{"id":1125,"date":"2008-12-30T10:39:16","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T18:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1125"},"modified":"2008-12-30T10:39:16","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T18:39:16","slug":"hell-and-the-scientific-method","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/hell-and-the-scientific-method\/","title":{"rendered":"Hell and the scientific method"},"content":{"rendered":"

My good friend OpinionJournal.com blogger James Taranto drops<\/a> his insistence<\/a> that there is no tension between American tolerance and a belief in eternal damnation for wrong-believers (not without getting in one last crude mischaracterization of my argument, however).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now he says that our disagreement <\/a>boils down to the following statement of mine, from which he deletes the final clause:<\/p>\n

[I]t is an empirical matter, presumably verifiable after the Last Judgment, whether unbelievers and the unbaptised are eternally punished, not just a matter of feeling.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

James pretends that I was proposing a scientific test today for what will transpire after death.\u00a0 In fact, I was just stating the obvious: If hell is real, we will all find out–some of us directly–after the Last Judgment.\u00a0 By contrast, the statement which James offers as an analogy to the belief in eternal damnation: \u201cShe is the most important thing in the world\u201d is a value judgment that cannot be corroborated by actual experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In an effort to be cute, James states that I \u201cmust be the only atheist who thinks [that] the Last Judgment is a real event.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Earlier James accused me of lacking imaginative sympathy with religious belief; now he accuses me of believing religious doctrine.\u00a0 I wish he\u2019d make up his mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My good friend OpinionJournal.com blogger James Taranto drops his insistence that there is no tension between American tolerance and a belief in eternal damnation for wrong-believers (not without getting in one last crude mischaracterization of my argument, however).\u00a0 Now he … 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":[153],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125"}],"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=1125"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1134,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions\/1134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}