Nope. And I don't think that the only knowledge is from scientific enquiry. I know about love from art and poetry and so on.
My point here was solely about the philosophy of ideas or even the philosophy of philosophy, to whit that there is something different about belief in a philosophical or religious idea and belief in a cancer diagnosis.
Just because something is not provable or falsifiable doesn’t mean it’s not true or false. Similarly there are a lot of things we believe are true on the basis of the most limited data, although it is true that few of them are “life or death” issues.
In a legal setting it is often necessary to accept the truth or falsity of an account on what, in English law, is called the balance of probabilities. As that phrase indicates, there can be a fair degree of uncertainty about the facts in question which means that they cannot be definitively proved or falsified. But that doesn’t mean that one or other version of the events in question isn’t true. The reality of what actually happened is unaffected by the court’s decision about what it believes happened.
If heaven or hell is real, that reality is unaffected by my belief in it. My believing is a subjective state of mind, but that doesn’t affect the reality of the object of my belief.
I think Christian beliefs about 'hell' or eternal damnation, and how bible verses (that appear to touch on that) are interpreted do not exist in 'doctrinal isolation'. I think they are intrinsically tied up with doctrinal beliefs about salvation, what Jesus achieved on the cross etc etc.
The original question (to KarlLB) was about the belief held by a significant number of people that birthdays matter and should be celebrated. I use the word "belief" because I think it does apply in the same way being discussed here - how human beings believe - even if these two things are of rather different degrees of immediacy and significance.
Maybe, though I’m not completely convinced.
I think what @KarlLB and @Lamb Chopped are getting it is whether a belief is true, whether it is grounded in reality, whether it accurately perceives how things actually are. And what they are saying, it seems to me, is that they are unable to convince themselves into believing something apart from being convinced that that something is true whether they believe it or not. I strongly suspect that they are far from alone in that.
There are lots of people who choose to believe—or at least choose to act as though they believe—that climate change is not real, or is not really a problem, though my experience tells me that not many such people are found on the Ship. I suspect most of us here would say as much mental anguish that concern over climate change may cause us, we cannot simply choose to believe that climate change isn’t a problem so as to avoid that mental anguish.
Another one might be the fact that x whom I care about has cancer. My belief that she has cancer causes me much pain. Nevertheless I would not seek to alter my belief (that she has cancer) unless she informed me she was cured.
I wouldn't say either of those things are good examples, in that they seem to me to conform to the same criteria as referring to physical or geographic spaces or locations, which you rejected in an earlier post:
Okay, to clear up one problem—the primary issue (whether hell exists) is not the same thing at all as arguing about whether it is a geographic space on the lines of the moon or some distant star. Nobody here to my knowledge has argued that it is a physical space of that sort. … It’s the idea that such a distressing state might exist that offends people, not geographic issues.
If you’re truly interested in location and other place details, nobody’s going to be able to answer, and a significant number of us will think you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Good has never given us that kind of information—what we know about final states like hell are necessarily couched in metaphorical language because that’s the only way we can grasp certain spiritual realities that come after this life. Might they be actual places? I suppose they might, if God chose. But for purposes of this argument, the emphasis is on “actual,” that is, real, and not on “ places.” Whatever hell turns out to be in the end from a classification standpoint, it is horrible.
The difference is that both climate change and cancer damage and kill people whether anyone believes in them or not. People who don't believe in them still experience the anguish caused by increasingly extreme weather and cancer, even if they unable to name the cause in the same way as people who do believe in them. The same is not the case for hell. All the anguish caused by hell is caused by believing in it.
As you alluded to earlier: sometime in the future, there may be anguish caused by the actual experience of hell, or there may not be - who knows? But until then, it's all about what's believed.
... All the anguish caused by hell is caused by believing in it....
I've stayed out of this conversation because the OP said that it wasn't one for people like me - who don't believe in it.
But I do believe and have experienced it as a state of mind and body in those incarnations where I have had to balance out the energies I set in motion in a previous one.
One of the hell states I've experienced in one incarmation was the hell state of believing I was afflicted with a physical infirmity as a punishment for a sinful nature and was destined to burn in hell for eternity.
So I'm right there with you @pease because I've experienced it as a form of self-torment and penitent self-flagellation. And I tend to regard those who bind themselves to this belief similarly. I don't want to argue the point because everyone's experience is sacred, and their Higher Awareness knows when enough is enough. When it's time to surrender the belief, that is the moment when the energies giving rise to it have been neutralized.
So I am also completely in agreement with @Lamb Chopped on the matter of not being able to give it up even if she wants to.
No, if a sufficiently compelling line of reasoning were offered, that was more compelling than an existing one, and which led to a different conclusion, then it would logically need to a change in conclusion, or belief. That's what a belief is to me - a conclusion reached from a line of reasoning from available evidence.
But I'm not sure of the why implicit in your formulation. If I didn't already believe a proposition were true, why would I try to convince myself it was? If I did already think it was true, then I wouldn't need to convince myself. It seems to postulate a set of propositions which I think are true but which I don't currently believe, which is a logical contradiction. "Believe" and "Think to be true" are synonymous.
As you've said before. And as I've said before, they might be synonymous for you, but they're not synonymous for me. There are a whole load of beliefs that I hold that have not come about as a result of a rational consideration of reasoned arguments. I suspect this is true for most of us. Why do we celebrate birthdays? What is it that we believe about birthdays that leads us to think that we should celebrate them?
This is I think the sense of "rational consideration of reasoned arguments" that Star Trek writers use when they want to have Kirk score a point off Spock. One can explain why one considers birthdays to be important given their significance in our culture. I wouldn't say that's unreasoned - and I'd also not give birthdays more importance than can be rationally given them considering their role in our culture.
I suppose part of the question I'm trying to address is that both of you appear to have beliefs about Hell that seem to cause you a certain amount of anguish. Do you want to hold onto these beliefs? If it were possible for you to intentionally change your beliefs about Hell, would you want to do so?
I think it's a central doctrine of Christianity that God's beliefs about Hell caused God a certain amount of anguish.
I don't know about Lamb Chopped, but KarlLB, if I'm reading him right, doesn't believe in Hell on what I take to be reasoned grounds- namely that a loving God wouldn't allow it to be instantiated. (X-posted - he has confirmed this.) I think if you approached debate from the point of view of trying to explain why you believe what you believe, or don't believe what the other person doesn't believe, and possibly (**) convince them through reasons, you might find that you might achieve more understanding than if you approach debate from the point of view of trying to diagnose the other person's emotional state and trying to cure it.
Pease--you say "All the anguish caused by hell is caused by believing in it." I hope you're right, as that would mean it either does not exist or else is empty. May it be so!
Doublethink, I don't mind, but it'll have to be after my meetings.
I think this is the problem: the assertion that belief in hell is the same kind of thing as belief in climate change or the effectiveness of vaccinations. It's not.
Why is it not? Can you demonstrate that it’s not, or how it’s not?
To be honest, it seems to me that the problem is that you are putting religious beliefs in a category of “things we choose to believe because we find it useful or helpful, or just find it more agreeable,” while the people who hold those religious beliefs put them in the category of “things I’m convinced are true, and cannot choose not to believe without being convinced I’m wrong about it being true.” As a result, the discussion is predicated on inconsistent assumptions about the subject under discussion.
And yet you are telling me that's just the same as provable, falsifiable, data-driven concepts like the geographic location of Belgium, whether that person over there truly has tuberculosis or whether the planet is getting warmer.
Actually, no, that isn’t what I’m telling you, or trying to tell you. What I’m trying to tell you that you can’t assume everyone approaches an issue from the same perspective that you do.
What I’m saying is that you, like me and, I think, most everyone else here, would say that what matters on an issue like climate change is not whether we like the idea or not, but whether it is true—whether data we have reason to find reliable, interpreted by people we believe worthy of trust, supports the conclusion that global warming is indeed happening and will likely have the consequences predicted regarding it.
In a similar way, many if not most people with religious beliefs would say that what matters with regard to those beliefs is not whether we like the idea of the belief or not, but whether the belief is true—whether data we have reason to find reliable, interpreted by people we believe worthy of trust, supports acceptance of that belief as reflective of the truth.
Now, you (generic you) or others may think the data that those religious people find reliable and persuasive isn’t reliable or persuasive, or that the people they find trustworthy aren’t at all trustworthy. Indeed, you may think it’s all built on fanciful stories with no factual basis. You may think those religious people are deluded. You may even be right about all of that.
But that’s all irrelevant to the question of whether they believe that a certain religious belief—say a certain doctrine regarding Hell—should be accepted as true based on data they find acceptable and persuasive, interpreted by people they find trustworthy.
This matters in a discussion because if parties to the discussion can’t or won’t acknowledge and understand the perspectives of others in the discussion, there’s going to be misunderstanding and people talking past each other. You certainly do not have to agree with the perspectives of others, but you can’t ignore those perspectives without sowing confusion and misunderstanding.
