SeN: "Hope for immortality" is a Useful Salve for Childhood "rape and strangulation."

[Philo Sofee]

So long as his own self proclaimed, self important followers, including Utah Prophets and Apostles, missionaries, and internet Mormons provide the rest of us with that courtesy, I am all for it!

You are free to run your universe any way you like. No one is stopping you.

Now, let’s let God run his.

Regards,
MG

Lets quit pretending this one is his then, since he does nothing here.....

[mentalgymnast]

You are free to run your universe any way you like. No one is stopping you.

Now, let’s let God run his.

Regards,
MG

Lets quit pretending this one is his then, since he does nothing here.....

Gross oversimplification.

Regards,
MG

[Shulem]

Let's hear from:

Daniel C Peterson!

Hip, hip, hooray!! Come on Danny baby, let's get a little action.

[Meadowchik]

I can certainly sympathize with an atheistic perspective on questions like this, and even specifically on Dan Peterson's arguments. In fact, I approached these very arguments quite skeptically when I first heard them from Dan about 15 years ago, as an ex-Mormon atheist.

Around that time, I was on a research trip to the BYU library and ran into Dan there. Despite having know each other while I was a student and having gotten along fine then (albeit in person and at a time before I'd lost my faith), he and I had been going head to head on ZLMB and the FAIR boards for a couple years at this point. I had made it a sort of personal mission to refute what was put forward by his Freethinker alter ego (who I at first did not realize was him) and then later by Dan posting under his own name. We were coming from opposite angles on most everything.

In spite of that tumultuous history, we had a long, interesting, and pleasant conversation that day in the periodicals section of the Lee Library. Somehow the topic turned to beliefs about God and about life after death. In good measure we discussed pretty much exactly what's in this Sic et Non post. I offered the problem of evil and suffering as the primary reason for my disbelief in God, giving the example of the Holocaust. Dan commented along the lines that if death is the end, then Hitler wins - he truly succeeded in exterminating much of the Jewish people: they are forever gone. I couldn't argue with that, but at the time I didn't understand the argument he was building on it. Whether or not Hitler won was, so far as I could see, irrelevant to whether people really continue beyond their deaths.

Dan's presentation of his reasoning in writing now actually clarifies his reasoning a good deal, indicating that he's not arguing that victims of violence must survive their deaths because otherwise the perpetrators win, but rather that our sense of justice gives us reason to hope that such victims survive their deaths. I think this point is difficult to disagree with, and that is the case regardless of whether one thinks of it in terms of the need for punishment or repentance on the part of the perpetrators. Forget accountability for the perpetrators for now and just think of fairness for the victims. If a child murderer and all his victims both suffer the same fate (extinction at death), then they are actually dealt with quite unequally and unjustly by life: the murderer got to live life into adulthood while the children had their lives brutally, and permanently, cut short. Our sense of justice should, and does, recoil at murderers having such absolute and final power over their victims. Justice demands not only some accountability for the perpetrator but also some setting right of things for the victims.

Back to my conversation with Dan, I had expressed that I did see death as the end, since I saw consciousness as entirely dependent on brain function--hence, when the brain stops functioning, consciousness would cease. Dan brought up near-death experiences. I had studied those years earlier and had once put stock in them, but explained that I now saw them as events in the brain. Dan described specific near-death experiences with which I was unfamiliar but in which the experiencer appeared to have veridically observed surrounding events while brain activity was entirely flat. I was skeptical about these, but open, and later read more about one of these cases.

As I described my belief that death was the end, I told Dan that I wished it weren't so--that I would love to see lost loved ones again. Without missing a beat, he told me confidently, and with reassurance, "You will." I remember feeling surprised at his degree of confidence in this, and wishing I could at all share it.

I didn't leave this conversation believing in God or an afterlife. But the experience was positive enough that it became a turning point in the dynamic of our online interactions--we tangled far less after this.

While it had seemed to me from Dan's writing that he cast atheists in a needlessly negative light, when it came to how he treated this particular atheist in real life, I found him reasonable, generous, and kind.

I've since, as you know, changed my views on God, but if I stopped believing in a God and an afterlife again, I would still hope for some kind of ultimate justice. How can we not?

Don

So he essentially argues that the afterlife must be real because justice demands it? That certainly does not square. We cannot alter things simply because we want to, things do not happen because they are fair.

I deeply reject the type of thinking that relies on the afterlife for justice or any other type of righteousness. I think it damages human relationships by giving reason for people to neglect righteousness and justice right now.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I just watched a video of a baby impala being ripped from its mother’s womb by a pack of painted dogs, and both the mother and baby impala were eviscerated while conscious.

There may be another life. There may be another simulation to experience. Whatever. But a just god doesn’t create evil, and it doesn’t set up a system whereby one animal must gut another in order to get energy.

If there is a god, it’s terrifying.

- Doc

[Philo Sofee]

Lets quit pretending this one is his then, since he does nothing here.....

Gross oversimplification.

Regards,
MG

Simple obvious truth

[IHAQ]

May I suggest that we leave things in God’s hands rather than trying to control Him by telling him how to run the universe?

Regards,
MG

Do you think God listens to suggestions from the end user about how He might do things better?
Do you think God is capable of learning and growing?
Do you think the system He has supposedly set up here on earth is absolutely perfect and unable to be improved?
If improvement for God(s) is impossible, what does that say about Him and our supposed eternity being Gods?
What would you think of a parent who refused to listen and act on feedback from their unhappy children about their perceived parenting from the child's point of view? How does that kind of a parent/child relationship usually end up when the child becomes an adult?

In what way is it possible for us to control God? And if it isn't possible, what's the point of your exhortation that He needs us to back off?

[IHAQ]

Gross oversimplification.

Regards,
MG

Simple obvious truth

I agree. God's involvement in this universe is nothing more than a placebo. Belief in God simply makes people feel better about the bad stuff that happens to them. At it's worst it leads to people neglecting to take responsibility for themselves and their lives.

[mentalgymnast]

I deeply reject the type of thinking that relies on the afterlife for justice or any other type of righteousness. I think it damages human relationships by giving reason for people to neglect righteousness and justice right now.

Au contraire mefrou. I think you may have it backwards. How would one expect to show forth mercy, forbearance and righteousness...and BE/DO so by nature(in an afterlife)...if one neglected to do so and was basically a prick in this life? Doesn’t work that way.

LDS scriptures are full of injunctions/teachings to follow in the footsteps of the Savior and BE as He is and DO as he does. And by good fortune, He forgives and forgets when we fail to do so as long as we sincerely repent. It is through that process that we improve human/eternal relationships.

Regards,
MG

[mentalgymnast]

I just watched a video of a baby impala being ripped from its mother’s womb by a pack of painted dogs, and both the mother and baby impala were eviscerated while conscious.

There may be another life. There may be another simulation to experience. Whatever. But a just god doesn’t create evil, and it doesn’t set up a system whereby one animal must gut another in order to get energy.

If there is a god, it’s terrifying.

- Doc

Teach animals how to be polite and use forks? Teach and require/force humans to not do any evil?

Good luck with that.

Regards,
MG