Hell

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Oh, gotcha.

I wasn't saying you're a sociopath for preaching, but that the top-down chain of command is.

Sorry but I don't know the terms for the top people who put you in that unenviable position.

It was implied on here yesterday that I’d go to Hell for my disbelief. viewtopic.php?t=407437&start=16

However, I say:

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

I’d be reigning because I’m a Princess of Darkness.

It always struck me as odd that Satan would help God out by running a horrendous jail for sinners. It provides an incentive for people to behave themselves, quite the reverse of what I'd think Satan wants.

As for whether or not I'd like the fire-and-brimstone theory to be true, no I wouldn't. For one thing it's too hard to know what the rules are. Social morality can perhaps be understood - try to help people rather than hurt them, within the limits of your responsibility to maintain your own happiness - but as far as I can see divine morality makes no sense at all except when it happens to coincide with social morality, and when it clashes with it, then if you obey it you'll be violating social morality and therefore hurting people just to please one omnipotent being, not because you understand the supposedly benevolent reason for his demands but simply because he says so, or you think he says so. And the punishment - eternal torture - rarely fits the crime, yet we're told that there's no degree of sin in God's eyes. There are degrees of morality. Mass murder is very different from being a bit mean or dishonest occasionally, and if somebody hurts me a little bit, I'm not usually so vindictive as to want them to rot in Hell forever. A good slap would be enough to satisfy my lust for revenge. If somebody's harmful, what's the point sending them to hell after they've died and can't do any more harm? Punishment is a Pavlovian attempt to control a hostile person while they're alive. It probably works to a degree in that form.

But I'm glad to say I don't think there's any such place as Abrahamic Hell. Best guess, somebody once made it up to keep us under control, it only works on you if you believe it, and these days most of us are more likely to insist on evidence before swallowing a very strange-looking assertion, and religion is in decline. Humans commonly make up threats of a horrible nature in order to control the gullible. English parents used to tell naughty children that Napoleon would come and kill them if they didn't mend their ways, and the promise that they'd be rewarded by Santa if they were good is legendary. Children's minds have to mature a little before they realise that people can tell lies, and adults' minds have to do the same thing in order to recognise and escape the controlling influence of dishonest threats.

If I were judging people's moral behaviour, the non-superstitious ones who were good to others would score higher than those who only behaved themselves to save their own necks. Yet divine morality has it the other way round, and unbelief is quite ludicrously seen as an awful thing. Meanwhile some of us feel quite strongly that judging people solely on their private beliefs does more harm than good, and that makes sense to me. But I know fundamentalists who would think I was going to hell just for having a secular map of the universe as my guiding map, or for not regularly attending their particular brand of church gathering. AFAIK not even the Bible says I have to do that, so I wonder where their ideas come from.