Atheistic Proof for Eternal Hell

[SolomonVII]

This is an argument that would make an atheist's skeptical disbelief in the eternity of hell moot.

First, presume that there really isn't any continuation of conscious beyond that veil. That point is fully conceded.

Now note how bad that life can be here in this life. It is not even an exercise in imagination. It is simple history. Even if this is all there is, this can be and has been plenty bad enough for folks everywhere.
One does not need hell to be an eternal personal consciousness of suffering to recognize that reality as it is now and all has been is bad enough. Suffering in this life is as real as Hiroshima, and it even plays itself out in the personal life in a million different ways for a million different people, to as high as numbers of people can possibly go. Hell is functionally infinite.

In a very sense, even limiting ourselves to the confines of the material world, what people regularly go through can reasonably be presumed to be some reasonable facsimile of hell, even if the proposition of eternal personal hell is conceded to be based in blind faith alone, and not in actual materialist, personal experience.

The parameters of hell as so defined would be sufficient horrible as to be bad enough to legitimately be considered hellish. Concentration camps and slavery are hell enough. Even Me-too is hell enough, at is worst extremes horrifically so.

But now, the parameters of 'eternal' also need defining. Keeping this to the completely material dimensions and proofs of time, eternal can be practically defined as the span of the genesis of mankind. Any other conception of hell would extend beyond the confines of human consciousness anyway.

Spoiler Alert!
Marxism is a myth. Progress is not going to save you from this hell! The parameter holds!


Even chimpanzees make war. Evil and suffering have been around as least as mankind have been around. It is a reasonable proposition that suffering ,as it exists now, has always existed, and will extend to at least as long as the human species is what it is, what we are.

This is to say that as long as humans exist, hell will exist.

This ,by the way, in no way negates that as long as humans exist, wonders the likes of such as the cosmos has never seen exist outside of humankind will exist too. Human life is not limited to hell. The experiences that we all share in are delights to be sure. Human experience is rich and pretty awesome. Hell is not all there is, not by even a smidgen.

But nevertheless, as long as humans exist, hell will exist, and seriously so. we can contain it to some extent, but we cannot extinguish it without extinguishing our mortal selves. It is very much a part of the fullness of the human experience.

Choosing life entails that one also chooses the eternity of hell.

This is the hard choice that defines us all. Choosing life is choosing to extend hell into the future. Every probability is that our future will be a continuation of our past.

But link up to Jordan Peterson's ideas to find what a clinical scientist has to say about the opposite choice, rejecting life. This virtually ensures that a person's life will be a living hell. Going down the dark path, and rejecting eternal hell by rejecting life, is bringing veritable nightmares into any one's life such as we don't even want to imagine.
And yet it would be all to easy to imagine, wouldn't it?

As a side note, clinical practice is a dirty business. Walking into someone's personal hell cannot be fun.


Choosing life is choosing to extend hell beyond our future, a choice for the eternity of hell even.

And, that is the best choice and the best way of ensuring that the tentacles of that hell, which are now proven to be real enough, don't reach into the bowels of ones own existence.

No matter. The argument posits no values on how to deal with the existence of eternal hell; only that eternal hell does exist, and as long as we exist, hell exists.

 

[Occams Barber]

An "Atheistic Proof for Eternal Hell"?

Summary: Life (as opposed to post death)is actually hell and Jordan Peterson's ideas aren't helping.

Sounds fine to me.
OB

 

[SolomonVII]

An "Atheistic Proof for Eternal Hell"?

Summary: Life (as opposed to post death)is actually hell and Jordan Peterson's ideas aren't helping.

Sounds fine to me.
OB

Poor reading.
Life contains hell. That is what makes Christ eternally relevant.

 

[SolomonVII]

As long as hell exists, Christ the Redeemer is relevant.