So, what I’m saying is imagine your reaction if, in a discussion with a climate change denier, they said “If the idea of climate change worries you so much, just change your belief about it.” The (very valid) reaction you would likely have is not unlike the reaction someone for whom beliefs about Hell are grounded in whether they are convinced of the truth of those beliefs would have when being told “If your belief about Hell causes you so much anguish, then just change your belief.” Again, you may find their perspective untenable or bizarre. That doesn’t change the fact they they will receive your advice as a non-starter, as something that, to them at least, makes no sense at all and fails to understand their perspective.
Your first three terms (data-driven, provable and falsifiable) are a pretty decent reply to what we were asking for. Next time just spit it out.
…
Now let's try hell. And let's do it with full respect for the fact that we are dealing with something that is different in our ability to access it right now than the cancer diagnosis is.
Data-driven--well, yes. I'd argue that the basic doctrine of hell is data-driven, though my appeal to authority is not to an oncologist, but to Christ's authority as recorded in Scripture. I would secondarily appeal to general experience of human nature and certain logical extrapolations. Before you say it, I am aware that not everyone is going to accept the authority of Christ, or the accurate reportage of what he said in Scripture. Those would be a whole set of subordinate arguments we'd have to have separately if you wished to pursue the matter. But yes, this is an appeal to authority, just as yours is---because most human "data-driven" objects rest on an appeal to authority, simply because one lifetime leaves us so little time to become experts ourselves in so little. You appeal to authority every time you trust a scientist, a judge, an eye witness, and so forth.
Absolutely. I would say the source of our beliefs are our trusted authorities - the authorities that we trust.
I don't have a problem with trusting the authority of God and Christ. I do have a problem with trusting the authority of the Church, and the way that it assumes the role of mediator of the authority of God. For some of us, it's when the authority of Tradition & Scripture was replaced with the authority of the Bible (ie by Luther), which in practice includes the compilers, translators, interpreters etc, leading to interpretations of the Bible, that things get more interesting. When we ourselves provide the final interpretations, as we ask ourselves to do when we read the Bible for ourselves, I would say we can end up acting as our own authorities, to at least some extent.
okay. Provable. Yes, I'd say hell is provable by personal experience. the hitch here is that you have to die first, due to the nature of hell. Before you take me up on that, I can equally well say that the surface of the latest exo-planet is equally provable by personal experience provided you can travel there--which at the moment is not possible. Nevertheless, no one doubts that the latest exo-planet possesses a surface, or surface analogue (I suppose it might be a water world). Therefore difficulty of access does not in itself place a statement in the "mere subjective opinion" category. It may push it into the "for future explorations" category--that is, unfinished business, just as the continents of the Americas were once unfinished business as far as proof goes--but not thereby "a mere matter of opinion, subjective."
I see an important distinction here in what might be called the returnability. There's a big difference between exploring and any research in which there's a risk of the researcher being unable to return a report or return in person. However, a number of researchers down the years do appear to have been prepared to take that risk, if they believe sufficiently strongly in the reality of what they're hoping to experience. In relation to it being opinion, I'm reminded that in the act of proving something to oneself, it is generally held that the thing being "proven" remains a matter of opinion as far as everyone else is concerned.
Note that in the case of gas giants, the question of a surface - a distinct boundary between gaseous and solid phase - can be rather moot.
Falsifiable. As I mentioned above, falsifiability is the other side of provability. Hell either does or does not exist. Die (under certain circumstances) and you (general you) will either prove hell or falsify it. You are not likely to be able to report your findings, but you will certainly have them.
I love the reference to Popper's work. I suspect he'd be apalled. I also wonder what Pascal would have made of falsifiability.
So as I see it, the only real difference here between hell and a cancer diagnosis in terms of category is that one is more accessible, and the matter can be settled here and now. The other must wait for a bit. And there are plenty of universally-acknowledged objective realities that also must "wait for a bit" till we can access the result and make proven statements about their qualities. So temporary inaccessibility can't be a disqualifier for the category of "objective reality."
I have an issue with the bit I've bolded. While it's fair enough to say that there are plenty of other universally-acknowledged realities that might have to wait, I would say there's an important distinction between people, plural, being able to access the results, and the distinctly singular experience of death, which remains a singular experience pending the results of the investigation itself. In the case of Hell, I find the use of the plural "we" prejudges the outcome.
Having said that, I appreciated this post, Lamb Chopped. But an underlying problem I see with the argument is that it fails to take into account the emotive nature of the issue. Hell is not an exoplanet (except in science fiction).
Anyone contemplating this practical, personal demonstration of the existence of hell will need to consider the consequences of being right, and of being wrong, both for themselves, and for the people around them, the people we care about. I don't believe that it's possible to do this dispassionately. It seems likely to involve a fair amount of anguish.
Putting it another way: it might be provable and falsifiable, but I can't see any ethics boards approving this line of research.
On this thread, "anyone contemplating … the existence of hell" includes you, me and everyone else reading it. I realised today that I can feel the emotional toll it's taking.
Okay, just a quick review. Yes, I’m forced to believe that hell exists on the authority of Christ, speaking through the Scripture. No, Christ hasn’t spoken to me directly on the subject, thank God, what a horrible conversation that would be! As some of you will remember, I came to faith in isolation, with nothing but a Bible which I read and which converted me—and then spent the next four years trying to hide my newfound faith. So my understanding of all the basic Christian teachings comes from Scripture, not from a faith community or education, because of the weird circumstances of my earlier life. And I do think the Holy Spirit guides and helps us as we interpret Scripture, not that I can never err—but it’s less likely with his help. And I’m sorry to say, when the conclusion I’ve come to is one I don’t like (here, that hell exists).
I trust the Scriptures to report Christ’s words accurately for the reasons outlined in the “boring thread” I mentioned before, and I trust Christ because I am convinced that he is who he claims to be, namely, one with God, the second person of the Trinity, and someone who loves us and has our best interests at heart. That tells me he knows what he’s talking about and that, if he’s warning me, I’d better pay attention. Even if it’s on a topic I don’t like.
And when you read the Gospels, he mentions hell rather frequently—at least, compared to most modern preachers. It comes up a lot in the parables, though of course we have to be careful about taking things super-literally when they come in a parable. But it also gets brought up when he’s warning the various cities he’s been working in with no result—this kind of thing:
20 Then he began to denounce the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent. 21 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. 22 But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. 23 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. 24 But I tell you that it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.” (Matthew 11)
Now it’s clear to me from reading the Gospels (again and again and again…) that Jesus doesn’t WANT anybody to go to hell, and is in fact giving his life to prevent that outcome (along with other forms of human destruction). He’s not one of those preachers you get the uneasy feeling he WANTS to see people suffer. He hates it.
He also makes it clear that hell was not originally created for human beings in Matthew 25:
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty…’”
So hell was prepared for evil spirits, that is, angels, not human beings. Which gives me a whisper of hope that in the end, none of us will be there. (I’m not happy about the angels, either, but that’s definitely above my paygrade as a subject to consider.) Still, Jesus holds this out as a real possibility for any of us. He’s not above trying to motivate people by fear, at least temporarily.
The other thing that gives me hope there might not be any human being in there… well, with Jesus, you need to watch his language very, very carefully. He has a habit of saying the precise truth, but not correcting people if they choose to draw wrong conclusions from that (at least, people who are not his disciples yet—he corrects the disciples). For example, there’s this guy who approaches him saying, “Good teacher, …” and Jesus catches him up really sharply on that, saying “Why do you call me good? No one but God is good.”
Now this is a perfectly true statement—only God is truly good. And plenty of people run with it and say, “Jesus is denying that he himself is God.” Um, no. He’s not doing that, he was very careful NOT to do that. He has not said the man is WRONG to apply the term “good” to Jesus; he has only warned him about spraying around that word casually and indiscriminately the way he did in his greeting. If the man had truly meant that adjective, the conversation would have been quite different. Probably more like with Thomas after his statement “My Lord and my God!”
Okay, so we have to watch his language carefully. On the subject of hell, I can’t find a single place where Jesus says unequivocally that there will be people in hell. He comes very close to it when he talks about dividing the sheep and the goats, and when he says in Matthew 7:13-14,
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
I think there’s still a bit of wiggle room for universal salvation to come true (please, God!), because these are warning statements about habitual action, or warning portraits of a possible future, and not straightforward statements “There will be x number of people in hell.” If that makes any sense. There is still time to change the road they’re on. And I hope that happens.
There’s even a place where someone asks him that question point blank: “23 And someone said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, 24 “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. 25 When once the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then he will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ 26 Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ 27 But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ 28 In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out. 29 And people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God. 30 And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
That sounds pretty discouraging—and yet, he doesn’t outright say “They will NEVER be able” to enter. I can hope that having screwed up on the first attempt, they will maybe hear one of these warnings, get straightened out, and try again, successfully.
The thing I see in all Christ’s dealings with us is that he respects human choice—he refuses to force anybody—he will call, he will allure, but he won’t drag. I’m aware that there are people who think he SHOULD drag, if necessary, to keep people from choosing hell. I don’t think so, but some do. (Because that’s what it amounts to in the end—a choice. The people who end up in hell are there by their own choice, because they refused, and continue to refuse, what God wants to give them.)
