that sounds almost too scientific for words.
Now the Greeks also had a tasty little place called Tartarus, a place in which conquered gods and other spirits were punished.
Now Tartarus formed part of Hades in Greek mythology.
But Hades, it was kind of mixed, right?
It also included Elysium, which was a place which rewarded those who'd led virtuous lives, while others spent their afterlives in the Asphodel's fields.
So like most pre-Christian religions, the underworld here is not viewed as sort of purely negatively as it is in Christianity.
Because hell, at least in early Christianity, is where the sadistic imaginations of rather deranged people, in my view, really went to town.
Like, no holds barred, what is the worst prison that you could invent for everyone forever?
It's described in the New Testament on several occasions in Matthew, Luke, and in the book of Revelations, hell is also sometimes meant called the Abyss and the Earth, interestingly enough.
Now the population of hell in this sort of Christian concept, at least the early Christian concept, or you could say the biblical Christian concept, is that it is comprised of the souls who died without accepting Christ as their Savior.
They died without accepting God's grace in sin and without although beliefs in these categories differ a little bit between Christian denominations.
So, of course, the problem of what happened to righteous people who lived before the time of Christ, thus being sort of non-Christian through no fault of their own, this is sort of a complication, right?
Especially for the many righteous Jews of the Old Testament.
So some people say these people went straight to heaven despite not being Christians because Christ had not come and gone yet.
In other sort of views they have to wait in limbo until the harrowing of hell.
Good name for band.
And also, this is the three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection, when I think that Jesus goes down like a sort of big bungee jump into hell, gathers up the souls and takes them to heaven.
And that is, to me, quite interesting.
Of course, if people went to heaven prior to Christ coming to earth, then it seems to me kind of confusing as to why Christ would come to earth.
If people were just being saved beforehand, it would seem like Christ then wouldn't be bringing much of a benefit, which is now a lot of people don't get saved, whereas beforehand everyone did get saved.
Now, according to some Western Christian beliefs, the devil and his angels, or demons, are also receiving punishment.
So they reside in hell along with the souls of the damned.
In the Eastern Orthodox teachings, they don't really believe that at all.
Now, Now, Hell, as we all know, and that's a very funny bit in the movie, Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, which is the sequel to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, where they actually end up in Hell, and one of them looks into the other and says, Dude, this looks nothing like your album covers!
Because they're real heavy metal guys.
I thought that was a pretty funny line.
But fire, of course, is a big thing in the idea of hell.
So fire and, to a smaller degree, thirst.
Now fire, of course, is very interesting because there's no body, right?
It's just the soul.
So it's hard to understand how fire can burn a soul.
It's also hard to understand how a soul can get thirsty, because it doesn't have any need for liquids, right?
So this stuff's a little bit confusing to me.
But, you know, as far as things that make me confused about this sort of stuff, it's probably not even in the top 10,000, but I've always sort of found that to be kind of curious.
Now, it's fairly easy to understand why fire is associated with hell in the Christian mythologies and in other mythologies as well, simply because hell was considered to be something underground.
And heaven, of course, was up in the blue skies with the clouds and so on.
And so because hell is underground and you've got volcanoes and you've got eruptions and so on, you can easily associate heat with underground and fire with underground.
So that's, I think, fairly easy to understand, given that they didn't really understand anything about geology when these doctrines came into being, that they would associate Hell with fire.
I mean, it's just the untutored, right?
I mean, it's the same way that primitive people feel that an eclipse is, you know, the moon god eating the sun god or something.
And there are sort of other reasons why heat is associated with certain religions.
And also, there's a lot of the Mediterranean religions and the Eastern sort of Middle Eastern religions, they view volcanoes as gateways to hell, right?
So this is how you get into hell is through a volcano, which is why they believe it's a lake of fire and so on, that kind of stuff.
But some people think that it has something to do with the hot, dry climates, right?
So if you're in a hot climate, extreme heat is considered to be bad, right?
Whereas something that's cooler is probably going to be good.
So generally, sort of hot, dry climates were found in the cradle lands of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, sort of the Middle East.
And the fact that the equivalent of hell in Norse mythology, known as Niflhelm, is pictured as a cold and foggy place.
So the name itself sort of means home of the fog.
So it's sort of an extrapolation of where it is that you are, with sort of the negative effects amplified.
And that's sort of what hell is generally perceived to be.
Now, in the Middle Ages, the theologians just went nuts with their descriptions of the torments of hell, and the art is particularly ferocious in this period.
If you ever get a chance to have a look at it, it's well worth it, in sort of a sense of psychological instruction.
And if you ever want to read the kind of texts or sermons that Catholic boys to a large degree but young people in the Christian world experienced up until sort of the 1950s.
There is a completely terrifying section in a book called The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
I'm not a big Joyce fan at all but this book is worth reading in particular for this description of hell that occurs which is so sensual as to be unbelievably sort of mentally ill and I think just completely horrible.
Talk about everything that the sinner is going to smell and taste and feel and hear in hell.
It goes on and on for pages upon pages upon pages and is completely horrifying and gives you a strong sense of one of the reasons why I might consider this kind of instruction to be somewhat abusive to young minds.
Now, in the Protestant Christian traditions, hell is not ruled by Satan or demons at all.
It is a place that was originally designed by God for the punishment of the devil, Lucifer, Beelzebub, or Satan, and the fallen angels, or the demons.
