The ultimate sacrifice?

[Silent3]

For me, this is an extremely hypothetical question because I don't believe in an afterlife of any sort. The particular Fundamentalist Christian conceptions of a Heaven of eternal bliss and a Hell of eternal torment seems particularly unrealistic.

A lot of people seem to think you can't have morality without belief in something like this, that you have to believe there's an ultimate Carrot and an ultimate Stick of some sort. Many Christians and other believers tone down their conception of Justice in the afterlife from the Fundamentalist view, seeing a God who's a bit more level-headed about making punishments fit their crimes, but still like to believe that Ultimate Justice exists, and that belief in metaphysically enforced justice is required for morality.

Others see the Carrot and the Stick as besides the point. Valuing goodness for the sake of goodness, avoiding causing undue harm to others because such harm is offensive in and itself, regardless of any potential rewards and punishments, is what real morality is about. One could counter-argue that such a view is still carrot/stick, however, that the rewards and punishments are still there, but that they are simply one's internal feelings about one's actions.

At any rate, take it as given for sake of argument that something like the Fundamentalist Heaven and Hell exist, and you have come to know without a doubt they are real.

God says to you, "You've lead a good life and I'm prepared to send you to Heaven, but there's a problem. I can't send you to Heaven unless I send X people to Hell, many of whom also deserve Heaven, some of who you love dearly. If you sacrifice your spot in Heaven, and accept eternal torment in Hell for yourself, many others can be saved." You are further guaranteed that if you choose Heaven, God will free you from any sense of guilt you might feel about your decision. Nothing will interfere with your full and complete enjoyment of your heavenly experience.

What would you do? Would it make a difference if X were one, ten, a thousand, or a billion?

Take it as given that this is not a trick question, that no one is ever, ever going to reward you for your sacrifice. No one is ever going to so much as pat you on the back, much less reduce the degree or eternal duration of your torment, for being selfless. Saying "I can't believe God would ever put someone in that position!" is besides the point, and just a way of wiggling out of the hypothetical dilemma.

Me? Given those choices, I'm afraid I choose Heaven, and even if a billion or more would suffer for my choice, I'd literally say "to Hell with them". I'd feel like I had no choice but to be selfish and look out for Number One.

[Poppyseedman]

1. I will answer as soon as you can tell me

how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

[Evoman]

2. Self Deleted

Oops, wrong post responded to

[Evoman]

3. What I would do

I would ask god, "If I go to heaven, will I forget that YOU made me make the choice"

If he says yes, then I would go to heaven and start turning people against his evil ass from the inside. If he says no, then I would pick hell and start trying to gather an army of hells minions to dispose of the piece of shit. Hey, its eternity...maybe I could succeed eventually. I'm guessing most people would eventually get tired of being tortured and would rise up against him. Even Satan can't stop the 6 or 7 billion people that are in hell.

[Silent3]

7. Nice sentiment but...

...it's side-stepping the point of the hypothetical question, which isn't at all about the nature of God and how just or unjust that God is, but how far you are personally willing to go with self-sacrifice when there is not only a lack of reward for making a moral choice, but a terrible and unending penalty for doing so.

Take it as given in this scenario that God is all powerful and simply cannot be overthrown by any means. Further, in Heaven you and everyone else there are too blissed out no matter what you remember or not to try to change anything. In Hell you're powerless to do anything but suffer -- it's not like you get to chat about how bad Hell with the guy shrieking away next to you in the Lake of Fire, and try to make plans with him. If you ever did feel like you were making a plan to overthrow God, it would only be a Sisyphean set-up meant to crush you with even more despair and feelings of futility when it inevitably failed.

[China_cat]

4. Do you get the same deal his son did?

Three days (well less if you figure Friday to Sunday isn't really 3 days and he had all that other stuff to do while he was dead) in hell, everybody else eligible for heaven and you get to go there to?

Anything less is rank nepotism.

[trotsky]

8. Great answer! n/t

[neebob]

5. I'd seriously consider going to hell,

preferring not to be around this type of supreme being and the other assholes who would take his deal, and then probably choose heaven.