This is getting long. I’m going to break it up a bit.
Okay, the second reason I believe in hell (besides the appeal to Christ’s authority) is that I can see how it flows logically from certain observable human psychological processes. What I mean is this.
I think we’ve all seen people stumble into a negative psychological state—jealousy, anger, resentment, what have you. And normally, if we leave it alone, we get out of it—something else comes along and gives a different focus to our thoughts, or maybe we just go to sleep and wake up happier.
But it is possible—I’ve seen it, I’m sure you’ve seen it—for someone to deliberately nurse that negative emotion. They take that resentment or jealousy and they pet it and stroke it and dwell on it, focusing their attention on it and finding more and more reasons from their external world to feed it—and of course, it grows. It gets bigger, and starts taking over more and more of the person’s life. And sometimes it blooms into something horrible—assault, murder, etc.
Now, I don’t think God sits back and just allows this sort of thing to develop undisturbed. He tries. But again, his refusal to force anyone means that a person who wants to resist him, can. And you can just see how one of these jealousies, or resentments, or hatreds, if nurtured lifelong, can turn into hell. I mean, we don’t even HAVE to have a hell constructed by God—we can make it ourselves. (And there’s a very strong argument for the idea that God constructed hell as a kind of containment zone for people who have made one themselves—who have created a hell in themselves, and who are dangerous to the people around them.)
To be sure, we don’t often see the end result of this process in this life. Occasionally we do—when we come across an elderly person so full of hatred and resentment that it takes us aback, and we wonder how a human baby ever turned into THAT. But in the long, long middle of our lives, it’s easy to overlook the process of building hell, so to speak, when we see it in other people. We may say “He’s got an anger problem,” or “Whoa, didn’t expect THAT from her!” but most of the time, people manage to keep it under a camouflage of decency. And of course, we hesitate to judge other people, because we ourselves are aware of our own shortcomings. So we may brush that stuff off.
But those are the two reasons I believe there is a hell, though I hate it. Christ says so, and I can see the necessity of it when it comes to human psych problems.
It's an interesting observation...Hell isn't uniquely Christian. I figure LC might know more about this than I from context...
There are Buddhist hells. I think I saw a piece once about a Chinese theme park built around them. Hinduism has ideas of post-corporeal consequences that look an awful like "Be a good person, go to the better place, be a bad person, go to the worse place." And that's more or less the way Christians understand hell. There are tropes literally all over American popular culture. There's a TV show called "The Good Place." There's a silly song by Cake called Sheep Go to Heaven with the implied follow up "Goats go to Hell." If you follow appropriate social norms, you get good things! If you refuse to follow appropriate social norms, you get bad things! Follow appropriate social norms, mmkay!
In some fields we call this a pro social story. Be chivalrous. Don't be a jerk. There are consequences. Karma.
It ain't just Christianity. It ain't just the Bible. I think it's wired into our moral thinking that we want the world to be just. And I really think one thing that makes Christianity different as a religion is that it punches a gaping hole in that called "grace."
And some of us have been trying with all of our might to plug that hole because it makes us all really really uncomfortable.
The idea that we create our own hell is pretty standard in psychotherapy. Even more subtle is the notion that an internal saboteur does its dirty work against us. How many people have negative thoughts or voices? Of course, one has to ponder where does this come from? Maybe internalised rage, however this gets us into heavy theory.
The idea that we create our own hell is pretty standard in psychotherapy. Even more subtle is the notion that an internal saboteur does its dirty work against us. How many people have negative thoughts or voices? Of course, one has to ponder where does this come from? Maybe internalised rage, however this gets us into heavy theory.
While I'll confess that I'm busy and I'm not always around, I got pretty strong arms.
Thinking on, a lot of our modern conceptions of hell go back to Dante, and if you read the guy, he was absolutely enraged at some honestly horrifying political abuse that he was witnessing. And his depictions of hell were also imaginary punishments for some of the truly monstrous people he'd seen in real life. There's a lot of political psychology in there too, not just theology. This is especially true with the emphasis on retributive pain that you see so much with the pitchforks and traditional "devil" figures. It's not purely biblical. It's like fan fiction.
And I'm not going to knock that, categorically. I'm not sola scriptura. But I recognize the lines and seams inside my own tradition for what they are, I think.
@Lamb Chopped Within the Quaker tradition there was a man called James Nayler. He wrote and said many things we remember and consider spiritually enriching to the point of including them in Quaker Faith & Practice. However, at one point in his life he became convinced that he was in some sense the reincarnation of Christ.
One of the consequences of this within Quakerism was to develop a process for testing individuals’ religious leadings against corporate discernment - we call the process a meeting for clearness.
I mean no disrespect when I say, that I think there is a danger in interpreting scripture in isolation - we can be very influenced by our personal histories and that can lead us down unhelpful paths.
I think it is the inherent cruelty in the concept of Hell that seems so inconsistent with the nature of a loving God. Also that we see people as debasing themselves when they enact cruelty, and for God to debase himself in this way makes no emotional sense. If God so loved the world that he would send Christ - how could he simultaneous create a reality to torture people for eternity ?
I'm not at all sure God has any hand in the torturing. I mean, I know what popular culture shows in cartoons and such, but i can't recall anything in the scriptures that says God does it. I've generally figured the torment was a function of them being the kind of people they are--and that they continue to be "in hell" in the most important sense no matter where they were physically. Like Mephistopheles--
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
And Milton's devil:
Which way i fly is hell, myself am hell,
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
As for God creating a reality to torture people--Christ explicitly says it was never intended for human beings at all. Hell was for Satan and his evil angels. It is the "kingdom of my Father " that was created for us, "before the foundation of the world" Matthew 25.
This feels like being on the beach and discovering a load of pebbles have words and phrases on them so you try to fit them together to make coherent sense, but they never really do.
Someone earlier mentioned about non-Christian concepts of hell. It feels to me like there are a range of available options about an afterlife and/or punishment, I don't see why I should need to have an opinion about any particular one. Any of them may or may not exist (whatever that means) and either I'm choosing the one that makes sense to me or I'm believing in it for other reasons.
If his knowledge on earth was incomplete - then his statements about Hell may not be comprehensive.
I suppose?
But he strikes me as someone who is very much self aware. I would expect him to signpost his area of ignorance--as in fact he does, when he's speaking about the date of the second coming.
No, if a sufficiently compelling line of reasoning were offered, that was more compelling than an existing one, and which led to a different conclusion, then it would logically need to a change in conclusion, or belief. That's what a belief is to me - a conclusion reached from a line of reasoning from available evidence.
But I'm not sure of the why implicit in your formulation. If I didn't already believe a proposition were true, why would I try to convince myself it was? If I did already think it was true, then I wouldn't need to convince myself. It seems to postulate a set of propositions which I think are true but which I don't currently believe, which is a logical contradiction. "Believe" and "Think to be true" are synonymous.
As you've said before. And as I've said before, they might be synonymous for you, but they're not synonymous for me. There are a whole load of beliefs that I hold that have not come about as a result of a rational consideration of reasoned arguments. I suspect this is true for most of us. Why do we celebrate birthdays? What is it that we believe about birthdays that leads us to think that we should celebrate them?
KarlLB has said exactly what I would have. I’ve no doubt you’ll consider me self-deluded, but from the inside I can tell you that the process of changing one of my beliefs about God etc looks and feels precisely like the process of changing one of my beliefs about astronomy (and yes, I’ve done both). New evidence turns up, I look at it critically, I’m convinced (or not), and then I start incorporating the new understanding into my life. Very boring of me, really.
I don't consider either of you to be deluded.
I suppose part of the question I'm trying to address is that both of you appear to have beliefs about Hell that seem to cause you a certain amount of anguish. Do you want to hold onto these beliefs? If it were possible for you to intentionally change your beliefs about Hell, would you want to do so?
My personal experience that it is possible to change one's beliefs. Taking the current topic, I think where I differ from what you both describe is that, rather than being presented with a reasoned argument (which I'm not planning to do), I believe it is possible for someone to set out to change their beliefs about Hell themself.
And in this, if anything, I suspect that I'm the one who sounds more deluded.
maybe, then, we should drop the whole "deluded" thing, since none of us appears to feel that way about the others!
Do I want to hold on to this belief? Dear God, no. If I could get rid of it, I would.
If it were possible for me to intentionally change my beliefs about hell,...
Well, here's the rub. "Possible" to me means one thing: That sufficient evidence has turned up to allow me to say, "Oh thank God, I was wrong." If that happened, I'd be incredibly glad.
But if you mean "Would you be willing to change your belief regardless of whether it corresponded to reality or not?" the answer is no. And that's because I can't tolerate error/falsehood/deception/lies of any sort in my personal understanding of the world. Not just on hell, but on pretty much everything. Heck, someone once convinced me I'd fucked up my understanding of Mercury's rotation and orbit, and I promptly spent some hours researching this and getting myself straightened out. I am not an astrophysicist and I am never likely to need that piece of data again. But I can't stand having errors in my mental database.
It seems to me that at some level belief is a choice. Whilst it might feel from within that these things are a "package deal" and that one isn't being invited to decide which aspects to believe, surely the history of Christian belief says this isn't the case.
