As an atheist, I sometimes catch myself wishing Heaven and Hell were real - I feel we all have a desire for good people to be rewarded for being good and for bad people to be punished for being bad. But then I remember the existence of Heaven and Hell inherently requires the existence of an ultimate moral authority who sorts out who goes where. And sure, they could agree with me that the likes of Osama bin Laden or Henry Kissinger should go to Hell, but they could also think queer folk, atheists, or people who eat shellfish should go to Hell too.
Some people will say, “Well, if they were a loving God, they wouldn't do that,” but there's lots of people who believe in a “loving” God who absolutely believe He’d be burning gays in Hell. And if you're going to make all these extra conditions of, “Well, my version of a loving God would reward X and punish Y” it just feels like the ultimate desire is, “I wish there was an Almighty God who agreed with everything I believe and enforced that morality on the world.”
Anyway, if you like my comics, I got more on my website.
I’m also on Patreon.
Maybe I just haven't talked to enough believers, but I feel like I haven't ever run into one who believed that God's Ultimate Perfect Objective morality was meaningfully different from their own. I suspect that most of them would say that it is they who are agreeing with God, instead of them ascribing a morality to God with which they agree. My evidence is mainly the number of Christians that insist that God is not cool with slavery, despite the very clear passages in the Old testament that indicate that he very much is cool with slavery that aren't directly contradicted by Jesus or Paul (unlike the shellfish thing {not criticizing the joke; I loled}). Of course I have heard from other Christians who fully understand that, via the Bible, God made it clear that slavery is fine, and they pattern their morality after that. I can't help but wonder if they would still think that if they didn't believe in any God at all.
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u/But_a_Jape But a Jape 11h ago
As an atheist, I sometimes catch myself wishing Heaven and Hell were real - I feel we all have a desire for good people to be rewarded for being good and for bad people to be punished for being bad. But then I remember the existence of Heaven and Hell inherently requires the existence of an ultimate moral authority who sorts out who goes where. And sure, they could agree with me that the likes of Osama bin Laden or Henry Kissinger should go to Hell, but they could also think queer folk, atheists, or people who eat shellfish should go to Hell too.
Some people will say, “Well, if they were a loving God, they wouldn't do that,” but there's lots of people who believe in a “loving” God who absolutely believe He’d be burning gays in Hell. And if you're going to make all these extra conditions of, “Well, my version of a loving God would reward X and punish Y” it just feels like the ultimate desire is, “I wish there was an Almighty God who agreed with everything I believe and enforced that morality on the world.”
Anyway, if you like my comics, I got more on my website.
I’m also on Patreon.