Monday, September 18, 2023

Yahweh's And Allah's Eschatological Justice (Part Two)

The wicked and the righteous are, according to the Quran in Surah 2:81-82, both going to live forever in the Hereafter, either in the Garden/Paradise or in the Fire, aka the Islamic hell.  Numerous other passages from the Quran affirm the eternal nature of the pain the unforgiven human sinners are said to experience [1].  The Bible, no matter how popular the idea to the contrary is, teaches that any suffering in hell is temporary and that death is the final consequence of true justice for sinful humans--among other verses, see see Matthew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, John 3:16, Ezekiel 18:4, Romans 6:23, Revelation 20:15 as listed in part one [1].  As if these verses are not as or almost as clear as language can be on the matter, what of Matthew 25:46, which says the wicked will go to eternal punishment and the righteous to eternal life?  Not only does it not follow from a punishment being eternal that it must entail suffering, but the very contrast in this verse could only apply if the wicked do not live forever (all of this is addressed more thoroughly below).

The concepts behind the "There they will remain" for both groups in Surah 2:81-82 and the "eternal punishment" of Matthew 25:46 are not equivalent.  If someone is in agony and will remain there forever, with no escape (see Surah 2:167, 217, 275-276), then they will suffer eternally.  There they will remain.  Eternal punishment, however, does not have to involve endless suffering depending on what exactly the punishment is.  All it has to do is be final and irrevocable.  It could even involve no torment at all if death itself, the cessation of life and exclusion from all the potential joys therein, is the full punishment or the culmination of it.  The effects, the status of nonexistence, would just have to last forever.  Now, the Bible does not say that the wicked will immediately be exterminated in hell, only that their death, their literal purging from conscious existence, is the outcome.  Yahweh's justice is death with the potential for some torment beforehand (Luke 12:47-48).

Matthew 25's contrast of eternal life with something else also means that the other experience or fate, however long it lasts, cannot involve eternal conscious existence, or else both parties would really be receiving eternal life, just of a different kind.  On a linguistic level, this would be as asinine as saying that something unprovable is actually provable (which is the ultimate foundation of many people's worldviews when it comes down to it!), and on a logical and conceptual level, it is inherently impossible.  Someone who does not have eternal life cannot be alive in order to be tormented.  Unlike the Bible, the Quran simply never contrasts eternal life with the punishment of hell.  Both the righteous and wicked are explicitly said to live forever in their respective abodes with the only linguistic ambiguity whatsoever being that baseline level of unknowability which no language can avoid.  Only the meanings of our own words are known with absolute certainty because there is no inherent meaning to a vocal sound or written symbol [2] and non-telepathic beings do not know other minds.

Both the Biblical and Quranic hell are described as featuring fire.  The Biblical hell is even called the lake of fire, which is the second death (Revelation 20:15).  Beyond things like this and how they are both supposedly manifestations of divine justice, they are rather different.  Revelation 14:9-11 and 20:10 are at most talking about specific groups of beings and not everyone else, and if they are literal, then they would have nothing to do with the fate of the wicked masses, and if they are figurative, numerous other Biblical passages already establish that the Christian hell is not one of eternal conscious torment.  The beast and devil mentioned in Revelation as receiving eternal agony are also described in other places as still being killed/destroyed, as with a seeming singular antichrist figure in 2 Thessalonians 2:8 and seemingly with Satan in Ezekiel 28:11-19.  Yahweh's and Allah's justice are not the same when it comes to criminal punishment in this life or hell in the next.  Yahweh's is logically possible and evidentially probable, but Allah's is self-contradictory.  The Quran's presentation of Allah as if he is the undistorted version of Yahweh is far more egregiously seen with the nature of hell in each religion than it is with Allah's conditional, non-universal love (Surah 4:107).



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