But it instead is the final dwelling place of every soul that did not obey the teachings of God, even the contradictory ones, and accept the salvation of Jesus from God's holy wrath, and thus are like accomplices, or sort of mini-demons, of Satan, which is from Matthew 25, 41, and Acts 4, verses 11 to 13. which is from Matthew 25, 41, and Acts 4, verses And it's described by many different symbols in the Bible, sort of the outer darkness, the abyss, the lake of fire, eternal fire, and Jesus Christ spoke about hell more than any other single person in the Bible,
Those in hell will receive God's righteous and holy judgment for an eternity based upon their deeds.
It is a place of everlasting punishment and separation from God.
Their punishment will be proportional to the deeds of each soul.
So this is sort of something where I have a certain amount of problem and people say, well Christ was the sort of man of peace and so on.
This stuff seems to be not so much that way.
I think it doesn't seem to be very peaceful to talk about these eternal sort of punishments for people who obviously didn't follow God's rules, but it's not like God's rules are that easy to follow because they contradict each other.
Now, the Catholics, of course, are pretty up front.
There's the Baltimore Catechism.
At question 185, this is the unchangeable traditional Catholic teaching in hell.
Quote, Those are punished in hell who die in mortal sin.
They are deprived of the vision of God and suffer dreadful torments, especially that of fire, for all eternity.
The souls in hell are beyond all help.
The souls in hell do not have supernatural faith.
So now, you can't be an atheist in hell because you're suffering God's punishments.
But it's too late!
mighty God, not with divine faith, but because they cannot escape the evidence of God's authority.
The punishment of hell is eternal.
So now you can't be an atheist in hell because you're suffering God's punishments, but it's too late.
It's too late.
Hell is described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as, quote, to die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by one's own free choice.
This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called Hell.
Now, Pope John Paul II is known to have said, quote, The images of hell that sacred scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted.
They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God.
Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy and the funding for my big hats.
Oh, sorry, I misread that last part.
However, in 1917 at Fatima there was an apparition of Our Lady of Fatima to three young shepherd children.
And this has now been approved by the Catholic Church, or some time ago approved by the Catholic Church.
And it reported in 1941 that Mary revealed hell to them as follows, quote, Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth.
Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent, burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves, together with great clouds of smoke,
Now, falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear, the demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent.
So that is our good friends, the Roman Catholics, and how they perceive it.
There's lots of other ways of looking at it.
So, for instance, the Seventh-day Adventist Church believe that hell is only temporary and that souls in hell cease to exist after serving their time there.
And others believe that there is no conscious hell at all, but the word refers to the decay of earthly remains in the ground.
And this is called annihilationism.
Jehovah's Witness believe that the Bible presents hell as translated from Sheol and Hades to be mankind's common grave for both the good and the bad, whereas Gehenna signifies eternal destruction or annihilation.
Sorry, I should have read this earlier.
Hell, which is in the modern translation of the Bible, comes from Sheol or Hades or Gehenna, all of which mean very different things.
So you can look that up on Wikipedia if you like.
Now, others believe that after serving their time in hell, all souls are reconciled to God and admitted to heaven, or ways are found at the time of death of drawing all souls to repentance so that hell is never experienced, and both these beliefs are called universalism.
Now, the Latter-day Saints believe in a concept of temporary hell, commonly called spirit prison.
Also a good name for a band.
for the disembodied spirits of the wicked awaiting resurrection they also believe in a concept of permanent hell commonly called outer darkness a place of eternal emptiness after the resurrection for sons of perdition those who are irredeemably evil to their core While not fully universalist, they do not believe in a permanent state of hell for any soul who is at all susceptible to the light of God.
So that's one way of looking at it.
The Christian science defines hell as follows, quote, Mortal belief, error, lust, remorse, hatred, revenge, sin, sickness, death, suffering, and self-destruction, self-imposed agony, suffering, and self-destruction, self-imposed agony, effects of sin, that which, quote, that which, quote, worketh abomination or maketh a lie.
No.
Now, the Muslims believe in Jahannam, in Arabic, similar to Hebrew Gehinnom and resembles that of other Abrahamic religions.
In the Quran, in the Holy Book of Islam, of course, there are literal descriptions of the condemned in a fiery hell.
As contrasted to the garden-like paradise enjoyed by righteous believers.
So, of course, in Islam, the people who go to hell, they get 72 women, but they're not virgins.
So it's very, very different.
And there is, of course, a meaning of jihadists to do with hotness.
The word for paradise is jannah, which literally means garden.
Garden of Eden.
I think you get the whole idea, right?
Now, of course, in Islam, as is common in many religions, heaven and hell are split into many levels depending on the actions taken in your life.
Punishment is given depending on the level of evil done in life, and good is separated into the other levels depending on how well one followed Allah while still alive.
And there's an equal number of mentions of both hell and paradise in the Quran.
Now, the Quran also says that some of those who are damned to hell are not damned forever, but instead for an indefinite period of time.
When judgment day comes, the formerly damned will be judged as to whether or not they may enter into paradise.
So it could be said that it's a little bit more friendly to those evil sinners, I guess, like myself, than some of the Christian religions.
and And there are a number of other entries here.
I think the one of Buddhism is great.
As diverse as other religions, there are many beliefs about hell in Buddhism.
Most of the schools of thought, which I'm not really going to try and pronounce, although they do seem to look fairly tasty, I could imagine them with some noodles, would acknowledge several hells, which are places of great suffering for those who commit evil actions.
