Trying to understand your post, @Basketactortale . Are you suggesting that the the solution to the problem of 'hell' only arose with the earthly ministry of Jesus?
I apologise but I don't understand your question.
You said 'respect for your ancestors beyond 2000 years' -which I took to be the time since Jesus was on earth. If that's right then I was interested in clarifying what changed, with respect to hell, at that point in time.
In the first place, beliefs are subjective attitudes. That is, they're mental properties we, as individuals, have regarding things, rather than being qualities of the things we have beliefs about.
To address this again, subjective has more than one meaning.
I might talk about an objective judgement, by which I would mean a judgement based on beliefs about evidence as opposed to my personal inclination and preferences. From there, it's natural to talk about a subjective judgement, being one based more on personal factors rather than on neutrally evaluating the evidence.
But that is a different sense of subjective from the sense you're using 'subjective' in above. And it would be a fallacy of equivocation to move from 'beliefs are subjective attitudes, that is mental properties of individuals' to 'beliefs are subjective, that is based on personal inclination rather than neutral evidence'.
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.
Pardon me for wandering into the thread, but I was just again reminded...yet again...of how there are so many people I know who will never go near a fucking church in their lives because of the straight-up spiritual abuse they received from people who loudly and earnestly declared that they were True Christians...
...and of course soft spoken, gentle mainliners like me are frauds...
And it infuriates me to imagine God condemning such people even to the genteel first circle of eternal torment for crimes that were visited upon them.
Honestly, my God-given ethical sense simply will not tolerate it, so I'll just wave the wand of "Holy Mystery" and declare myself a soft universalist. Damning is God's job, not mine. But I have my suspicions.
[with apologies to anyone who may feel they resemble the people I'm angry at, I do not intend to attack anyone here, this is just a conversation I literally just had. I went to the ship to see if I could start a thread on it and voila! there was one!
I am aware there are conservatives with better sense, but I also am viscerally aware of the logical problem created by theological architecture.]
Trying to understand your post, @Basketactortale . Are you suggesting that the the solution to the problem of 'hell' only arose with the earthly ministry of Jesus?
I apologise but I don't understand your question.
You said 'respect for your ancestors beyond 2000 years' -which I took to be the time since Jesus was on earth. If that's right then I was interested in clarifying what changed, with respect to hell, at that point in time.
Are we not discussing the whole "believers go to heaven, the fallen go to hell" Christian theology?
Unless I'm missing something, this Christian idea is something from the Christian era.
Comments
You said 'respect for your ancestors beyond 2000 years' -which I took to be the time since Jesus was on earth. If that's right then I was interested in clarifying what changed, with respect to hell, at that point in time.
I might talk about an objective judgement, by which I would mean a judgement based on beliefs about evidence as opposed to my personal inclination and preferences. From there, it's natural to talk about a subjective judgement, being one based more on personal factors rather than on neutrally evaluating the evidence.
But that is a different sense of subjective from the sense you're using 'subjective' in above. And it would be a fallacy of equivocation to move from 'beliefs are subjective attitudes, that is mental properties of individuals' to 'beliefs are subjective, that is based on personal inclination rather than neutral evidence'.
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?
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.
...and of course soft spoken, gentle mainliners like me are frauds...
And it infuriates me to imagine God condemning such people even to the genteel first circle of eternal torment for crimes that were visited upon them.
Honestly, my God-given ethical sense simply will not tolerate it, so I'll just wave the wand of "Holy Mystery" and declare myself a soft universalist. Damning is God's job, not mine. But I have my suspicions.
[with apologies to anyone who may feel they resemble the people I'm angry at, I do not intend to attack anyone here, this is just a conversation I literally just had. I went to the ship to see if I could start a thread on it and voila! there was one!
I am aware there are conservatives with better sense, but I also am viscerally aware of the logical problem created by theological architecture.]
Are we not discussing the whole "believers go to heaven, the fallen go to hell" Christian theology?
Unless I'm missing something, this Christian idea is something from the Christian era.