Monday, December 31, 2018

Evangelical Hypocrisy Regarding Conscience

Evangelicals are quick to dismiss certain objections to eternal conscious torment for all unsaved beings on the grounds of moral intuitions, declaring the sense of fairness appealed to by the objections to be faulty.  Humans are said to deserve endless suffering simply by committing the slightest moral offense.  The Bible is said to contradict any sense of justice that is repulsed by eternal conscious torment.  Now, there is nothing problematic about disregarding conscience.  In fact, this can be a sign of great moral development, since it means that one cares about morality itself and not one's feelings about it.  The actual errors in this evangelical position have to do with other things: the Bible does teach proportionality in a way that contradicts the evangelical stance on hell, and evangelicals arbitrarily hold conscience in high regard when it comes to different issues.

Those in the evangelical church, on one hand, realize that conscience is not necessarily accurate, though they are wrong to characterize annihilationism and conditional immortality as unbiblical.  They realize that a person's conscience might conflict with actual theological truths.  On the other hand, they will be among the first to endorse the asinine claim that conscience is a sacred thing that brings moral knowledge.  After all, appeals to conscience are their first responses to moral skepticism or moral nihilism (and are ultimately what their moral epistemology reduces down to).  But which one is it?  Is conscience valid, or is it not?  It cannot be both, for an unreliable thing cannot also be accurate at the same time.  Either conscience is purely subjective, or its impulses correspond to proven moral obligations.

It takes very little time to realize that the former of these options is true.  Conscience is nothing but a subjective network of moral emotions.  It is a sign of hypocrisy that evangelicals will literally denounce the belief that one's conscience is reliable in one case before treating it as authoritative in another.  Even if conscience was only partially arbitrary, and not totally subjective, it would be impossible to distinguish an accurate judgment of conscience from an inaccurate one.  There is nothing surprising about this evangelical inconsistency, to be sure, given that the whole of evangelicalism is a house of arbitrarily placed cards.  All it takes to dismantle their epistemological, metaphysical, and Biblical errors is a gentle breeze.

The greatest irony here is that evangelicals think they are upholding a Biblical truth by denouncing the idea that humans cannot deserve infinite torment, when the Bible's teachings on hell make it clear that unsaved humans will perish--they will cease to exist instead of experiencing pain endlessly [1].  Evangelicalism's view of conscience is one that shifts in accordance with whatever preferences its adherents have, and they happen to regard eternal conscious torment as inherently just on some level.  Ultimately, hypocrisy puts evangelicalism in direct conflict with the Bible it claims to revere.  I am not an annihilationist because my conscience approves of annihilationism.  I am an annihilationist because the Bible is explicitly clear that the human soul is not inherently immortal and that disproportionate punishments are grievous injustices.


[1].  See here:
  A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html
  B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/04/eternal-fire-common-assumption.html

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