There's cold hells, there's hot hells, and so on.
Like all the different realms within a cyclical existence theology, an existence in hell is temporary for its inhabitants.
Those with sufficiently negative karma are reborn there, where they stay until their specific negative karma has been used up, at which point they are reborn in another realm.
They might be humans, they might be hungry ghosts, they might be animals, asuras, devas, or demons, all according to the individual's karma.
Now, this should clear it up, I think, considerably.
A Zen does not really focus on the use of the idea of hell.
Rather, consider this koan.
A Roshi meets two students in the garden.
To them he asks, where is hell?
In heaven, the first student replies.
The Roshi humphs disappointedly.
He then looks at the second.
Doesn't that give you chills?
It's just all too scientific for words, like the majority of this stuff.
All right, but that's enough of the brief sprint through the history of hell.
Let's have a talk in the car in a moment about some of the moral problems with this idea.
Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Def.
It's back to the land of the driving rain, because it's Canada, so it stopped snowing, and now all it's doing is raining.
So, it is the 5 o'clock and 5 minutes on the 12th of April, 2006.
Hope you're doing well.
Thank you for the extra person who came and donated today.
I'm still going to keep nagging you for donations, because It's either that or invest the time to find some advertising, which I don't have and don't want to do at the moment.
So spare us both, throw me some cash, and I'll stop nagging you.
So, you can donate at freetomainradio.com.
Now, the question of hell.
Do you see how I'm slipping this right in the beginning?
See, if I put it at the end, people will, you know, they'll do what I do when I'm watching.
I'll hit the mute button.
And if I put it at the beginning, people were just far forward.
But I'm going to sprinkle it throughout.
Every 17th word, if I remember, will be the word donate.
So, just listen for it.
It might make the podcast a little bit more confusing.
But just think how exciting it is for me to drive and count words at the same time.
So to move on, this idea of hell came because of a post on the boards today, which is why we're talking about religion.
Today was supposed to be the day for Marx's labor theory of value, so really either religious text is... we could work with either religious text.
With the same degree of accuracy and veracity, but we will save that for a little later in the week because I've shuffled a little.
But the idea behind Hell came up because I mentioned it as not so much in accordance with what I would consider to be a man of peace scenario, That Jesus and many other people in the Bible and many other people in many other religious texts, except for the ever confusing Buddhists, are the ones saying that if you don't obey God, then you're thrown into a lake of fire.
Now, there's so many problems with this, I could do three podcasts on it, but since that would be, if not hell, at least close to purgatory, I won't.
I'll just see if I can tick off my list on the way home tonight, and then if you have any additional questions, you can let me know.
But, you know, the first thing, as I mentioned, is this question of non-intervention, right?
So God doesn't intervene, He gives us free will, and so on.
Now, of course, if you have free will, it's hard for me to understand how eternal punishment and hellfire and torments forever tie into the whole concept of free will.
This always seemed sort of baffling to me, even as a kid.
I just never really understood this.
And so, this idea that it's up to you, but I am going to do Ultra-murder to you.
Ultra-murder is sort of the term that we'll use that I just came up with, because it's eternal murder.
We just call it ultra-murder, because murder is sort of like, you're killed, you're dead, and that's it.
Back to food for worms, and you don't have to worry about a thing.
But ultra-murder is when you're killed, sent to hell, and tortured for eternity.
And so this idea that you're free to do whatever you want, but ultra-murder is on the one side, and ultra-bliss, or eternal bliss, is on the other side, doesn't seem to me to be as much of an appeal to free will as it might be.
People have problems with advertising, right?
They say, well, it slants, and if you buy the car, you don't get the hot chick draped on the hood along with it.
It's manipulative, and so on.
But, you know, can you imagine somebody on a Coke commercial saying, if you buy Coke, it will be fintastic for you.
You will have bliss for eternity.
And if you don't buy Coke, we will kill you and impale you on the horny lance of Satan till the end of time.
That would not necessarily be considered advertising that would appeal to the free will of people.
That would probably be considered a little bit heavy-handed and over-the-top.
So, for instance, if you are in a situation Where you've been captured by someone who wants information out of you.
And, I mean, we can say whether it's just or unjust or whatever.
It doesn't matter so much.
But that person has you sort of tied down on a slab.
And they've got one of those, I don't know, those James Bond lasers creeping up towards your groin or something like that.
Like the hungry rats of Winston Smith's horrified experience.
So, they have this kind of situation where they are going to torture you, and then probably kill you, but definitely torture you for days in the most excruciating ways.
And you can't get away.
And if you give them the information, then they will not only not torture you, but they will do something enormously positive for you.
I don't know, get you hooked on habit-free heroin, or hook you up with Christy Turlington, or something.
I don't know, whatever, right?
Some enormously beneficial thing.
So on the one hand, you're facing unbelievable, excruciating torture.
And on the other hand, you're facing ultimate bliss.
Could it really be said that this is a situation of free will?
So if you're a parent, and you wish your child to learn responsibility, then do you impose upon them The kinds of punishments that would be spoken of in this ultra-murder situation.
Eternal punishments.
You lock them in the basement.
You keep them starving for weeks.
You go down and beat them with a truncheon.
You roast their little toes in fire.
You flay the skin off their back.
You throw offal down instead of food.
I mean, whatever, right?
You kill their dog and throw it down the stairs.