 

[SolomonVII]

It is the fundamental truth, maybe the only fundamental, truth of Christianity. Eternal hell is real, and it lives in all of us.
Worse, the gateway to hell is love. Through love we connect to another person, and to enter into another is enter into their emotional state. The facts behind an emotional state may be hidden, but those that love enter into the feelings engendered by the traumatic experience of fuller expressions of hell, experience the traumatic emotional effects, just through that basic human connection that w e all feel.
The truth of hell is the universal truth. Suffering is as central to the Buddha as it is in the wisdom of Mohammed noting that more women are in hell than men.
And of course this is true. Women have greater capacity for love because they have a greater capacity for pain.
The gateways to hell are love.

 

[Occams Barber]

It is the fundamental truth, maybe the only fundamental, truth of Christianity. Eternal hell is real, and it lives in all of us.
Worse, the gateway to hell is love. Through love we connect to another person, and to enter into another is enter into their emotional state. The facts behind an emotional state may be hidden, but those that love enter into the feelings engendered by the traumatic experience of fuller expressions of hell, experience the traumatic emotional effects, just through that basic human connection that w e all feel.
The truth of hell is the universal truth. Suffering is as central to the Buddha as it is in the wisdom of Mohammed noting that more women are in hell than men.
And of course this is true. Women have greater capacity for love because they have a greater capacity for pain.
The gateways to hell are love.

Non sensical theobabble.
OB

 

[SolomonVII]

The understanding that we may be hell for others just by loving them, just by emotionally connecting to the hell that is within each of us, is the beginning or morality. It is the understanding that we have a dark power within us, the power to create pain in the people that we love.
This is the ground zero of Christian truth. It is the background of chaos that we are all emerging from, that indeed will consume us if we do not purposely strive for something better.

On the other hand, more real than hell, is the reality of the redeemer in our lives. Even as we are aware of that hell is core to our existence, and that people have the potential create hell in our own lives, and us in theirs, the usual experience of people is encounters with people that are like bumps of pleasure much more than hell.
That is the meaning of Christ the Redeemer acting through the Spirit that is imbued within the Church. We are to play the role of Christ to each other.
Because hell is so real and the core truth of who we are, being Christ in the lives of others is the greatest purpose that there can be.

 

[SolomonVII]

Jesus fell on his way to Golgotha, I think more than once, even, either in Scripture of the Stations of the Cross, completely based in Scripture.
Experience of hell is enough to make even the best of us, the Divinely Best, even, to stumble.
Suffice to say for many of the less than perfect, less than divine minions of earth, the experience is more of a break than a Fall.
Hell breaks the best of us. This is to say that if there is anything that is going to make even the strong man violate his principles and character, it would be the psychic and spiritual pain that describes hell of our imaginations and our experience.
Theology is quite silent on the question of whether the fall of Jesus more of a stumble than a break. 40 days in the desert was not enough to break him, but the hell of the Palestinian-Roman cooperation be able to break him?

None of us of course would be able to cast the first stone on anyone who becomes broken by hell. We know that we can be broken, to sing any lie as the truth, and to actually believe it to be true. We know that the pain that people devise for other people to be infinite, and courage and all the virtues, outside of the Supernatural itself, are finite.

We know we can be broke, even to renounce morality, even to renounce the loves that we hold most dear. We all know that pain can exist to such a volume that nothing else matters. We either know this personally, or through the experience of others and the emotional connections we have with people touched by hell, or through imagination that is able to see the world as it is, which is concentration camps, and parents selling their children as meat, at some of hell's more horrific levels.

It is no longer a sin of course, when it is compelled. Even if Jesus actually broke, it was not a sin. This was not a temptation where he had a choice. Everything at this point was compelled.

Such is the nature of hell.

 

[SolomonVII]

Hell exists and we all, to greater and lesser extents, carry hell within us. If it is present in us, it is presented to those who enter intimate relations with us. Love casts no shadow to hide our hells from each other.