If a belief about something or someone is causing mental anguish, one would think that the natural thing to do would be to stop believing it, stop thinking and stop worrying about it. That's a choice.
You can't just stop believing in things. I mean, I'd stop believing that Russia is invading Ukraine, that tens of thousands of Palestinian children weren't dead and that Trump was president of the USA if choosing to believe things changed reality.
I think you are comparing apples with rainbows in this example.
Not really. If Hell is real it's as real as Gaza, the White House and Kiiv. And choosing to believe otherwise wouldn't make a smidgeon of difference to its reality.
I think this is the problem: the assertion that belief in hell is the same kind of thing as belief in climate change or the effectiveness of vaccinations. It's not.
It's not so much that the belief is the same. It's that if Hell exists it's as objectively real as climate change or vaccine efficacy. So therefore what matters to me is what is true, not what I'd like to be true.
As it happens I don't believe Hell as commonly imagined is real, as a result of a chain of reasoning not far unlike Rob Bell's (Love Wins). If I'm right then a lot of people are objectively wrong. To be honest it's the ones who will be disappointed who worry me.
I would be elated beyond measure if it turned out that universalism were true after all. The idea of anyone being disappointed... er... wait, if they were disappointed, then arguably they'd still be clinging to something nasty, which itself would eventually have to be purged away somehow over the millennia, since universalism would apply to the disappointed people as well. Of course, what they would do here on Earth with that attitude could be (and might be right now) very bad indeed.
As some of you will remember, I came to faith in isolation, with nothing but a Bible which I read and which converted me—and then spent the next four years trying to hide my newfound faith.
I'd like to know the story if it's posted on the Ship elsewhere.
I don't know if I'm answering anyone in particular here, just thinking on and maybe repeating myself a little...
Not torture, but there's still a sense of threat. And there's a lot of imagery of fire.
And certainly, it's not biblical, but I think that a lot of Christian notions of hell do come out of Dante, and Dante had punishment on his mind a lot. He was very angry at very particular people and, using a Catholic sense, imagined them mired in an eternal torment that, more like the Buddhist model, tied them up in ways that were ironic commentaries on the sins they had committed in life. Some of these, if I recall, were almost comedic when viewed from a safe distance, like grotesque political cartoons.
But yeah, I don't think that's biblical either. It's just interesting that it latches so easily onto our psych. We want there to be some kind of connection between our life and what goes on next.
Maybe for some people universalism would be hell. Imagine Pol Pot living scot-free in the afterlife. Or Jefferson Davis, Pinochet, etc. to avoid the obvious one. These guys, just going on like nothing had happened. No punishment, no consequence. All of that misery for nothing.
It's a hard thing to swallow, I think.
And that's why Purgatory exists. It's funny, if you think Hell isn't biblical, I think Purgatory is absolutely ridiculous from a biblical standpoint. But logically speaking? Or ethically speaking? It makes perfect sense. If you allow for redemption and if you allow that redemption is a process. And if you allow that life may be more than this corporeal stuff, surely there must be some way for a perfect God to give people more time? Surely there's more time, right? Surely this perfect creator can give us enough time to get things right. It's like a video game, there's always another chance to learn the moveset, always another chance to figure out how to not-die, now to not-fail, how to find that eternal life that we are supposed to receive.
And in that wish, Purgatory is born, the proper sort of punishment, pain with a purpose, to refine and perfect. And that is a biblical image, I believe. Burn off the impurities until all that remains is pure metal. Humans do love their technological metaphors.
Torture is pain to a point, "hurt the thing until the thing does what you want." It's reducing a person to a tool, a slave, you might say, in koine, a δοῦλος. Refining isn't torture because rocks don't experience pain when they melt. They're rocks. Do that to a human and it hurts, because we have flesh. Flesh feels pain. Paul does have some funny things to say about flesh and the experience of suffering.
I've seen too much pain in my own life to accept that God cannot be the author of pain. Hurts a little to type those words, but I prefer honest discomfort. That said, I don't think the pain is the point in itself, I do not think God is a sadist, which I think means God does not engage in one sort of torture, but I do think God is a teacher of sorts. And sometimes pain is a tool for that.
Of course, natural suffering is a thing and I've seen too much of that to fall for the simplistic notion that pain is always good for us or edifying. And a lot of the "hell" imagery in the text seems less about "I'll hurt you" and more "I will annihilate you." The farmer doesn't want to hurt the chaff, he just lets it blow away, or uses it for kindling. It's nothing personal. The chaff is just so much stuff.
But Imago Dei says we are more than chaff, more than sparrows. He counts sparrows, surely He counts us. He can count the hairs on our head, so I'm told. And maybe the weight of our seriousness gives hell its dignity? If I throw away an apple core, that's one thing, but if I have to bury a body, even the body of someone I loathe, that's a more serious affair.
So, we are images of God, and also *ahem* servants thereto. We suffer changes at God's will, and these likely include discomforts that may be for our benefit, or not. If we are Christian, the Bible indicates that Jesus often threatened us his followers with destruction using various metaphors. These often involved fire, sometimes destroying, sometimes refining. Refining is, of course, a destructive process for removing "impurities."
Maybe we are akin to those three old Jewish boys in the furnace, chilling out in an inferno while everything around us gets burned to ash? And heaven and hell are the same place?
I picked up in seminary the argument that heaven and hell themselves were distractions and the real gospel was in the general Resurrection. New heaven, new earth, new body, new life. All that is old just passes away. It just doesn't matter.
Pardon the rambling. I'm tired. I hope some of this is edifying for somebody.
I think this is the problem: the assertion that belief in hell is the same kind of thing as belief in climate change or the effectiveness of vaccinations. It's not.
It's not so much that the belief is the same. It's that if Hell exists it's as objectively real as climate change or vaccine efficacy. So therefore what matters to me is what is true, not what I'd like to be true.
As it happens I don't believe Hell as commonly imagined is real, as a result of a chain of reasoning not far unlike Rob Bell's (Love Wins). If I'm right then a lot of people are objectively wrong. To be honest it's the ones who will be disappointed who worry me.
I would be elated beyond measure if it turned out that universalism were true after all. The idea of anyone being disappointed... er... wait, if they were disappointed, then arguably they'd still be clinging to something nasty, which itself would eventually have to be purged away somehow over the millennia, since universalism would apply to the disappointed people as well. Of course, what they would do here on Earth with that attitude could be (and might be right now) very bad indeed.
I get the impression that if a person found themselves in heaven and were self-aware enough to realise that they'd been wrong about hell-as-eternal-punishment, a significant percentage of Christians in that position would be disappointed. Some because the idea appeals to them. Some because they'd feel short-changed. Some because they like the feeling of being right.
Which in itself is pretty ridiculous on various levels.
I get the impression that if a person found themselves in heaven and were self-aware enough to realise that they'd been wrong about hell-as-eternal-punishment, a significant percentage of Christians in that position would be disappointed. Some because the idea appeals to them. Some because they'd feel short-changed. Some because they like the feeling of being right.
Which in itself is pretty ridiculous on various levels.
I think there's an economics to it. In a scarcity game, their less is my more. So if they get more, I must get less, relatively speaking. Infinite supply means zero value. The more goods there are, the less important any particular good is. If I can look across the lake of fire and see other people, then I know I'm better off. Without that frame of reference, how can I know where I am? How do I know this is heaven at all? Maybe I picked the wrong door and wound up in Nirvana!
Though I think that kind of competitive thinking is a necessary component of Hell. In the Bible, I think it might be telling that the guy in heaven is actually pleading on behalf of the guy in hell. It's a fiction that Jesus creates, but I think that's a point to it. It seems like selfishness is a barrier to entry, so it's hard to imagine people in heaven deriving any joy from hell's existence.
I can't think of a parable where someone is pleading for someone else in hell (pleading with whom?) but there IS one where Jesus just automatically presupposes that people in heaven would be trying to help people in hell if it were possible. That's the one in Luke 16, where Abraham in paradise is talking to the rich man in hell, and he says,
"Besides all this, there is a huge gulf fixed between us and you, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us."
It's easy to see why people in hell would want to travel to heaven; much less easy to see why people in heaven would want to do the reverse trip--unless we assume that they feel sorry for them and want to help them if it's at all possible. And in fact my experience (living among people who do believe in hell) is that such believers DO in fact want to help anyone they can, up to and including people who are in hell or hellbound. I mean, I can't tell you how many people have confessed to me, embarrassed and shamefaced, that they've prayed for the devil, because they feel sorry for him. How much more for evil people! (Yes, I've done it too, so there's my dose of embarrassment)
Also from the parable--we can't overload the details of any parable, but we can take note of them, and wonder what they say about God--there's that gulf. Who put it there? God, apparently. Who else could have done it?
Why's it there? Well, to keep heavenly folk from traveling to hell. Given that Jesus himself made that trip, we can't say there's anything WRONG in it. But it may well be that God knows the effort will be both useless and heartbreaking, and so he puts up a barrier to prevent futile effort.
