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[Will 88]

The way I see it there are really only three options for an afterlife:

1. There is no afterlife, atheists and materialists are correct
2. There is an afterlife when you die, and monotheists (including christians) believe all people only get one life and then you either go to eternal heaven or eternal hell
3. There is reincarnation based on karma and people have multiple lives. This is what most buddhists and hindus believe in

Without getting weird this is basically the only three positions. Here is why I think - option 1, or option 3 are the only possible options which could make any sense to a rational mind.

Firstly, if you only get one life, and by your conduct you risk eternal hell, then you are best off dying pretty much after your first breath. It is just too much too risk. You might do something that offends the one god (of whatever Abrahamic or monotheistic denomination), then you go to hell forever. That is ridiculous. What god would allow a soul a single breath, or moments of life only and then give them eternal life or eternal hell. It is idiotic to think that any god or being would organise the whole of reality in such a way. If you only get one life, what is the point of letting someone take a few breaths and then move on to eternal heaven or hell. It makes no sense.

At least with the atheist view or the view of reincarnation, there is some internal logic and a point to having a life. With the one life only concept, life is reduced to a pointless joke, and a few decades of earthly experience would not be worth the risk of eternal suffering from a mendacious and nasty god.

How could anyone who thinks, believe in one life only which leads to eternal bliss or eternal suffering?? It is a god who rewards or punishes finite sins or good deeds with infinite punishment or reward. It is insane.

[jimwalton]

The problem with the atheist position (you live, do what you want, and then die and you're done) is that there is no justice. Someone horrible like Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, or Pol Pot live as they wish, sometimes in power and luxury, then they die—and that's it? There's no accountability for what they did? No punishment to fit the crime or any justice? If that's the case, it's a wonder we aren't all out there grabbing as much money, power, and pleasure as we can get, and who cares who we abuse in the process. Lives are just chemicals, anyway, and therefore meaningless (as far as MY gain is concerned). Well, in that perspective my life is meaningless too, except for whatever meaning I make up to give it. There is no internal logic, because even our sense of reason was the result of random processes and can't necessarily be trusted. I just don't buy into any of that.

Reincarnation, similarly, defies logic. To what purpose are the endless cycles of reincarnation? Hindus believe it is self-deification. But union with the impersonal absolute defies language, reason, and reality. It denies any ultimate difference between right and wrong and doesn't satisfy our longing for meaning in relationship and isn't philosophically coherent. The purpose of life is only to escape from life, which isn't real to begin with (the material world is an illusion, as are good and bad, suffering, and even human history). My problem with all of this is that it doesn't cohere logically with daily experience. The world is real; life has meaning; suffering is real; evil is real; death is real.

Instead, to me the logical choice is exactly as we perceive: life has meaning; there is a purpose to things; evil and suffering are real, just as goodness is. We are accountable for the way we live and are not just free to destroy or manipulate others at will. There is more to life than just pleasure and pain. There is such a thing as reason and free will, and those attributes allow us to think reasonably, live morally, and make rational choices. The idea that there is objective morality and a Judge who will hold us accountable for how we live coheres with our own societies.

Such a perspective doesn't make God mendacious or nasty. Any judge worth his salt vindicates good and judges evil. Any honorable parent trains children with rewards and punishments to socialize and educate them. Any good teacher holds their students accountable for the quality of their input and the effort enjoined. These are respectable traits, not deplorable ones. We each have many years—plenty of time—to pursue the truth and live according to it. Life is meaningful not only because we are in the image of a personal and meaningful God, but also because it is lived with purpose, our relationships matter, and goodness and justice matter. Life is meaningful because we are NOT just an agglomeration of chemicals or an illusory pretense.

[Mr. God]

> The problem with the atheist position (you live, do what you want, and then die and you're done) is that there is no justice.

When you say this is a "problem" with the atheist position...what do you mean by problem? There's certainly no rule that says only facts compatible with a just world can be true, or that justice is even a useful concept when trying to determine whether something is true.
Unless I'm just misunderstanding, it seems like your basic argument here is "I want it to be the case that this life isn't all there is, so therefore it's the case."

[jimwalton]

> There's certainly no rule that says only facts compatible with a just world can be true, or that justice is even a useful concept when trying to determine whether something is true.

I agree with this, and therefore that's not what I'm saying. My argument is not, "I want this to be true, therefore it's true." That would be pretty lame of me.

What I was saying is that in my considered opinion the atheist position falls short of reasonableness because it eliminates the concept of justice from life except where we create our own definition and artificially insert it where it doesn't fit, which I believe is what atheists have to do. If you truly believe we are an agglomeration of chemicals assembled by random mutations and assembled by blind processes (natural selection), then humans are no different in meaning and purpose from rocks, water, and lightning. Any purpose or meaning ascribed to humans is arbitrarily assigned, but with no meaning or purpose (other than possibly to feel good or to survive, but it could be argued that other courses and attitudes would contribute more effectively to survival). Justice, good, right, and accountability are all borrowed by atheists from theism. You have no basis for them in a world that is matter + time + chance. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If everything that exists has come out of absolutely nothing—no energy, no mass, no motion, no personality, no purpose—, then you cannot logically allow the assertion that we begin with nothing but have ended with something. Something doesn't come from nothing. It is logically unthinkable that all that now is has come out of utter nothing.