Whatever is going to torture that kid the most.
And say, well, it's up to you.
You can choose.
But this is going to be for the next 50 years of your life.
You're going to be locked in the basement if you don't agree with me or don't obey me.
That's going to be your punishment.
And if you do obey me, then I'm going to give you a million dollars.
I think that it's kind of hard to say that that is teaching a child responsibility or appealing to their virtue or appealing to their conscience or helping them to develop their free will and become sort of morally free agents.
That's always been a little bit confusing to me.
Now...
It also seems to me quite unlikely that a human agency of justice that would create this kind of eternity of Abu Ghraib kind of tortures, this eternity of Auschwitz, where every time you get gassed, you come back to life, and then you get gassed again, and then you come back to life, and whatever.
I mean, every time you are... you're dying of thirst, but every time you reach for the bottle, it evaporates before you can drink.
I don't know, whatever torments are made up.
If somebody were to create the most unbelievable and excruciating torments and sentence a prisoner who had been guilty, let's just make it easy, right?
Guilty of a crime.
So, some guy is guilty of murder, and the punishment is that they are tortured perpetually for the rest of their natural lives.
I mean, this is even less than the Christian, which is eternal.
I don't think that we would look upon that kind of legal system as being particularly just.
I think that we would probably say, unless we were, I don't know, like if someone killed Christina, I could see myself wanting that, but, you know, it's important that vengeance not be confused with justice.
But if we had a legal system like that, where perpetual torture was the punishment, We probably would not feel that that was a very just thing.
I mean, locking people up is sort of one thing, maybe we could make them more productive, and we can talk about this another time, sort of free market prisons, but the question is, would we look upon that as a just situation?
So if somebody comes along to you and says, I want you to sign this petition wherein people who do not...
People who kill someone else are perpetual torture.
Well, maybe, you know, if you're a particular kind of mindset, you might be interested in that and so on.
Now, what if someone came along and said, people who disobey instructions from the government must be perpetually tortured.
And we simply must assume that those instructions from the government are perfectly valid, perfectly moral, and must be obeyed.
Well, you know, we're into exact hellish totalitarian situations, so we probably wouldn't feel so good about that.
I'll go you one better.
Somebody comes along to you with a petition that says, those who disobey contradictory instructions must be forever tortured.
Well, of course, that's kind of a setup, right?
In other words, somebody wants to get some torturing done, but they need a premise.
So they're going to create a series of unfathomable and complicated and self-contradictory rules by which, if you break them, you will be tortured.
Well, all they're looking to do is to torture someone, right?
Obviously, they're not interested in justice, because if the rule says, at one place, you must not kill, or you will be tortured and another place the rule says you must kill or you will be tortured then pretty much you know what's what's going down is torture and that's sort of the common theme and there's you know I think pretty strong arguments to be made that the Bible is, well not strong arguments, the Bible is full of enormously contradictory impulses and
contradictory commandments and so on.
So if eternal hellfire is the price of disobedience, not of evil, but of disobedience, right?
Of not accepting Christ or whatever is your Savior, of not obeying certain commandments, of not performing certain rituals.
These are not moral things.
I can be a perfectly moral human being without uttering ever once the words, except in a podcast, denying that they should be uttered, I accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my Savior.
Oh my God, my car's levitating!
Just kidding!
So that is something that you simply couldn't accept as just.
That if you didn't follow certain rituals, if you didn't say certain words, if you didn't obey certain premises, that you would simply be tortured for eternity.
So of course The problem arises that if it's not good for a human being, how on earth do we know whether it's good for God?
And I've talked about this before, though not in a while, which I think is 80% the way towards originality, given that I've covered just about every topic in the known universe.
The problem we always have with the idea of a God is, are we worshipping virtue, or are we worshipping power?
And I'll sort of talk about how this ties into the idea of hell.
Now, if we are worshipping God because God is powerful, then he's got nothing to do with virtue.
You can't use the argument for morality.
Then you're just worshipping God because God is the most powerful God and you want to get his blessing and benefits and so on.
So you don't really then say that you have to be moral or whatever.
Just obey.
Obey because he's powerful.
This is sort of the argument of why you obey your jailor.
It's because he's more powerful than you.
And then, if you then say, well, no, God is good, and we worship God because God is good, then the question becomes, if it would be evil for a human being, how do we know that it's good for God?
Well, that's a matter of faith.
Well, you know, but then you're not really using virtue.
You're just using some sort of made-up standard, slapping the word God in it, and saying that that's the best virtue that can be, even if it would be absolutely morally repugnant if a human being did exactly the same thing.
I mean, if we find that there's a pedophile in Baltimore, and we then aim a nuclear bomb at Baltimore in order to kill the pedophile, or the 50 pedophiles, or the 150 pedophiles, or whatever, I don't think that there would be many people who would leap up and say, yay, how moral.
However, God can kill entire towns for a few unbelievers.
God can kill the whole world except for Noah and his floating ark, because there are some bad people, and God can do this, that, and the other, based on Sodom and Gomorrah, can be destroyed because there are bad people.
They're not all bad.
And some of them are children and some of them are in the process of becoming good and whatever.
Some of them are in the process of packing up and moving out because Sodom and Gomorrah are bad places and so on.
And so it would be pretty vile for us to nuke Baltimore because there were evil people in Baltimore and yet we look at a deity that does the same thing and say, gosh, I'm fainting in the radiance of your benevolent goodness.