Because men and women are different, the aspect of hell plays out very differently in the two populations. Scientists can work out the relative proof or disproof of that, but the popular culture bears this out. It plays itself out in the popularity among girls especially of the Vampire romanticism of popular literature.

It needs to be pointed out that even sexual dimorphism is conservative. The norms between men and women on almost any scale is mostly overlap. It doesn't mean we are identical. Genetic overlap between us and mammals is mostly overlap too.

That does not mean that that are not statistical differences between the two sexes that play themselves out over long periods of time of our meta-historical development. In terms of hell, most social research favors the idea that women statistically are able to endure pain more than a male, but that on the extremes of this norm are some males, who experience even the same pain as too extreme to bear.

That does seem to have a vampire scenario appeal, where the conflict is between the woman who dares to bear any pain in the name of love, and the love of the conflicted vampire, whose love of his desired is so great that he would never dare to hurt the one he loves by exposing her to his pain. He vows to protect her from his hell. But his desire is great.

It is not just fiction though. It is a matter of social hygiene. Much like Dennis Prager says that we use our deodorants so that we do not impose our bad smells on other, he makes the point that we likewise ought not leave our bad moods on others.

Largely, people do not need to experience our hells, nor us theirs, in most social situations
This is very possible in social situations that are pleasantly superficial too, a trip on transit, dealings with colleagues over projects at work, at the gym, the school, …... Truly we are each other saviors. Privacy is fine too, but it is easy to notice that people are mostly interesting.
This is what a diaspora Christianity would recognize as the church, those who save us and redeem us back to the community, even by trusting in the superficial as significant. This kind of trust is no small thing either. It can be taken away the various forms of malevolence that prey on societies.

Love casts no shadows. When people are in love, they are emotionally connected. It is a real state of consciousness on every level. Love cannot be just superficial. If someone loves us, they feel us. Sometimes what we are feeling though is the last thing that we want someone we love to feel.

This is of course not the norm of how men and women experience each other. Mostly it is pleasure, and men are often very adept at being superficial, so that it does not develop into anything other than pleasure. Superficiality is the closest thing to sainthood there can be, at some points in all our lives. When it comes to pushing back on hell, this is a Ground Zero stance, based in the pleasantness of everyday encounter.
What is not superficial about this, framed in conservative logic, is that the couple has a lifetime to absorbing each other hells into each other, and a lifetime of making that life of pleasure and commitment to each other so great that the hell within them seems suddenly small.

The Christianity of official Orthodoxies assure us where salvation is. Marriage is a sacrament in that regard. This is the Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against the Sacraments. The sacraments administered by the Church give assurance of this. That is the dogma.

Protestants nevertheless won the argument that sacramental assurance is not the same as ritual necessity. Like Tantra Buddhism accepting a left handed path, Orthodox Christianity accepts that even as there can be assurance of salvation in what the church administers, there is no way of knowing that anyone is not saved. Ultimately, it is between God and the individual.

Marriage endured all the way through that Protestant victory too. Marriage is where salvation lies Marriage is a wall against hell.

 

[SolomonVII]

