tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post4172211569923602455..comments2024-03-15T17:06:31.642-05:00Comments on The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective: Damned Sinners, Part III: Why Think the Damned Would Sin Forever?Eric Reitanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-61871234978857727922012-02-06T08:37:19.233-06:002012-02-06T08:37:19.233-06:00Randal,
Thanks for this. I concede that seen thro...Randal,<br /><br />Thanks for this. I concede that seen through the lens of your analogy of the skinned-alive torture victim, my final argument seems counterintuitive. But I'd make two points about this. <br /><br />First, I think what <i>makes</i> it counterintuitive is our intuitive allegiance to an implicit premise about agency that the Calvinist would have to reject. If I'm right about this, then your response says more about the limitations of Calvinist theology in relation to our intuitions than it does about my final argument. <br /><br />Second, my argument from attention is inspired by my reading of Simone Weil's writings--and these writings also provide the foundation for challenging the adequacy of our intuitions in the skinned-alive case. <br /><br />Unfortunately, I find myself with no time to fully develop either point right now, given work commitments and the final rehearsals for the local theatre production of the musical I'm doing the violin part for. I might devote a post to both points later in the week when some of the work stuff (our department is doing two faculty hires) lets up.Eric Reitanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-89242540457615856312012-02-03T18:31:52.845-06:002012-02-03T18:31:52.845-06:00Oops, disregard the closing sentence fragment.Oops, disregard the closing sentence fragment.RD Rauserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16028847662543056324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-26506851048299869742012-02-03T18:30:27.784-06:002012-02-03T18:30:27.784-06:00Eric, thanks for your thoughtful engagement. My ap...Eric, thanks for your thoughtful engagement. My apologies for being late in a response. Life has been busy busy busy.<br /><br />I find myself in the interesting position of defending a view in which I don't have a particular interest. But that's okay. Here goes:<br /><br />You close by summarizing your argument: "As such, so long as the damned are conscious, they are active at the level of what they attend to.<br /><br />"Hence, if damnation is characterized by eternal conscious torment, the damned (being conscious) would of necessity be committing sins of attention—unless, of course, they attended wholly and purely to God, in which case their attention wouldn’t be sinful. But in that case, they wouldn’t be damned, either."<br /><br />So the question is whether a conscious person who is suffering is necessarily going to be guilty of the sin of attention. I don't see that you've established this at all.<br /><br />Picture a case of extreme suffering: a person being skinned alive over a period of ten minutes. Is it plausible to think of that person as being guilty of any sin of attention during that ten minutes? On the contrary, it seems to me very plausible to think that the individual's suffering would be so extreme that he/she would not even have the awareness that it is he who is suffering. He might be completely consumed by a conscious awareness of pure pain. <br /><br />Likewise, why not think that a damned person is in a state of such extreme suffering that he/she is consumed by pain and thus is incapable of sinning, even in the modest sense of attention that you describe?<br /><br /><br />Let's begin by noting that the suffering of ECT, if it exists, is a uniqueRD Rauserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16028847662543056324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-57110952269982646042012-02-02T16:20:09.189-06:002012-02-02T16:20:09.189-06:00How could a calvinist answer your objection to my ...How could a calvinist answer your objection to my second hypothetical calvinist-argument? Well, something similiar to Steve's answer. You attack this in part two of this series of posts, but I don't think you really grasp Calvinist logic here. That is a very good sign. The few times I'm close to understanding it I lose most of my faith in mankind. This may be a caricature, but in Calvinist theology the only thing God really cares about is his own glory. He wouldn't really care if most of his creatures was trapped in sin, so long as he could balance out the negative effect sin has on his glory. Punishing sin apparently adds the same amount of glory to God sin has taken out. <br />So, he deprives the damned of the only chance they have to stop sinning, so what? According to this logic, God does not care that some do not give him glory freely (in a compatibilist sense) so long as he can take it from them by punishing their sin. Actually, he prefers that some continue to sin so that both the quality of his mercy and the quality of his "justice" are in effect for all eternity. Hence, an endless hell of unrepented sinners suffering for their sin poses no problem for God. Hurrah! <br /><br />My point in all this is probably to point out the futility of arguing against a theology that involves the idea of a God whose values and reasons are by definition arbitrary. I think you would do better to argue against the very foundations of the theology of five-point Calvinism instead, as you do so very well. <br /><br />- Øystein Evensen (Saldakordos is my google-name)Øystein Evensenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16227043943917056644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-80719194690302135072012-02-02T16:15:12.725-06:002012-02-02T16:15:12.725-06:00I would reject my own hypothetical arguments for t...I would reject my own hypothetical arguments for the same reasons you do. Even if the idea of a purely receptive existence of utter suffering were a coherent idea (and you might be right that it's not) it would be so pointless and sadistic as to be beyond belief. No matter what the damned were in the past, they would certainly no longer be anything resembling moral agents anymore so I don't see how any idea of justice, not even retribute justice, could be applicable. But of course, as we all know, anything God does must be just simply on account of the fact it is God doing it. <br />That last one was a joke. <br /><br />The point of my arguments was to see how your problem of damned sinners would fare against the arguments of a true five-point calvinist. A five-point calvinist does not believe that God or the blessed care for the well being of the damned. In light of my understanding of divine and human love, this is completely incoherent, but they have a different understanding of love which may stand up to purely philosophical scrutiny. This is what I wish to test. I agree with you that retributive justice, especially purely retributive justice, is without meaning or purpose. It is evil for the sake of evil, thinly disguised as justice. But there are many retributionists who see an inherent worth in retribution I simply cannot see (probably because it's not there, hehe). Retribution is for them