So this doesn't really make as much sense to me.
I mean, to just say that whatever God does is good is just worshipping power.
I mean, it's just God is big and God is all-powerful, and that's why we worship him.
And we'll call it good, but we just worship power.
Why is God good?
Because God tells us he's good, dammit!
And he's good, and if we try and apply irrational moral standards to God and he fails, it doesn't matter.
God is good.
And so, We're back to worshipping power.
Now, if we do say that God is good, but certain things that God does are not good, like nuking Baltimore or getting rid of Sodom and Gomorrah, then it seems to me that we're appealing to some other standard of goodness than God, or what God does, or whatever, right?
And so then, as I sort of mentioned this morning, why not just sort of flip over to that other thing and Talk about that, right?
This other moral rule and say, well, nuking Baltimore is bad.
Even if it's 80% full of pedophiles, it's still not exactly just.
And so if nuking Baltimore is bad, then God shouldn't do that.
Therefore there's a standard which is anterior to or external to God and His commandments.
So I just never quite sort of fully understood that.
In the realm of hell, if we would not believe that a human justice system could be ever done in a way that involved perpetual torture and could be considered just, then it's sort of hard to understand how God can do it.
Now, God is then said to have the following defense, right?
In defense of the Lord, Your Honor, I might take the infinite stand and say that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, and therefore the punishment that God meets out is perfectly just.
But it's important to understand then that you're not worshipping justice, you're worshipping power.
The power in this case happens to be omniscience and perfect whatever justice.
But you're not worshipping any instance, you're not worshipping any kind of instantiation of that belief.
You are simply worshipping the fact that there is such a thing called omniscience and all-powerfulness.
Which cleanses everything that that person does.
So you're not worshipping virtue because virtue would be describable in action and something which would be common to all sentient beings, gods and human beings.
You're not worshipping virtue because what God does would never be considered virtue by other sentient human beings, i.e.
us-ish, so to speak.
But what you are doing is you're saying that because God is all-powerful, everything that God does is good, but that's not worshipping virtue, that's worshipping power.
And that's a very, very different situation.
In fact, I think it's quite the opposite to worship power as it is to worship virtue.
I think that's a very, very different situation.
So I have a little trouble understanding how that can be brought to bear in any kind of just scenario.
Now, to take a sort of mild metaphysical journey, I'll tell you about a thought that I had as a child, and you can let me know if it sort of strikes any resonation with you, to make up another word.
Yes, another word.
This deaf dictionary just grows by leaps and bounds.
But let me take you for this little metaphysical spin.
Let me know what you think.
It could be, I mean, in some scenario that would be compatible with morality.
It could be that a deity exists, and forgive me for the conceit, but it could be that a deity exists that is rational and moral and virtuous and so on, and that a devil exists that is irrational and evil and so on, and that the Bible was written by the devil.
And the Bible is tempting us with the worship of power rather than the worship of virtue.
And so the devil writes the Bible and says that God does all these evil things but you have to worship him anyway.
Well isn't that sort of the definition of Satanism?
That no matter what the God does and no matter how evil he is, you worship him because of whatever.
You're a Satanist.
So to worship power co-joined with evil would be the definition of Satanism.
And so I've never quite understood how you've got this real clear distinction between God and Satan in the Bible.
Because Satan doesn't actually go out and kill everyone.
Satan doesn't directly intervene and kill people.
He will sometimes motivate God to do it, in the story of Job that we talked about late last year in a podcast.
But God is the one who sends thunderbolts and slays entire towns and kills people and commands the killing of this, that and the other.
Satan doesn't sort of do that.
Satan influences.
He whispers in the ear of God and gets God to smite Job and gets God to Abraham's kid is going to get killed by Abraham, and all this kind of stuff.
So the devil is kind of an influencer here, but God is the one who... God is Othello and the devil is Iago, sort of in this situation, if you're familiar at all with your, I guess, monochromatic Shakespeare.
You have this problem, which would seem to me to be a logical conclusion, which is that if people on earth are tempted with this idea of co-joining perfect virtue with evil power, or the exercise of evil power, then that would be something that the devil would be inculcating in the mind of man, and therefore it would seem logical to me that all Christians are Satanists.
I mean, that would sort of be...
A logical conclusion for me, and that the idea is that Satan rules the world, which is something that is mentioned in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, I believe.
And the way that the world is ruled by Satan is that Satan wrote this ridiculous book full of the most unbelievable evil.
And then says, but you have to worship this because it's all good, and that's exactly, you know, we're worshiping the devil and not God.
I mean, that would seem to me something that would be kind of logical.
Silly, of course, because none of these things exist to begin with, but it would be a logical explanation of the contents of the Bible.
And that's the goal of us in this sort of crazy scenario.
The goal of us would then be to reject religion and to embrace the tangible reality, rationality, universal ethics, As anarcho-capitalism and all this kind of stuff, the goal of it is then to surmount the fantasies that are put forward by an evil deity, in this case it would be Satan masquerading as God, and to put aside all of this nonsense and superstition and to realize that the only way to win this game is not to play it.
And that is how you get out of the grip of Satan and into the realm of godliness, which is to embrace reason and empiricism and rationality and so on.
That was sort of a thought I had as a kid that didn't have a small part in influencing the ways that I thought about religion, because I just would never be able to look at all the things that God did in the Bible and think that that had anything to do with a kind of morality or a virtue that I could really embrace and worship as, boy, you know, you just don't get any more virtuous than nuking Baltimore for the existence of pedophiles.
