{"id":1061,"date":"2008-12-24T18:36:48","date_gmt":"2008-12-25T02:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1061"},"modified":"2008-12-27T19:18:31","modified_gmt":"2008-12-28T03:18:31","slug":"being-in-love-is-not-always-the-same-thing-as-eternal-damnation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/being-in-love-is-not-always-the-same-thing-as-eternal-damnation\/","title":{"rendered":"Being in love is not always the same thing as eternal damnation"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto<\/a>, living in modern America, with its easy-going, good-natured inclusiveness, while also believing that your office-mate–who stayed up all night finishing your sales report so you could nurse your sick child–will burn in hell for eternity simply because he is Jewish, is no more puzzling an existential state than feeling that the woman you love is the \u201cmost important thing in the world,\u201d\u00a0 while also believing that all men are created equal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Only someone who suffers from a \u201cpoverty of imagination,\u201d writes Taranto, would posit any tension between the lived experience of American tolerance and the knowledge of certain hell for a significant portion of one\u2019s ethical fellow citizens.<\/p>\n

With all due respect to my esteemed former City Journal colleague, in my view it may be he who suffers from a poverty of imagination.\u00a0 It cannot be that he is taking the prospect of eternal damnation as seriously as it deserves if he thinks it is so easily reconciled with American openness.\u00a0\u00a0 I would hope that those who subscribe to the doctrine of divine retribution have struggled a little more than Taranto does with its worldly implications in an era of the rights of man.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Americans have finally created a world in which creedal distinctions are irrelevant to almost all spheres of public and private life.\u00a0 Yet\u00a0American Christians\u00a0are to believe that at death, this wonderful ecumenical indifference is yanked away and one’s religion determines whether one has a shot not just at Harvard but at heaven, all thanks to the dispensation of a loving God.\u00a0 If that is not a source of potential cognitive dissonance, I don’t know what is.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Taranto adopts a familiar tactic of religious apologists\u2014the appeal to unreason.\u00a0 \u201c[I]t occurs to us that there are other areas of life that reason alone is inadequate to explain,\u201d he writes.\u00a0 (The appeal to unreason as a grounding for religious faith alternates regularly with the appeal to reason <\/a>as a grounding for religious faith.)\u00a0\u00a0 Returning to his analogy between love and eternal damnation, he argues:<\/p>\n

“She is the most important thing in the world” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I will leave such gobbledygook to those more theologically gifted than I.\u00a0 But let me flesh out Taranto\u2019s analogy.<\/p>\n

The statements:<\/p>\n

“She is the most important thing in the world” makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

are the same as saying:<\/p>\n

\u201cChildren who die before being baptised will burn in hell despite possessing equal rights and human worth\u201d makes no sense as a logical proposition, but that does not make it false. Its truth lies elsewhere than in the realm of reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

James may find this analogy self-evident; I do not.\u00a0\u00a0 And it is an empirical matter, presumably verifiable after the Last Judgment, whether unbelievers and the unbaptised are eternally punished, not just a matter of feeling.<\/p>\n

Pace <\/em>Taranto, I have not accused Christians of being \u201cinsincere or confused.\u201d\u00a0 I hypothesized that because society has changed radically, unrecognizably, since the era when doctrines of eternal damnation were formulated, perhaps the content and experience of religious belief has as well.\u00a0 This is hardly an impious proposition.\u00a0 Ask a believer about Biblical injunctions to stone undevout family members or homosexuals, and you will get a stern lecture about the impropriety of taking such commandments literally in light of evolving faith.\u00a0 Secular, Enlightenment tolerance has revised huge swathes of the Bible; it does not seem so implausible that it could have had a similar if subtler effect on the doctrine of damnation for wrong-believers and the unbaptised.\u00a0 But if it hasn\u2019t, I offer my apologies to all those who are keeping the faith.<\/p>\n

P.S. Taranto agrees with me that we should not facilely ascribe bigotry to belief “except on the basis of attitudes toward worldly matters.”\u00a0 Yet he also writes that “[i]t is bigoted to think Jews should not be allowed to . . . live in Hebron, regardless of whether that belief has a theological predicate.”\u00a0 I’m confused.\u00a0 Would it also be bigotry to believe that Palestinians should not live in Hebron?\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto, living in modern America, with its easy-going, good-natured inclusiveness, while also believing that your office-mate–who stayed up all night finishing your sales report so you could nurse your sick child–will burn in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1061"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1065,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions\/1065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}