But then I don't believe in the slightest possibility of any sort of god or afterlife, either, and am answering on that basis. And anyway the fundamentalist god wouldn't offer me the deal. I'd be one of the ones being sent to hell, if it hadn't already been decided.

[varkam]

6. I'd choose Hell.

That's where all the philosophers and coffee shops are :evilgrin:

[godhatesrepublicans]

9. "WHO WILL BE EATEN FIRST"

http://godhatesrepublicans.org/featured/article1.html has a cartoon called "WHO WILL BE EATEN FIRST" that is a great rebuttal to the whole "Threat of Torture" school of theology that has taken over Xianity.

This is a quote from a famous sermon of Jonathan Edwards, an American Congregationalist clergyman
who was the outstanding theologian and scholar of colonial New England in the 1700's. Read this, and
think about what sort of person the God he describes is.

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.”

That man’s image of God is frankly insane. It’s like worshipping the killer in the movie Seven. It’s like imagining the Creator as the worst abusive alcoholic parent in history. If I truly believed the Maker of All Things was such a creep, I’d cheerfully go to hell just to spite him.

Just for the record, I don’t believe in hell. There are scriptural verses to back me up on this, mostly in Psalms and Proverbs, but it’s also a gut instinct that Hell is being separate from the Spirit of God.

No flames, no cartoon devils with pitchforks. There is just Death as the end of Life.

Hell is also here on Earth for those who are separate from the Spirit. Your job can be Hell. Your family can be Hell. Wanting what you can’t have, being filled with anger and not being able to let go of it, being too paralyzed with fear or to do what needs to be done, all these are Hell on Earth.

When Jesus spoke of Hell, it was as a metaphor for these very things, and his teachings were aimed at freeing people from Hell on Earth, and giving them a chance on living on after death.

That’s my take on it. It’s a lot more hopeful than the Republican vision of “God as abusive Father.”

Fear is no reason to believe. Wanting to make life on Earth closer to life in Heaven is a reason to believe.

[Silent3]

10. If you say "I’d cheerfully go to hell just to spite him"...

...that's awfully damned expensive spite! :D

I'll repeat this again: I do NOT believe in this conception of Hell. But the point of the hypothetical question is to take that kind of Hell as a given, and consider how far you'd go to avoid it. I think a God that would create such situations is repugnant too, but again, that's beside the point.

Imagine someone sticking hot pokers into you eyes and every orifice of your body while simultaneous ripping out your intestines. Now imagine that the torment of Hell would make that, by comparison, seem like a relaxing back rub. Imagine that physical pain is just a part of your torment. You feel terrified, helpless, hopeless and utterly alone to a degree no human has every experienced. Now imagine this goes on FOREVER, and that your mind is not allowed to retreat from the suffering, no madness of internal illusion is allowed to form into which you can escape, there is never any numbing or desensitization. Unimaginably crushing torment without end.

No comforting thoughts can possibly form. You'll never have any comfort in recalling, "Well, at least I did the right thing" or "I stood up proudly for what's right". If you can recall at all that your own decision landed you in Hell, that would only add to your torment by filling you with burning self-loathing for having put yourself in Hell. Even the tiny comfort of blaming God or anyone else would not be allowed to enter your mind.

If you're grasping what I'm getting at, I sincerely doubt you'd face that just to make a point about unfairness.

I'm not asking anyone to believe any of this is so -- I'm asking people to take it as a hypothetical given that it is so, and go from there.

[Silent3]

11. Maybe it wasn't as interesting a hypothetical question as I thought...

...but at least I find it interesting myself in the reluctance I see to respond to the hypothetical question on its own terms. :)

[lvx35]

12. brilliant post!

And what of the saint who would spend an eternity in hell for the good of others, should he not be exalted above anybody who would go to heaven to save his own ass? If you accept a just God, heaven and hell can only be metaphors for a more complicated truth. I believe these concepts are almost like a litmus test...I have seen fundies relishing the thought of others burning in hell, and I see their smallness and evil, their utter lack of Christlike love for humanity. The fact that theological matters are not quite as they seem is the great lesson science has taught us, but many are not listening.