So that was a sort of idea.
And in the same sort of way, you know, if we're not going to accept it in a human judge, it's hard to understand how we would conceivably be able to accept it on the part of sort of an omnipotent, omniscient judge.
And just saying that because he has all this power, everything he does must be perfect, is saying that the effect of power is virtue.
And we know, of course, that for all other sentient beings that we know of, i.e.
human beings, the effect of power It's the exact opposite of virtue, especially legal and military power.
Now, the other topic that came up on the board today in regards to hell was the idea that God owns everything.
God owns everything.
He is not only omniscient, but the all-powerful landlord of every piece of atomic matter in the universe.
And because God owns everything, and because God owns us, obviously, God can do whatever He wants with us.
And it really can't be considered unjust, because He owns us all, He owns the universe, He owns our souls, so He can do whatever He wants with us.
I mean, my lord, I mean, where would you even begin with a belief like that?
I mean, the first thing that I would do, of course, is to say that, well, generally there's only one owner of a particular piece of property.
Now you can sort of have your house in two names and so on and then together you are sort of ownership but generally only one person can use a tennis racket at a time, right?
There's generally only one owner of a piece of property and I know this sucks us back into the whole IP argument and we'll maybe deal with that again another time when I have re-roused my interest to debate the issue again because it burnt down to a pretty low wick after the last round but If God owns me, then can I really be said to own me?
There's certainly only one of me, and only one of us can use me at a time.
And so if God owns me, I really can't be said to own myself.
And so I really have a lot of trouble with this sort of idea.
And it comes back to the love it or leave it argument, wherein the government owns everything, and we just kind of live here, and the government can do with us what it will.
And so there's a reason why these ideas are very popular in Christianity, because they do serve the state, Pretty nicely.
I think they do serve the state quite well in terms of this sort of fascistic way of looking at ownership.
This sort of abstract entity owns everything and we just sort of hear by its sufferance, by its goodwill, that owning my house is a privilege, not a right.
And so it can be revoked at any time.
And so that's sort of one argument that I've never really been able to understand, and that's sort of one response that I have to it, this idea that God owns everything.
But let's say that, fine, God does own everything, and God can do with us what he will, he wills, what he would.
And so let's sort of take a look at that in a context that would make sense, I think, to some of us.
Now, without wanting to get a lot of flame mail from the PETA activists, it could be said that I own my dog.
I buy my dog.
I'm responsible for my dog.
If my dog bites you, the legal causality comes back to me.
That I own my dog.
Now, the fact that I own my dog, does that mean that I can morally do whatever I want to that dog?
Can I, if my dog disobeys me, Can I then throw my dog into the basement, stick him with forks and burn his paws and cut his ears off?
Whatever.
Can I torture my dog for ten years because my dog has disobeyed me?
Well, I would submit that that's not a particularly moral thing to do.
I think that, you know, we can own animals, but we don't morally, I think, have the right to inflict endless amounts of pain on them, because that's just clear sadism for no benefit, right?
Killing them with a headstun or a beheading to get food is one thing, but torturing them for ten years, keeping them in a miserable and horrible state for ten years because they disobeyed us, I think, is not such a good thing.
And we can talk about the argument for morality around that another time.
But the fact that I own an animal, the fact that I own a living organism, does not give me the moral right, I think, to torture and brutalize and keep that animal alive and never kill it, but never let it be happy.
I mean, that just is horrible, right?
I mean, it's a pretty ghastly thing to do.
We all kind of get that instinctually, I think.
You're sort of saying, hey, where can I get me one of these dog rights that lets me do that?
In which case, don't ever email me.
So the idea that we own a living organism and therefore we can do whatever we want with it, I think is not what we would accept as a moral reality for a human being.
And that's sort of important, right?
And a human being can never do this ultra-murder, this sort of continual soul murder that is advocated or described in Christian circles or in Old Testament circles.
So, if it would be bad for us, then it's hard to see how infinitely worse evil, an infinitely worse evil, right?
So to torture a dog for ten years and have it finally expire in your hands would be considered pretty evil, but to torture another living organism that you own for infinity based on disobedience would be sort of not right in a much worse way, like in an infinitely worse way.
And also, if you said to the dog, come here, go away, simultaneously, or sort of in sequence, like, come here, boy, go away, come here, go away, come here, go away, and then you punish the dog for failing to obey you, it would be hard to understand how that would be even remotely moral as a causal agent of punishment, let alone the degree and extent and depth and severity of punishment.
If the rules are impossible to obey, then it seems hard to me to figure out how punishment, even at a tiny level, could be just.
And at an infinite level, co-joined with impossible-to-obey commandments, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt obey the secular authorities.
So if they draft you, you have to obey them.
There's lots of things that thou shalt not kill, but thou shalt kill unbelievers.
I mean, lots of contradictory instructions in the Bible.
Even if you take out the factor of God's sort of do as I say, not as I do kind of thing, because God's like, don't kill, but I'm going to kill lots of people, in fact, the whole world except for Noah.
So it's sort of hard for me to understand how infinite torture based on contradictory instructions can be valid, even if we accept that God owns his heart, body, and soul, and can do whatever he wants with us, then it seems to me that, again, you're just worshipping power.
You're not worshipping virtue.