I tend to think that if hell-as-punishment exists and a majority of the dead are in it, then the universe makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But generally I don't think about things that are ridiculous.
I don't know if I'm answering anyone in particular here, just thinking on and maybe repeating myself a little...
Not torture, but there's still a sense of threat. And there's a lot of imagery of fire.
And certainly, it's not biblical, but I think that a lot of Christian notions of hell do come out of Dante, and Dante had punishment on his mind a lot. He was very angry at very particular people and, using a Catholic sense, imagined them mired in an eternal torment that, more like the Buddhist model, tied them up in ways that were ironic commentaries on the sins they had committed in life. Some of these, if I recall, were almost comedic when viewed from a safe distance, like grotesque political cartoons.
But yeah, I don't think that's biblical either. It's just interesting that it latches so easily onto our psych. We want there to be some kind of connection between our life and what goes on next.
Maybe for some people universalism would be hell. Imagine Pol Pot living scot-free in the afterlife. Or Jefferson Davis, Pinochet, etc. to avoid the obvious one. These guys, just going on like nothing had happened. No punishment, no consequence. All of that misery for nothing.
It's a hard thing to swallow, I think.
And that's why Purgatory exists. It's funny, if you think Hell isn't biblical, I think Purgatory is absolutely ridiculous from a biblical standpoint. But logically speaking? Or ethically speaking? It makes perfect sense. If you allow for redemption and if you allow that redemption is a process. And if you allow that life may be more than this corporeal stuff, surely there must be some way for a perfect God to give people more time? Surely there's more time, right? Surely this perfect creator can give us enough time to get things right. It's like a video game, there's always another chance to learn the moveset, always another chance to figure out how to not-die, now to not-fail, how to find that eternal life that we are supposed to receive.
And in that wish, Purgatory is born, the proper sort of punishment, pain with a purpose, to refine and perfect. And that is a biblical image, I believe. Burn off the impurities until all that remains is pure metal. Humans do love their technological metaphors.
Torture is pain to a point, "hurt the thing until the thing does what you want." It's reducing a person to a tool, a slave, you might say, in koine, a δοῦλος. Refining isn't torture because rocks don't experience pain when they melt. They're rocks. Do that to a human and it hurts, because we have flesh. Flesh feels pain. Paul does have some funny things to say about flesh and the experience of suffering.
I've seen too much pain in my own life to accept that God cannot be the author of pain. Hurts a little to type those words, but I prefer honest discomfort. That said, I don't think the pain is the point in itself, I do not think God is a sadist, which I think means God does not engage in one sort of torture, but I do think God is a teacher of sorts. And sometimes pain is a tool for that.
Of course, natural suffering is a thing and I've seen too much of that to fall for the simplistic notion that pain is always good for us or edifying. And a lot of the "hell" imagery in the text seems less about "I'll hurt you" and more "I will annihilate you." The farmer doesn't want to hurt the chaff, he just lets it blow away, or uses it for kindling. It's nothing personal. The chaff is just so much stuff.
But Imago Dei says we are more than chaff, more than sparrows. He counts sparrows, surely He counts us. He can count the hairs on our head, so I'm told. And maybe the weight of our seriousness gives hell its dignity? If I throw away an apple core, that's one thing, but if I have to bury a body, even the body of someone I loathe, that's a more serious affair.
So, we are images of God, and also *ahem* servants thereto. We suffer changes at God's will, and these likely include discomforts that may be for our benefit, or not. If we are Christian, the Bible indicates that Jesus often threatened us his followers with destruction using various metaphors. These often involved fire, sometimes destroying, sometimes refining. Refining is, of course, a destructive process for removing "impurities."
Maybe we are akin to those three old Jewish boys in the furnace, chilling out in an inferno while everything around us gets burned to ash? And heaven and hell are the same place?
I picked up in seminary the argument that heaven and hell themselves were distractions and the real gospel was in the general Resurrection. New heaven, new earth, new body, new life. All that is old just passes away. It just doesn't matter.
Pardon the rambling. I'm tired. I hope some of this is edifying for somebody.
I will say that Dante is a lot better both theologically and otherwise then you may be giving him credit for here. And also remember that the inferno is only the first third of the entire divine comedy.
Heaven and hell being the same place, just with people reacting differently to it, is actually a very orthodox or even Orthodox idea.
I think this is the problem: the assertion that belief in hell is the same kind of thing as belief in climate change or the effectiveness of vaccinations. It's not.
It's not so much that the belief is the same. It's that if Hell exists it's as objectively real as climate change or vaccine efficacy. So therefore what matters to me is what is true, not what I'd like to be true.
As it happens I don't believe Hell as commonly imagined is real, as a result of a chain of reasoning not far unlike Rob Bell's (Love Wins). If I'm right then a lot of people are objectively wrong. To be honest it's the ones who will be disappointed who worry me.
I would be elated beyond measure if it turned out that universalism were true after all. The idea of anyone being disappointed... er... wait, if they were disappointed, then arguably they'd still be clinging to something nasty, which itself would eventually have to be purged away somehow over the millennia, since universalism would apply to the disappointed people as well. Of course, what they would do here on Earth with that attitude could be (and might be right now) very bad indeed.
I get the impression that if a person found themselves in heaven and were self-aware enough to realise that they'd been wrong about hell-as-eternal-punishment, a significant percentage of Christians in that position would be disappointed. Some because the idea appeals to them. Some because they'd feel short-changed. Some because they like the feeling of being right.
Which in itself is pretty ridiculous on various levels.
Or even Hellish. In fact, come to think of it there are specific scenes in CS Lewis‘s excellent book the great divorce that this reminds me of.
I can't think of a parable where someone is pleading for someone else in hell (pleading with whom?) but there IS one where Jesus just automatically presupposes that people in heaven would be trying to help people in hell if it were possible. That's the one in Luke 16, where Abraham in paradise is talking to the rich man in hell, and he says,
"Besides all this, there is a huge gulf fixed between us and you, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us."
It's easy to see why people in hell would want to travel to heaven; much less easy to see why people in heaven would want to do the reverse trip--unless we assume that they feel sorry for them and want to help them if it's at all possible. And in fact my experience (living among people who do believe in hell) is that such believers DO in fact want to help anyone they can, up to and including people who are in hell or hellbound. I mean, I can't tell you how many people have confessed to me, embarrassed and shamefaced, that they've prayed for the devil, because they feel sorry for him. How much more for evil people! (Yes, I've done it too, so there's my dose of embarrassment)
Also from the parable--we can't overload the details of any parable, but we can take note of them, and wonder what they say about God--there's that gulf. Who put it there? God, apparently. Who else could have done it?
Why's it there? Well, to keep heavenly folk from traveling to hell. Given that Jesus himself made that trip, we can't say there's anything WRONG in it. But it may well be that God knows the effort will be both useless and heartbreaking, and so he puts up a barrier to prevent futile effort.
Oh my goodness if you have not read CS Lewis’s the great divorce, please please read this. You talked about people in hell wanting to travel to heaven and… The matter of people wanting to travel from one to the other for various reason reasons… Or not wanting to travel there… Is a major plot point. It’s an awesome awesome book and I really ought to reread that perhaps in the not too distant future.
PS no need to be embarrassed, I’ve prayed for the devil too. Just in case. And for everyone else.
I think one thing that people are not necessarily thinking of in a couple of cases on the thread are that, as I understand it, the people or beings in heaven are not there forever impenitently clinging to the awfulness of the selves that they have been. They have realized what they did was wrong, and they have ultimately and finally rejected and been set free from all of that evil, and been redeemed. They’re not just going on forever being horrible people, but in a nice place. In some cases, they might be practically unrecognizable from the way we know of them here on earth. Again, I think the great divorce shows some very good idea ideas of what that could look like or at least analogies.
To correct my earlier image, this now feels like one of those old adventure books where you designed your own story by flicking to page 24.
How exactly? I genuinely don’t get it. (I remember those! I wonder if Internet/computer adventure games have essentially replaced them completely at this point…)
To correct my earlier image, this now feels like one of those old adventure books where you designed your own story by flicking to page 24.
How exactly? I genuinely don’t get it. (I remember those! I wonder if Internet/computer adventure games have essentially replaced them completely at this point…)
To correct my earlier image, this now feels like one of those old adventure books where you designed your own story by flicking to page 24.
How exactly? I genuinely don’t get it. (I remember those! I wonder if Internet/computer adventure games have essentially replaced them completely at this point…)
It seems like you've moved into flights of fancy where you decide that some religious author is more authoritative than any other and then you measure other ideas (on hell in this case) against it.
Which is fine, I don't have a problem with you "choosing your own adventure" but this doesn't seem to be any different to my comment above that if you don't like the logical conclusions of your theology then you should change your theology.
Pease--you say "All the anguish caused by hell is caused by believing in it." I hope you're right, as that would mean it either does not exist or else is empty. May it be so!
I can see that from your perspective that would be a big win, compared to the eternity of anguish of a populated hell. From another perspective, it's a big lose, as it means the 2000 years (and counting) of anguish of multitudes of human beings was apparently needless.