If hell exists, it changes the meaning of what it means to be good.
One might imagine being thrust back into the Iron Age with our modern sensitivities and try to make a go of it. Atheists sometimes mock the prayers as being ineffectual in the real world of empirical science that life is reduced to when empiricism is the arbiter of all truth. For sure, most of us would prefer the American army rather than Mother Teresa at out back in a war zone.
The Iron Age was such a war zone. This was an age of genocidal intent, not unlike our own in the twentieth century and beyond. Modern history does not disagree with the chaotic, genocidal state of affairs that Israel merged itself into after their flight into freedom.
Atheist make fun of the Bible too, and how much better their morality is than the Bible's.
So I can imagine Sam Harris in that Iron Age from which many chapters of the Bible were inspired by.
In one of his latest conversations with Jordan Peterson in Vancouver, three of the ways that he proposed to be superior to the Bible were masturbation, homosexuality and eliminating the sufferings of hell as the greatest possible good. And certainly the hedonism involved in the former two of these propositions know about pleasure bumps that can keep the hounds of hell at bay.
So Sam Harris arrives in the Iron Age as some modern day guru, and he holds up his placards of "Choose Heaven", "Gay sex is good", and "pleasure yourself". Often Sam Harris wants assurance from the fundamentalist Christians he has debated with in the past that they acknowledge the goodness of his moral system. Nevertheless, outside of the usual partisan booby traps involved in these points, Sam Harris does come off as fastidiously good. Compassion for people fighting off their hells with the pleasures that life affords is well within the norms of most moderns experience, conservatives and liberals alike, with all the good and bad that comes with that. There is a big heart in Sam Harris for sure. His goodness is apparent.
That being said, there is more to being good than being the most moral man in the room. In a world of evil without proper social control, a world where genocide is the norm, the hardest choice is usually the correct one
Life is the supreme Biblical value. The choice our ancestors face is kill, or be killed, terrorize, or become a victim of terror. This defines the Age of Iron. This defines a genetic disposition where violence is embedded into very early segments of our evolution. Populations and individuals that have evolved 'monster' into their psychic makeup, and the genetic evolution that went into that makeup, are in a better position to survive hell.

Jordan Peterson, whatever his personal faith may ultimately be, takes the Biblical perspective against Sam Harris. The inner monster is very much a part of what it takes to survive. Sam Harris rejects the terrible aspects of "God", thereby rejecting or denying the terrible aspect of himself. His goodness is like the prayer of a Mother Teresa as a result. It is not an empirically valid form of goodness.

Evolution itself mitigates against such a definition of 'goodness'. We are terrible, through nature's design, so too must be the God that we aspire to.
The alternative is our own genocide.

 

[SolomonVII]

The Free Market is an incredible power that dominates our lives. What it means is that whatever people can dream up can be sold, and become a part of our reality. This is something that managers of change fear most about entrepreneurs. It is a fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals. Liberals are the entrepreneurs, and conservatives are the ones who build and manage the innovations, preferably profitably.

The fear then is the scenario where entrepeneurs on a social level especially will innovate ideas that are beyond the capability of any manager to manage profitably.

Where the power lies of course in Free Enterprise system is individual choice in the marketplace. The epiphany moment for conservatives may be to recognize that liberal social engineering does not drive the narrative. Individual choice does. It is individual choice that is driving. The legalities of the state are secondary when, for example, two people want to get divorced, or exchange vows of any kind.
Free Enterprise does not normally create the demand, except frivolously in appeals to people's excess-pennies from the fun jar to pay for the Pet Rock.
But it is real need that drives the marketplace most. Life is too real for most of us, for that to be otherwise. Enterpreneurs are of the type who can reach into that darkness in their own lives to develop a product for that need. Scientists such as Jordan Peterson identify that as a feature of those who tend liberal. Entrepreneurial success is predicated on developing a product that meets that need. Compassion is a useful tool in feeling out where the need lies, to be sure.

But not all change is good, even if the need is real enough.
Nevertheless, free people err on the side of freedom.

The epiphany would note that it is not law, not social justice warriors, not fake news official propaganda, not even conspiracy, that drives any of the change we experience. We all take a seat at the cornucopia of the Free Enterprise system, and chose from the smorgasbord. It is the individual choice of people in the free market that is driving the change.
The force that drives the change that we experience, is us. The individual is crucial to any free market.
As often as not, laws are only liberalized when they have become ineffective and obsolete anyway, as per individual choice.
That is not saying that is a good thing, or a bad thing, but just a thing.

 

[DeaconDean]

Non sensical theobabble.
OB

Since you are rather "new" here, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

You self identify as an "atheist", ergo, by all the rules here, you cannot debate here.

Thank you for your consideration.

God Bless

Till all are one.