Worshipping virtue means that you have a standard of virtue that somebody approaches, and then you value them based on that.
So, you value a car based on how it gets you from A to B, and the comfort, and this and that, and in my case, the room for podcasting equipment.
But you value a car based on its utility to you, and you don't just sort of grab a rock and say, this is the best car ever.
I mean, you're sort of making things up, right?
And so you value somebody based on, if you love virtue, you value someone based on the degree of their virtue.
You don't just grab any old person and say, this person is the most virtuous person ever, I love them to death regardless of what they're doing.
If they're stabbing a budgie at the very moment you're saying that, because they're the kindest, gentlest, most wonderful person in the world, then you're just making categories up with no relation to what's actually occurring.
to worship God as all virtuous while completely ignoring everything that God actually does.
or almost everything that God actually does is not to worship virtue but to worship God as powerful, right?
Because otherwise you would have a standard of virtue that would be external to God and you would judge God relative to that standard of virtue and find him pretty wanting, of course, in which case you would reject God and you would keep on to that standard of virtue.
But even if you felt God could be rehabilitated through prayer or something, to take silly examples, You would still be trying to guide God through your prayer, saying, God, please don't kill Baltimore because of the pedophiles.
Please don't kill me because I'm not a perfect Christian or whatever.
You would still be trying to pray to God and move God towards a virtuous state, and that virtuous state would be independent of simply what God did.
So if you say, I'm sorry to be hammering this point, and I just feel that I'm not explaining it very well, so I apologize.
Let me give it a shot again.
If you say, I love my father because my father is virtuous, but your father is a drunken, wife-beating, child-beating, tightwad, theft, robber, hitman, scumbag, but you love him, well, what are you loving?
Well, you're loving a category called father.
You're loving sperm.
You're loving a hump 20 years ago.
You're not loving a human being, and you're certainly not loving any of that human being's actions.
And so if you say, I love my father, when your father is this way, then you are not loving virtue, you're simply loving power.
I love my father because he is my father.
Well, then you're loving a concept called father, you're loving a power over you, you're certainly not loving virtue.
And so similarly, if you love a god who killed the whole world and says that unbelievers go into a lake of fire forever and gives contradictory instructions and punishes for eternity those who fulfill whatever they're supposed to fulfill or don't in a way that can't be determined in advance and so on, Then you are not worshipping, if you worship a God like that, you're not worshipping virtue at all.
You're worshipping in an abstract category called God, which is in your mind co-joined with another abstract category called virtue, but neither of which has any particular content.
It's like me.
I'm loving a round square or a square circle.
I'm loving an up and down staircase simultaneously.
I'm just sort of creating categories, co-joining them randomly and saying, or not so randomly in this case, and saying, this is what I love.
So I love father.
I love power.
Not, I love my father because of what he does and who he is.
And so that's a pretty important thing to understand, and the concept of hell is kind of designed to reveal that to you.
As I said this morning, sorry, rather last night, that everyone's telling you everything that you need to know, we just don't want to listen.
So religions are telling us that God is not good, that God is in fact stone evil by any rational or objective moral definition.
Any sentient being's definition of evil would not include genocide.
And so God is not a good.
I mean, religions are telling you this.
They're not making up this stuff that makes God kind to kittens and he gets lost children back down from trees and he makes little shelters for the homeless and whatever, right?
I don't know.
He invents capitalism or something that's really beneficial.
Religions are telling you sort of very openly and very clearly that God is stone evil, that the actions of this kind of arbitrary power and brutality, even if you throw away hell, I mean hell is just one of the components, but any one of these make this stone evil, this entity stone evil.
I mean they're absolutely telling you straight up that this is evil, that what is occurring is evil.
Because if you try it, they'll call you evil, right?
You can't have different standards.
The university of morality reaches all the way to the infinity of the sky heavens and all the way to the depths and bowels of Gehenna as well.
The argument for morality is universal formula.
It's universal like gravity.
There's no exceptions.
And so, you can't have a sentient being that does the exact opposite of anything which would be considered evil to another sentient being and call that sentient being good.
I mean, you can.
But you're a devil worshipper.
I mean, I'm telling you, you're a devil worshipper.
This thing is a ruse.
And it's not even a very subtle ruse, because when you read the Old Testament, or parts of the New Testament, it's not particularly subtle.
I mean, he does sort of say, you should kill people who don't agree with you.
And you worship that as good.
But you can't claim that you had no idea.
I mean, this is not a very sophisticated Spate and switch.
This is not a very sophisticated Khan job to say, you have to worship this God because this God is all good, and here's this God doing these unbelievably awful, evil things.
This is not that complicated to work out, that this is not a good thing to do, that this is not a moral thing to do.
It's not hard, I'm telling you.
I don't have to make very subtle arguments to you.
I hope that something like genocide is not good.
And something like eternal torture for beings that you claim have free will, but you actually own and direct their actions, and you punish them, and you reward them, but then you say that they're free.
This is not hard to figure out, whether this is moral or not.
Every time I give an example of a human being acting like an Old Testament God, or even a New Testament Jesus Christ, Anytime I give an example of that occurring, everybody's like, yeah, that's kind of evil.
I mean, without a doubt.
So it's really not that hard to figure out.
This is not something that you need an advanced PhD in theology or moral philosophy to figure out.
It's all perfectly obvious.
It's all perfectly clear.
It's all right down there in black and white.