Doublethink, I don't mind, but it'll have to be after my meetings.
And to Doublethink (because the question you put to Lamb Chopped arose from the question you thought I was asking her about interpreting scripture):
Regarding Lamb Chopped's replies to you, I don't have a big issue with Lamb Chopped's reasoning in her first post. And I recognise and understand the reasoning in her second post.
But as I've already said, I don't see reasoning as being the primary way we acquire these beliefs. And I decreasingly think about beliefs in terms of being true or false, or resulting from true/false reasoning.
To correct my earlier image, this now feels like one of those old adventure books where you designed your own story by flicking to page 24.
How exactly? I genuinely don’t get it. (I remember those! I wonder if Internet/computer adventure games have essentially replaced them completely at this point…)
It seems like you've moved into flights of fancy where you decide that some religious author is more authoritative than any other and then you measure other ideas (on hell in this case) against it.
Which is fine, I don't have a problem with you "choosing your own adventure" but this doesn't seem to be any different to my comment above that if you don't like the logical conclusions of your theology then you should change your theology.
I don’t think I’m doing that but peace be with you regardless.
I will add that Lewis was the one who taught me about Christianity in the first place, and I think that his expression/explication of these ideas still make the most sense to me.
The notion of the fires of Hell and the fiery love of God being the same thing, just with two different responses to it, is indeed one of several very orthodox (and big O Orthodox) beliefs on the matter. This seems to me to fit best with God’s character as I understand Him.
Hello,
This isn't Purgatory but a place for own voice lived experience where the usual rules on no personal attacks are supplemented by the guidelines
respect for posters' lived experience will be necessary. Posting style therefore needs to reflect this; we're looking for listening, sharing, thinking and giving room to those with lived experience – aiming for constructive dialogue rather than competitive debate.
People are talking about their lived experience of Christian faith. Posters dont have to agree with that but do have to follow the guidelines.
Accusing another poster of ' moving into flights of fancy' is not following our guidelines and is a personal attack @Basketactortale which breaks C3
Please be more careful how you characterise other people's lived experience in general and avoid negative accusations to other posters.
Thanks
To correct my earlier image, this now feels like one of those old adventure books where you designed your own story by flicking to page 24.
Most of your statements seem to hinge on incredulity. However, I'm not sure this is a profitable path. Many people are incredulous about Christianity, or indeed, other religions, but so what?
Regarding my own beliefs about hell, I've never been an adherent of universalism (universal reconciliation). The prospect of eternal life without the prospect of eternal consequences of putting oneself first undermines the principle of fairness. I'm less decided about the nature of these consequences - whether they involve separation, punishment, suffering, etc, or even whether we need to define them in any detail.
The 'principle of fairness' is not as simple as it sounds. I am thinking of the parable of the vineyard owner who paid his employees the same whether they signed on at the beginning or the end of the day. Our minister conceded that that was one of the more difficult texts on which he had preached.
Comments
Nope. And I don't think that the only knowledge is from scientific enquiry. I know about love from art and poetry and so on.
My point here was solely about the philosophy of ideas or even the philosophy of philosophy, to whit that there is something different about belief in a philosophical or religious idea and belief in a cancer diagnosis.
In a legal setting it is often necessary to accept the truth or falsity of an account on what, in English law, is called the balance of probabilities. As that phrase indicates, there can be a fair degree of uncertainty about the facts in question which means that they cannot be definitively proved or falsified. But that doesn’t mean that one or other version of the events in question isn’t true. The reality of what actually happened is unaffected by the court’s decision about what it believes happened.
If heaven or hell is real, that reality is unaffected by my belief in it. My believing is a subjective state of mind, but that doesn’t affect the reality of the object of my belief.
As you alluded to earlier: sometime in the future, there may be anguish caused by the actual experience of hell, or there may not be - who knows? But until then, it's all about what's believed.
I've stayed out of this conversation because the OP said that it wasn't one for people like me - who don't believe in it.
But I do believe and have experienced it as a state of mind and body in those incarnations where I have had to balance out the energies I set in motion in a previous one.
One of the hell states I've experienced in one incarmation was the hell state of believing I was afflicted with a physical infirmity as a punishment for a sinful nature and was destined to burn in hell for eternity.
So I'm right there with you @pease because I've experienced it as a form of self-torment and penitent self-flagellation. And I tend to regard those who bind themselves to this belief similarly. I don't want to argue the point because everyone's experience is sacred, and their Higher Awareness knows when enough is enough. When it's time to surrender the belief, that is the moment when the energies giving rise to it have been neutralized.
So I am also completely in agreement with @Lamb Chopped on the matter of not being able to give it up even if she wants to.
AFF
I think it's a central doctrine of Christianity that God's beliefs about Hell caused God a certain amount of anguish.
I don't know about Lamb Chopped, but KarlLB, if I'm reading him right, doesn't believe in Hell on what I take to be reasoned grounds- namely that a loving God wouldn't allow it to be instantiated. (X-posted - he has confirmed this.) I think if you approached debate from the point of view of trying to explain why you believe what you believe, or don't believe what the other person doesn't believe, and possibly (**) convince them through reasons, you might find that you might achieve more understanding than if you approach debate from the point of view of trying to diagnose the other person's emotional state and trying to cure it.
(*) anything might happen.
Doublethink, I don't mind, but it'll have to be after my meetings.
What I’m saying is that you, like me and, I think, most everyone else here, would say that what matters on an issue like climate change is not whether we like the idea or not, but whether it is true—whether data we have reason to find reliable, interpreted by people we believe worthy of trust, supports the conclusion that global warming is indeed happening and will likely have the consequences predicted regarding it.
In a similar way, many if not most people with religious beliefs would say that what matters with regard to those beliefs is not whether we like the idea of the belief or not, but whether the belief is true—whether data we have reason to find reliable, interpreted by people we believe worthy of trust, supports acceptance of that belief as reflective of the truth.
Now, you (generic you) or others may think the data that those religious people find reliable and persuasive isn’t reliable or persuasive, or that the people they find trustworthy aren’t at all trustworthy. Indeed, you may think it’s all built on fanciful stories with no factual basis. You may think those religious people are deluded. You may even be right about all of that.
But that’s all irrelevant to the question of whether they believe that a certain religious belief—say a certain doctrine regarding Hell—should be accepted as true based on data they find acceptable and persuasive, interpreted by people they find trustworthy.
This matters in a discussion because if parties to the discussion can’t or won’t acknowledge and understand the perspectives of others in the discussion, there’s going to be misunderstanding and people talking past each other. You certainly do not have to agree with the perspectives of others, but you can’t ignore those perspectives without sowing confusion and misunderstanding.
So, what I’m saying is imagine your reaction if, in a discussion with a climate change denier, they said “If the idea of climate change worries you so much, just change your belief about it.” The (very valid) reaction you would likely have is not unlike the reaction someone for whom beliefs about Hell are grounded in whether they are convinced of the truth of those beliefs would have when being told “If your belief about Hell causes you so much anguish, then just change your belief.” Again, you may find their perspective untenable or bizarre. That doesn’t change the fact they they will receive your advice as a non-starter, as something that, to them at least, makes no sense at all and fails to understand their perspective.
I don't have a problem with trusting the authority of God and Christ. I do have a problem with trusting the authority of the Church, and the way that it assumes the role of mediator of the authority of God. For some of us, it's when the authority of Tradition & Scripture was replaced with the authority of the Bible (ie by Luther), which in practice includes the compilers, translators, interpreters etc, leading to interpretations of the Bible, that things get more interesting. When we ourselves provide the final interpretations, as we ask ourselves to do when we read the Bible for ourselves, I would say we can end up acting as our own authorities, to at least some extent.
I see an important distinction here in what might be called the returnability. There's a big difference between exploring and any research in which there's a risk of the researcher being unable to return a report or return in person. However, a number of researchers down the years do appear to have been prepared to take that risk, if they believe sufficiently strongly in the reality of what they're hoping to experience. In relation to it being opinion, I'm reminded that in the act of proving something to oneself, it is generally held that the thing being "proven" remains a matter of opinion as far as everyone else is concerned.
Note that in the case of gas giants, the question of a surface - a distinct boundary between gaseous and solid phase - can be rather moot.
I love the reference to Popper's work. I suspect he'd be apalled. I also wonder what Pascal would have made of falsifiability.
I have an issue with the bit I've bolded. While it's fair enough to say that there are plenty of other universally-acknowledged realities that might have to wait, I would say there's an important distinction between people, plural, being able to access the results, and the distinctly singular experience of death, which remains a singular experience pending the results of the investigation itself. In the case of Hell, I find the use of the plural "we" prejudges the outcome.
Having said that, I appreciated this post, Lamb Chopped. But an underlying problem I see with the argument is that it fails to take into account the emotive nature of the issue. Hell is not an exoplanet (except in science fiction).
Anyone contemplating this practical, personal demonstration of the existence of hell will need to consider the consequences of being right, and of being wrong, both for themselves, and for the people around them, the people we care about. I don't believe that it's possible to do this dispassionately. It seems likely to involve a fair amount of anguish.