an essential part of justice. It's not supposed to achieve anything, but when justice is done, this is good for it's own sake, like beauty or joy. It's hard to argue against these kinds of intuitions, although I don't understand them. <br /><br />(Continued)Øystein Evensenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16227043943917056644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-91452600488348036732012-02-02T12:08:37.817-06:002012-02-02T12:08:37.817-06:00As to your second line of argument, it is one that...As to your second line of argument, it is one that I can't accept for numerous reasons (among other things, it supposes that God and the blessed cease to care for the damned utterly--even ceasing to care that the essentially good created nature of the damned is being vitiated). <br /><br />But part of what's at issue here is whether someone with radically different theological beliefs than mine could invoke this line of reasoning to show that an apparent contradiction in their theology is ONLY apparent. <br /><br />To answer this, I think we need to think about retributive justice. Why is it that sin warrants punishment in the first place? Why does sin warrant DAMNATION? What does the punishing of sin in a fitting way achieve? HOW does punishing sin set right what sin puts wrong?<br /><br />With respect to these questions, the only plausible account of retributive justice that I've found which can be invoked in the service of the fittingness of eternal damnation is one according to which the affront of sin is that it involving valuing things less than their intrinsic worth calls for, and that the disparity between the real value of something and the valuation expressed in sinfulness needs to be forcefully repudiated with a punishment that conveys the extent of the error. Since God is infinitely valuable, sin in relation to God involves an error of infinite scope and so demands a response that expresses this infinite gravity.<br /><br />I don't see how one could adopt such a view and hold that the ongoing sinning of the damned ceases to be a problem. And I have yet to encounter an alternative conception of retributive justice that could actually underwrite the view that finite sins in this life can warrant ETERNAL damnation.Eric Reitanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-77225774492663254492012-02-02T11:54:43.872-06:002012-02-02T11:54:43.872-06:00Saldakordos,
Good questions. I think the first qu...Saldakordos,<br /><br />Good questions. I think the first question is the more significant, and pushes up against what is most controversial about my final argument in this post. <br /><br />Here's how I'd answer it. It seems to me that human consciousness is characterized by attention, and that attention is active, not merely passive, EVEN IF I could not have done otherwise than attend to what I am attending to. <br /><br />Complete subjective passivity, in which one is MERELY the subject of stimuli, strikes me as a mode of subjectivity in which consciousness in the fully human sense is gone. One is experiencing pain, perhaps, but not attending to it and so not affected by it in the same way. SUFFERING, it seems, involves attending to one's pain. And so, without attention, one cannot suffer.<br /><br />A helpful analogy here might come from certain pain relievers that function, not by actually reducing pain, but by making you CARE less about it. If you don't care about the pain, you don't suffer the way that you would if you did care. But to care is an intentional mental act--one bound up with attention. Total passivity would seem to involve ceasing to attend or to care. And so, were the damned to be rendered utterly passive, they wouldn't care about the evils which afflict them. And if they don't care about the evils which afflict them, they don't suffer.Eric Reitanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-22450879489988358452012-01-29T18:27:44.082-06:002012-01-29T18:27:44.082-06:00As a universalist it is by no means in my interest...As a universalist it is by no means in my interest to defend any doctrine of hell, but for the sake of philosophical reflection, I have a few comments. You critize the objection that those in hell no longer sin because they no longer can act on their sinful dispositions by pointing out that their hatred and self-attention would still be sins, but what if the state of those in hell are purely receptive? Maybe those in hell no longer have any active existence whatsover, not even the ability to fix their attention on anything or to actively will anything. Is feeling something an action? If not, maybe they can feel the punishment for the sins they committed in this life without committing any new sinful acts.<br /><br />Another way to resolve the problem of the damned sinners may be to point out that, even if those in hell continue to sin, the only ones they hurt with their sins are themselves (asuming that God and their loved ones no longer care about their well being). Maybe what makes sin in this world an intolerable problem is it's destructive consequences for the well being of both the good and the bad, the elect and the non-elect indiscriminately. But when the non-elect are separated from the elect forever and the sinners no longer can harm anyone but themselves, maybe sin no longer is a problem for God?<br /><br />There are a number of theological, philosophical and ethical problems with the premises of these arguments (that God does not care for all his creatures, that eternal torment is a just punishment for sin and the dualistic separation of the world into the elect and the non-elect) but assuming that these premises are correct, what are their effect on the problem of damned sinners?Øystein Evensenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16227043943917056644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-16119910519342433592012-01-29T18:18:34.835-06:002012-01-29T18:18:34.835-06:00This comment has been removed by the author.Øystein Evensenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16227043943917056644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-38159166427271140522012-01-24T14:54:11.850-06:002012-01-24T14:54:11.850-06:00Umm...I agree with that conclusion (although I'...Umm...I agree with that conclusion (although I'm open to the idea of a metaphorical "purifying" fire that culminates in redemption). In fact, I co-authored a book in support of universalism--although I'd never say of my book that it is "where the true word is delivered and proven."<br /><br />The purpose of this post is to step into a theological framework which DOES think God throws some of his children into hellfire as a punishment for sin...in order to expose what I take to be a problem with such a framework.Eric Reitanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-88018732730722011602012-01-24T12:44:33.571-06:002012-01-24T12:44:33.571-06:00God will not put any child no matter what their si...God will not put any child no matter what their sins into a hell fire. I would like to invite you to read http://minigoodtale.wordpress.com where the true word is delivered and proven.The Good Talehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11574105752086912139noreply@blogger.com