If you have a standard of morality which involves infinite punishment for somebody who disobeys your contradictory instructions, Then I'd love to see you try and live that.
I mean, it would make Saddam Hussein look like Woody Allen.
So it's really hard for me to understand how the arguments for the moral nature of God can be advanced in any way that makes any kind of sense.
And I'm telling you that it's just willful Blindness on your part that doesn't see this.
I mean you just you want to see it so badly and I understand that.
I mean I would understand that if you are a religious person that it seems to me that you would probably have been pretty harmed in your youth.
And you have not been allowed to develop your own sense of rationality and control and common sense in a universal way.
You've not been schooled in a rational philosophy, which is very rare, and we're trying to develop some of it here, of course.
We're not the first, but I hope that we're going to extend a little further than other people have in the past, because we never did end up with a particularly rational philosophy.
All you have to do is read the Symposium, or God forbid, the Republic, to figure out how far Socrates was able to affect Plato.
Or, you know, read Aristotle's vehement defense of slavery and his opinions on women, and you'll see.
And, you know, the fact that Aristotle never really figured out capitalism is kind of important.
He was sort of missing something a little bit there, and probably the defense of slavery had something to do with that.
So I think that we've got a ways to go, and we're trying to get there, and we're having a great conversation about it.
But if you're a Christian, you really do have to understand that you are worshipping that which any sentient being would define as stone evil.
Stone, stone, evil.
And I'm not talking about the parts which says, go help the poor and stuff like that.
I'm not talking about that stuff, because that's common to most moral philosophies, a kindness towards those who are in need.
I mean, I'm not saying that they have a right to hold a gun to your head and take your money, but there's often quite a lot of kindness.
And I certainly think that in a free market society, there would be an enormous amount of generosity and kindness and sympathy towards the poor.
Because, of course, those who were poor would be much easier to help.
There'd be job opportunities, and options, and loans, and so on.
It'd be much easier to help than now, where they get stuck in the welfare state and can never get out.
I'm not talking about any of that stuff.
I'm not talking about, you know, be nice to kittens, be kind to your kindly grandparents, and stuff like that.
I'm not talking about any of that sort of stuff, because that's certainly not common to Christianity.
Neither is that the essence of Christianity.
The essence of Christianity is the worship of the deity as described in the Christian Bible.
But that's it.
There's no other moral considerations that you can bring to bear on it.
Because you are a Christian because you worship God.
And you worship God as a perfectly moral entity.
And the Bible has example after example after example of absolute stone evil actions that God has.
And you have the displays of the most hideous and genocidal outbursts of violent rage and tempers.
You have jealousy.
You have possessiveness.
You have rape.
You have murder.
You have pedophilia.
All condoned.
And so it's really not that subtle to see that this Bible, this book, is a smoking slab of evil.
And it's right there.
You can't miss it.
It's right there.
It doesn't take that long to find these passages on the web.
Trust me, it takes me like three minutes.
It's right there.
The Bible is not in some ancient language that only the priest can translate, but you just have to accept what he's saying.
You can get good translations of these passages right there.
They're not hidden.
There's no secret Bible that has all of these evil passages in it that you can't find.
It's right there.
And we want you to be good.
We want you to be good and to be happy.
And to worship a deity whose every action speaks of the worst acidic smoking evil.
is not the way to be good.
It's not the way to be good.
It's not going to make you happy.
Of course I want to convert you away from this.
Of course I do.
I mean, I really do.
Because the final argument against hell is, and this is more around those who have a more peaceful nature, like the fine gentleman on the board, who I do not believe for a moment subscribes to this smoking evil, but just hasn't looked at it particularly clearly, in my humble opinion.
But They then say, well, hell is not hell.
There's no lake of fire.
There's no this, there's no that.
What hell is, you see, is hell is just kind of like the absence of God.
Well, I think that's fine.
But then everything's reversed for me.
Because I don't have God in my life.
I mean, what a nightmare that would be to me.
The exact reverse would then be the case.
For me, then hell, which is the absence of God, would be heaven, because my life is a beautiful, wonderful, magical, perfect thing.
And to then be in a state where I was sort of rubbed up against God, which I find an appalling concept, to have to consort face-to-face with the murderer of the entire world, Would be like the endless tea party with Stalin.
I'm telling you, that's not something that I would particularly look forward to.
To me, that would be hell.
To go to heaven and to have to consort with God, with the guy who kind of Wanted me dead my whole life who gave me all these arbitrary instructions and then told me I was going to get killed and burn forever if I didn't obey them down to the letter and This other God who said that my wife and I should be killed for not believing him the sort of the Jesus thing If I had to go and spend eternity with these people, that would be hell to me.
I'm telling you, that would be the worst nightmare.
That would be the worst and most god-awful existence that I could imagine.
Whereas to go to a place where these genocidal ghosts did not live, And I could be free to discuss and think and eat grapes and discuss philosophy with Socrates, who would be there, and Plato and Aristotle, who would be there.
I think that would be... and Democritus and the Stoics.
I think that would be wonderful.
How delightful!
And to be there with the FDR crew would be fantastic as well.
So, if you say to me that hell is the absence of God, then you've completely reversed the equation to me.
You've completely reversed the equation for me.
If I don't have to be around this murderous ghost's bloodstained with the blood of an entire planet, then I think that would be pretty good.
And so even at that level, when you say, even if we accept all of these things as true, and you say that to me, hell, Thanks so much for listening.
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