[Random_Australian]

13. I'd swap myself for one person, anyone.

Why? Because living in paradise while others were tortured is one of the worst fates I can think of. Who cares about 'guilt over the decision' - PEOPLE ARE STILL IN HELL! SAVE THEM!

That about sums it up for me. Balance of probablities means that it is better to go to heaven, but by less than one soul's worth.

[Silent3]

15. A failure of imagination? :)

Because living in paradise while others were tortured is one of the worst fates I can think of.

I admit that the terms of my hypothetical question are very forced and artificial, but I'm trying to make a point about how much self-sacrifice most people are capable of.

I can't decide if you're far, far more self-sacrificing and noble than I think I could ever be, or if this imagined Hell is too much of an abstraction, making it a whole lot easier to agree to suffer it for the sake of others.

As I've laid out this hypothetical question, it's "easier" in a sense than it might otherwise be to accept the position of sacrifice, because while you'd be making a very difficult decision, you wouldn't be under the strain of the actual torment while making the decision. It's a grit-your-teeth, make the decision you think is right, then wait for the shit to hit the fan sort of thing.

Are you really grasping how horrible a vision of Hell I'm proposing? I suppose you could be, and that is for you even more motivation to save others from it, even at your own terrible expense. But understand this: if you experienced this Hell for even one second, and someone then gave you the choice between experiencing that Hell for just one more second, or running across a floor covered in broken glass and razor blades to a place where you'd have to stand on a flaming grill, pick up a saw, and saw off one of your own arms -- you'd choose the whole routine with the razor blades and the saw as a walk in the park by comparison.

That about sums it up for me. Balance of probablities means that it is better to go to heaven, but by less than one soul's worth.

I certainly don't think I'm more valuable than others, or that saving myself from such suffering at the expense of others is a fair trade. Nevertheless, deep down I'm too selfish. I think in a certain sense we're all ultimately selfish. For myself, I can't see accepting such horror when I know that I'd never even get the slightest comfort afterward for making the "right" decision, and knowing that I'd be blissfully free from even the slightest pang of guilt for making the selfish decision.

I believe we all choose what's best for ourselves at any given moment -- even though "best" may sometimes be no more than the least terrible of a set of crappy choices. What separates "good" people from "bad" people is that good people highly value the welfare of others, and that valuation becomes part of how they decide what is best for themselves. The cost of doing things that would typically be termed "evil" or, by the more ordinary use of the word, "selfish", is the guilt we'd feel, the sacrifice of values we don't want to give up, a loss of the self we want to see ourselves as which would be too hard to bear.

I do believe there are people who would be capable of this kind of self sacrifice, but I'm not sure how many there would be if the decision had to be made with a full and deep understanding of the sacrifice in question. Even for those rare few, I'm not sure whether I'd consider their choice for self-sacrifice noble or foolish.

[Random_Australian]

16. My imagination is plenty vivid. And I take limits - so I have a good

concept of Hell.

I was thinking with my overly rational side.... I actually have had (though I learnt ways around it) acute difficulty with having emotions - but they are such a good regulator I am glad to have them. It was really that side talking, the balance of probabilities really is less than one soul's worth by my working.

And I am halfway that noble, but the other half is simply very little individual self worth.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

14. Happily, we don't have to make this decision!

But I think I'm with you. Eternal torment is not cool. (no pun intended) But then I'd wonder if he were playing tricks on me and like if I chose Hell I'd go to Heaven and get a really nice condo or something.

Now, if I knew for certain the other eternally tormented were my children or grandchildren, I might have to readdress my answer. But even then...at the end of it, we are all responsible for our own souls. But that's a hard call.

[SPKrazy]

17. Why Would I Want To Answer A Question Like This?

I don't believe like this

but okay

I'll take hell because I don't care if I'm absolved of guilt, my loved ones are more deserving than I am.

boy I feel better now!