Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Wishing Eternal Torture Upon Others

It is not necessarily true that morality exists.  Conscience is just personal moral emotion that has nothing to do with revealing whatever good or evil might exist and social norms, as asinine, hypocritical, and contrary between cultures as they can be, cannot prove there is any sort of objective morality (though it is of course logically possible for there to be).  True moral obligation, if it exists, is there independent of all human perception, preference, and activity.  Almost nobody realizes this or is rational or bold enough to admit these truths if they brush up against them.  However, if morality exists, then one being torturing another without end--not for a potentially long time or in a specific manner, but genuinely without end--could never be just.

This is what many people stupidly think the Bible teaches about hell [1], and some of them go around casually wishing it upon others.  A ceaseless stream of punitive torment, or certain kinds of torment, for a moral offense would always exceed the severity of the wrong it is supposedly punishing.  No amount of finite moral blunders on any human's part could ever deserve eternal torture, yet one can find non-religious people who say that if there is a hell, they hope someone they despise suffers there eternally, or that they wish there was this kind of hell for the sake of a particular person of they fallaciously believe they "know" it does not exist.

One can also find people who adhere to a specific religion, such as Christianity, actively wishing this fate on other people.  Some of them do not care about reason and justice and are only committed to the religion because they were raised that way.  Some of them do not care if the religion really entails eternal torture in an afterlife, but that does not stop them from believing that this outcome is morally deserved.  Some religions like Quranic Islam teach this and others like Biblical Christianity do not [2].  Since Christian might still long for this to be true as long as they are hypothetically not the ones who will suffer eternally, they can be humiliated by showing what the Bible actually does say about death, justice, and hell.

Still, one does not need to show that the Bible says permanent death without resurrection is the true deserved penalty for sin to realize and then in turn demonstrate to others that eternal torture could never be just for any human wrongdoing.  For the aforementioned reason, this is true independent of whether Yahweh is the uncaused cause or morality otherwise overlaps with what the Bible describes; it would be true by logical necessity if morality exists at all, though it is not true by strict logical necessity that anything really is good or evil.  Killing people illicitly could not deserve eternal torture.  If morality exists, since eternal torture would be the ultimate sin, anyone who wishes it upon others would deserve to die or even be killed for being so stupid and cruel.  Unfortunately for my preferences, the Bible does not say that killing them like the insects they are for their irrationalistic beliefs is justice for them in this life.  Their killing comes later.

There is a kind of asinine hypocrisy I have repeatedly encountered in America where someone is likely to be considered righteous by at least many Christians for wishing eternal torture upon someone else while thinking that the mere killing of a human in this life is the most egregious sin one could commit against them.  Evangelicals are often like this: they erroneously think murder is the worst one could do to a person but they vehemently endorse eternal conscious torment rather than Biblical annihilationism.  It is why they tend to verbally address abortion more than prison rape or domestic abuse or the tortures of the ancient and modern world.  This is backwards regardless of whether the Biblical deity is the real uncaused cause.



No comments:

Post a Comment