Putting it another way: it might be provable and falsifiable, but I can't see any ethics boards approving this line of research.
On this thread, "anyone contemplating … the existence of hell" includes you, me and everyone else reading it. I realised today that I can feel the emotional toll it's taking.
Okay, just a quick review. Yes, I’m forced to believe that hell exists on the authority of Christ, speaking through the Scripture. No, Christ hasn’t spoken to me directly on the subject, thank God, what a horrible conversation that would be!
I trust the Scriptures to report Christ’s words accurately for the reasons outlined in the “boring thread” I mentioned before, and I trust Christ because I am convinced that he is who he claims to be, namely, one with God, the second person of the Trinity, and someone who loves us and has our best interests at heart. That tells me he knows what he’s talking about and that, if he’s warning me, I’d better pay attention. Even if it’s on a topic I don’t like.
And when you read the Gospels, he mentions hell rather frequently—at least, compared to most modern preachers. It comes up a lot in the parables, though of course we have to be careful about taking things super-literally when they come in a parable. But it also gets brought up when he’s warning the various cities he’s been working in with no result—this kind of thing:
20 Then he began to denounce the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent. 21 “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. 22 But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. 23 And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. 24 But I tell you that it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you.” (Matthew 11)
Now it’s clear to me from reading the Gospels (again and again and again…) that Jesus doesn’t WANT anybody to go to hell, and is in fact giving his life to prevent that outcome (along with other forms of human destruction). He’s not one of those preachers you get the uneasy feeling he WANTS to see people suffer. He hates it.
He also makes it clear that hell was not originally created for human beings in Matthew 25:
41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty…’”
So hell was prepared for evil spirits, that is, angels, not human beings. Which gives me a whisper of hope that in the end, none of us will be there. (I’m not happy about the angels, either, but that’s definitely above my paygrade as a subject to consider.) Still, Jesus holds this out as a real possibility for any of us. He’s not above trying to motivate people by fear, at least temporarily.
The other thing that gives me hope there might not be any human being in there… well, with Jesus, you need to watch his language very, very carefully. He has a habit of saying the precise truth, but not correcting people if they choose to draw wrong conclusions from that (at least, people who are not his disciples yet—he corrects the disciples). For example, there’s this guy who approaches him saying, “Good teacher, …” and Jesus catches him up really sharply on that, saying “Why do you call me good? No one but God is good.”
Now this is a perfectly true statement—only God is truly good. And plenty of people run with it and say, “Jesus is denying that he himself is God.” Um, no. He’s not doing that, he was very careful NOT to do that. He has not said the man is WRONG to apply the term “good” to Jesus; he has only warned him about spraying around that word casually and indiscriminately the way he did in his greeting. If the man had truly meant that adjective, the conversation would have been quite different. Probably more like with Thomas after his statement “My Lord and my God!”
Okay, so we have to watch his language carefully. On the subject of hell, I can’t find a single place where Jesus says unequivocally that there will be people in hell. He comes very close to it when he talks about dividing the sheep and the goats, and when he says in Matthew 7:13-14,
“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
I think there’s still a bit of wiggle room for universal salvation to come true (please, God!), because these are warning statements about habitual action, or warning portraits of a possible future, and not straightforward statements “There will be x number of people in hell.” If that makes any sense. There is still time to change the road they’re on. And I hope that happens.
There’s even a place where someone asks him that question point blank: “23 And someone said to him, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” And he said to them, 24 “Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able. 25 When once the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then he will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’ 26 Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.’ 27 But he will say, ‘I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of evil!’ 28 In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God but you yourselves cast out. 29 And people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God. 30 And behold, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
That sounds pretty discouraging—and yet, he doesn’t outright say “They will NEVER be able” to enter. I can hope that having screwed up on the first attempt, they will maybe hear one of these warnings, get straightened out, and try again, successfully.
The thing I see in all Christ’s dealings with us is that he respects human choice—he refuses to force anybody—he will call, he will allure, but he won’t drag. I’m aware that there are people who think he SHOULD drag, if necessary, to keep people from choosing hell. I don’t think so, but some do. (Because that’s what it amounts to in the end—a choice. The people who end up in hell are there by their own choice, because they refused, and continue to refuse, what God wants to give them.)
This is getting long. I’m going to break it up a bit.
I think we’ve all seen people stumble into a negative psychological state—jealousy, anger, resentment, what have you. And normally, if we leave it alone, we get out of it—something else comes along and gives a different focus to our thoughts, or maybe we just go to sleep and wake up happier.
But it is possible—I’ve seen it, I’m sure you’ve seen it—for someone to deliberately nurse that negative emotion. They take that resentment or jealousy and they pet it and stroke it and dwell on it, focusing their attention on it and finding more and more reasons from their external world to feed it—and of course, it grows. It gets bigger, and starts taking over more and more of the person’s life. And sometimes it blooms into something horrible—assault, murder, etc.
Now, I don’t think God sits back and just allows this sort of thing to develop undisturbed. He tries. But again, his refusal to force anyone means that a person who wants to resist him, can. And you can just see how one of these jealousies, or resentments, or hatreds, if nurtured lifelong, can turn into hell. I mean, we don’t even HAVE to have a hell constructed by God—we can make it ourselves. (And there’s a very strong argument for the idea that God constructed hell as a kind of containment zone for people who have made one themselves—who have created a hell in themselves, and who are dangerous to the people around them.)
To be sure, we don’t often see the end result of this process in this life. Occasionally we do—when we come across an elderly person so full of hatred and resentment that it takes us aback, and we wonder how a human baby ever turned into THAT. But in the long, long middle of our lives, it’s easy to overlook the process of building hell, so to speak, when we see it in other people. We may say “He’s got an anger problem,” or “Whoa, didn’t expect THAT from her!” but most of the time, people manage to keep it under a camouflage of decency. And of course, we hesitate to judge other people, because we ourselves are aware of our own shortcomings. So we may brush that stuff off.
But those are the two reasons I believe there is a hell, though I hate it. Christ says so, and I can see the necessity of it when it comes to human psych problems.
There are Buddhist hells. I think I saw a piece once about a Chinese theme park built around them. Hinduism has ideas of post-corporeal consequences that look an awful like "Be a good person, go to the better place, be a bad person, go to the worse place." And that's more or less the way Christians understand hell. There are tropes literally all over American popular culture. There's a TV show called "The Good Place." There's a silly song by Cake called Sheep Go to Heaven with the implied follow up "Goats go to Hell." If you follow appropriate social norms, you get good things! If you refuse to follow appropriate social norms, you get bad things! Follow appropriate social norms, mmkay!
In some fields we call this a pro social story. Be chivalrous. Don't be a jerk. There are consequences. Karma.
It ain't just Christianity. It ain't just the Bible. I think it's wired into our moral thinking that we want the world to be just. And I really think one thing that makes Christianity different as a religion is that it punches a gaping hole in that called "grace."
And some of us have been trying with all of our might to plug that hole because it makes us all really really uncomfortable.
Here's a link to the bit from that Chinese theme park. I don't have time to do deep research, but I don't think this was influenced by Christianity.
While I'll confess that I'm busy and I'm not always around, I got pretty strong arms.
Thinking on, a lot of our modern conceptions of hell go back to Dante, and if you read the guy, he was absolutely enraged at some honestly horrifying political abuse that he was witnessing. And his depictions of hell were also imaginary punishments for some of the truly monstrous people he'd seen in real life. There's a lot of political psychology in there too, not just theology. This is especially true with the emphasis on retributive pain that you see so much with the pitchforks and traditional "devil" figures. It's not purely biblical. It's like fan fiction.
And I'm not going to knock that, categorically. I'm not sola scriptura. But I recognize the lines and seams inside my own tradition for what they are, I think.
One of the consequences of this within Quakerism was to develop a process for testing individuals’ religious leadings against corporate discernment - we call the process a meeting for clearness.
I mean no disrespect when I say, that I think there is a danger in interpreting scripture in isolation - we can be very influenced by our personal histories and that can lead us down unhelpful paths.
I think it is the inherent cruelty in the concept of Hell that seems so inconsistent with the nature of a loving God. Also that we see people as debasing themselves when they enact cruelty, and for God to debase himself in this way makes no emotional sense. If God so loved the world that he would send Christ - how could he simultaneous create a reality to torture people for eternity ?
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
And Milton's devil:
Which way i fly is hell, myself am hell,
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threatening to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
Whereas I had understood it to be the case that God incarnate in Christs was none of those three things during his ministry.
I suppose?
But he strikes me as someone who is very much self aware. I would expect him to signpost his area of ignorance--as in fact he does, when he's speaking about the date of the second coming.
Amen. I'm with @Lamb Chopped on all this stuff too.
I would be elated beyond measure if it turned out that universalism were true after all. The idea of anyone being disappointed... er... wait, if they were disappointed, then arguably they'd still be clinging to something nasty, which itself would eventually have to be purged away somehow over the millennia, since universalism would apply to the disappointed people as well. Of course, what they would do here on Earth with that attitude could be (and might be right now) very bad indeed.
I'd like to know the story if it's posted on the Ship elsewhere.
Not torture, but there's still a sense of threat. And there's a lot of imagery of fire.
And certainly, it's not biblical, but I think that a lot of Christian notions of hell do come out of Dante, and Dante had punishment on his mind a lot. He was very angry at very particular people and, using a Catholic sense, imagined them mired in an eternal torment that, more like the Buddhist model, tied them up in ways that were ironic commentaries on the sins they had committed in life. Some of these, if I recall, were almost comedic when viewed from a safe distance, like grotesque political cartoons.
But yeah, I don't think that's biblical either. It's just interesting that it latches so easily onto our psych. We want there to be some kind of connection between our life and what goes on next.
Maybe for some people universalism would be hell. Imagine Pol Pot living scot-free in the afterlife. Or Jefferson Davis, Pinochet, etc. to avoid the obvious one. These guys, just going on like nothing had happened. No punishment, no consequence. All of that misery for nothing.
It's a hard thing to swallow, I think.
And that's why Purgatory exists. It's funny, if you think Hell isn't biblical, I think Purgatory is absolutely ridiculous from a biblical standpoint. But logically speaking? Or ethically speaking? It makes perfect sense. If you allow for redemption and if you allow that redemption is a process. And if you allow that life may be more than this corporeal stuff, surely there must be some way for a perfect God to give people more time? Surely there's more time, right? Surely this perfect creator can give us enough time to get things right. It's like a video game, there's always another chance to learn the moveset, always another chance to figure out how to not-die, now to not-fail, how to find that eternal life that we are supposed to receive.
And in that wish, Purgatory is born, the proper sort of punishment, pain with a purpose, to refine and perfect. And that is a biblical image, I believe. Burn off the impurities until all that remains is pure metal. Humans do love their technological metaphors.
Torture is pain to a point, "hurt the thing until the thing does what you want." It's reducing a person to a tool, a slave, you might say, in koine, a δοῦλος. Refining isn't torture because rocks don't experience pain when they melt. They're rocks. Do that to a human and it hurts, because we have flesh. Flesh feels pain. Paul does have some funny things to say about flesh and the experience of suffering.
I've seen too much pain in my own life to accept that God cannot be the author of pain. Hurts a little to type those words, but I prefer honest discomfort. That said, I don't think the pain is the point in itself, I do not think God is a sadist, which I think means God does not engage in one sort of torture, but I do think God is a teacher of sorts. And sometimes pain is a tool for that.
Of course, natural suffering is a thing and I've seen too much of that to fall for the simplistic notion that pain is always good for us or edifying. And a lot of the "hell" imagery in the text seems less about "I'll hurt you" and more "I will annihilate you." The farmer doesn't want to hurt the chaff, he just lets it blow away, or uses it for kindling. It's nothing personal. The chaff is just so much stuff.
But Imago Dei says we are more than chaff, more than sparrows. He counts sparrows, surely He counts us. He can count the hairs on our head, so I'm told. And maybe the weight of our seriousness gives hell its dignity? If I throw away an apple core, that's one thing, but if I have to bury a body, even the body of someone I loathe, that's a more serious affair.
So, we are images of God, and also *ahem* servants thereto. We suffer changes at God's will, and these likely include discomforts that may be for our benefit, or not. If we are Christian, the Bible indicates that Jesus often threatened us his followers with destruction using various metaphors. These often involved fire, sometimes destroying, sometimes refining. Refining is, of course, a destructive process for removing "impurities."
Maybe we are akin to those three old Jewish boys in the furnace, chilling out in an inferno while everything around us gets burned to ash? And heaven and hell are the same place?
I picked up in seminary the argument that heaven and hell themselves were distractions and the real gospel was in the general Resurrection. New heaven, new earth, new body, new life. All that is old just passes away. It just doesn't matter.
Pardon the rambling. I'm tired. I hope some of this is edifying for somebody.
I get the impression that if a person found themselves in heaven and were self-aware enough to realise that they'd been wrong about hell-as-eternal-punishment, a significant percentage of Christians in that position would be disappointed. Some because the idea appeals to them. Some because they'd feel short-changed. Some because they like the feeling of being right.
Which in itself is pretty ridiculous on various levels.
I think there's an economics to it. In a scarcity game, their less is my more. So if they get more, I must get less, relatively speaking. Infinite supply means zero value. The more goods there are, the less important any particular good is. If I can look across the lake of fire and see other people, then I know I'm better off. Without that frame of reference, how can I know where I am? How do I know this is heaven at all? Maybe I picked the wrong door and wound up in Nirvana!
Though I think that kind of competitive thinking is a necessary component of Hell. In the Bible, I think it might be telling that the guy in heaven is actually pleading on behalf of the guy in hell. It's a fiction that Jesus creates, but I think that's a point to it. It seems like selfishness is a barrier to entry, so it's hard to imagine people in heaven deriving any joy from hell's existence.
Haha, yes, it is rather ridiculous!
"Besides all this, there is a huge gulf fixed between us and you, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us."
It's easy to see why people in hell would want to travel to heaven; much less easy to see why people in heaven would want to do the reverse trip--unless we assume that they feel sorry for them and want to help them if it's at all possible. And in fact my experience (living among people who do believe in hell) is that such believers DO in fact want to help anyone they can, up to and including people who are in hell or hellbound. I mean, I can't tell you how many people have confessed to me, embarrassed and shamefaced, that they've prayed for the devil, because they feel sorry for him. How much more for evil people! (Yes, I've done it too, so there's my dose of embarrassment)
Also from the parable--we can't overload the details of any parable, but we can take note of them, and wonder what they say about God--there's that gulf. Who put it there? God, apparently. Who else could have done it?
Why's it there? Well, to keep heavenly folk from traveling to hell. Given that Jesus himself made that trip, we can't say there's anything WRONG in it. But it may well be that God knows the effort will be both useless and heartbreaking, and so he puts up a barrier to prevent futile effort.
I will say that Dante is a lot better both theologically and otherwise then you may be giving him credit for here. And also remember that the inferno is only the first third of the entire divine comedy.
Heaven and hell being the same place, just with people reacting differently to it, is actually a very orthodox or even Orthodox idea.
Or even Hellish. In fact, come to think of it there are specific scenes in CS Lewis‘s excellent book the great divorce that this reminds me of.
Oh my goodness if you have not read CS Lewis’s the great divorce, please please read this. You talked about people in hell wanting to travel to heaven and… The matter of people wanting to travel from one to the other for various reason reasons… Or not wanting to travel there… Is a major plot point. It’s an awesome awesome book and I really ought to reread that perhaps in the not too distant future.
I think one thing that people are not necessarily thinking of in a couple of cases on the thread are that, as I understand it, the people or beings in heaven are not there forever impenitently clinging to the awfulness of the selves that they have been. They have realized what they did was wrong, and they have ultimately and finally rejected and been set free from all of that evil, and been redeemed. They’re not just going on forever being horrible people, but in a nice place. In some cases, they might be practically unrecognizable from the way we know of them here on earth. Again, I think the great divorce shows some very good idea ideas of what that could look like or at least analogies.
How exactly? I genuinely don’t get it. (I remember those! I wonder if Internet/computer adventure games have essentially replaced them completely at this point…)
Edit: OMG they still exist!
https://www.cyoa.com/?srsltid=AfmBOooMxryy5rz_eV4SKuM-0Pc9nf6fjnku3ToqeDneTJWPjVDeJKU8
It seems like you've moved into flights of fancy where you decide that some religious author is more authoritative than any other and then you measure other ideas (on hell in this case) against it.
Which is fine, I don't have a problem with you "choosing your own adventure" but this doesn't seem to be any different to my comment above that if you don't like the logical conclusions of your theology then you should change your theology.
And to Doublethink (because the question you put to Lamb Chopped arose from the question you thought I was asking her about interpreting scripture):
Regarding Lamb Chopped's replies to you, I don't have a big issue with Lamb Chopped's reasoning in her first post. And I recognise and understand the reasoning in her second post.
But as I've already said, I don't see reasoning as being the primary way we acquire these beliefs. And I decreasingly think about beliefs in terms of being true or false, or resulting from true/false reasoning.
I don’t think I’m doing that but peace be with you regardless.
I will add that Lewis was the one who taught me about Christianity in the first place, and I think that his expression/explication of these ideas still make the most sense to me.
The notion of the fires of Hell and the fiery love of God being the same thing, just with two different responses to it, is indeed one of several very orthodox (and big O Orthodox) beliefs on the matter. This seems to me to fit best with God’s character as I understand Him.
This isn't Purgatory but a place for own voice lived experience where the usual rules on no personal attacks are supplemented by the guidelines
People are talking about their lived experience of Christian faith. Posters dont have to agree with that but do have to follow the guidelines.
Accusing another poster of ' moving into flights of fancy' is not following our guidelines and is a personal attack @Basketactortale which breaks C3
Please be more careful how you characterise other people's lived experience in general and avoid negative accusations to other posters.
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies Host
Most of your statements seem to hinge on incredulity. However, I'm not sure this is a profitable path. Many people are incredulous about Christianity, or indeed, other religions, but so what?