But I sense you still want to say all these things have rightly evolved, but you can't logically follow that train either. If everything that exists had an impersonal beginning, you are faced with at least some form of reductionism. If we trace backwards, at some point we will have to reduce everything to nothing. The personal came from impersonal, reason came from randomness, meaning came from meaninglessness, purpose came from determinism. This is all illogical, and it's a problem with the atheist position. Instead it makes more sense to think that the personal came from a personal source, reason and information came from intelligence, meaning came from meaning, and purpose came from intent.

The huge problem with beginning with impersonal forces (if even that, if the Big Bang was once a dimensionless singularity) and mere physical interactions is to find any meaning for the particulars (any individual factors—the separate parts of the whole). A drop of water is a particular; so is a human being. If we begin with the impersonal, how does anything have any meaning? Nobody has given an answer to that, it's a problem for the atheist position. If you begin with nothing, or with the impersonal, *everything* must be explained by the only constructs in the system: impersonal chemicals, random forces, time, and chance. No other factors exist. A stoplight will never learn your driving habits and learn to let you through when you're in a hurry. It is a mechanical apparatus and will never have the capacity to reason with purpose. The universe, in the atheist position, is no different. We can only work with the factors in the system. If we begin with the impersonal, we cannot then have some kind of teleological concept. NO ONE has ever demonstrated how time plus chance, beginning with the impersonal, can produce then needed complexity of the universe, let alone the personality of man.

So, possibly, when it comes down to the bottom line, the atheist position is more contrived and based on faith ("I want it to be the case that this life is all there is, so therefore it's the case") than the theistic position.

[Africa]

> The problem with the atheist position (you live, do what you want, and then die and you're done) is that there is no justice.

This is argument from consequences.

> Someone horrible like Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, or Pol Pot live as they wish, sometimes in power and luxury, then they die—and that's it?

Okay, let's put aside your logical fallacy for a second and bite...

Whereas under the usual Christian position, as long as someone like Hitler (himself both baptized and confirmed Catholic) fully repented* immediately before dying, not only would there be no punishment, he would be infinitely rewarded. While - according to the official position of many versions of Christian doctrine -- someone who lived a blameless life but did not accept Christ would be excluded (or, in many versions of doctrine, actually eternally punished).

* (well, in Catholicism he'd have to seek absolution I suppose, but the basic sense of there being a get out of hell card is there either way)

So the last person who should be bleating about justice is a Christian ... the whole doctrine of salvation is explicitly about avoiding what Christianity itself calls justice. For any crime at all, no matter how heinous, as long as it isn't continued disbelief -- that one's unforgiveable.

[jimwalton]

You've made a theological fallacy, so I'll bite. Heaven and hell have nothing to do with badness and goodness, morality or immorality, or your behavior in life. Whether you go to heaven or hell depends on whether you have the nature of Jesus or the nature of sin, period. You have, therefore, set up a false dichotomy of the evil person (for all intents and purposes) who gets into heaven and the good person (the blameless one in your hypothetical) who doesn't.

Let me try to put it this way. The Cubs are on the field playing against the Cleveland Indians, when out of the dugout runs the Browns defensive line and starts tackling the pitcher and the infielders. It's senseless to discuss whether it was a good tackle or to give them credit for a sack. They're in the wrong arena, in the wrong sport, and any "stats" or accomplishments are meaningless. That's not how we define "sack". The first step that has ANY meaning is to put the Browns on the gridiron. Now any subsequent stats will have meaning.

Back to theology. Your nature is the arena, and sin is the sport. The first step that has any meaning is your relationship with God. There are only two choices: you have fellowship with God because you have the nature of Christ, or you don't because you have the nature of sin. If you have the nature of Christ, you have fellowship with God (heaven). If you don't, you have the nature of sin and you are separated from God (death, "hell"). It is perfect justice for those who have the nature of God to have a continuing relationship with God, and for those who have no desire for that relationship to not have it. Now we have our players in the right arenas.

Once we are in the right arenas, now justice comes to bear again on a different level—the "stats". Each person in heaven gets judged according to their works, and there are degrees of reward in heaven. Each person who wanted nothing to do with God gets judged according to their works, and there are degrees of punishment in hell (and possibly even different durations of time spent there according to what is fair).

[Will 88]

Since you like things to make sense then please explain why any god with any sense or mind would grant a single breath of life to a child and then judge them for eternity? How can you possibly reconcile that?

[jimwalton]

Glad to comment. There are indicators in the Bible that babies who die go to heaven, and there are no indicators to the contrary. I'll show you the texts.

Romans 5.13. According to this verse, people are not held accountable for what they had no possibility of knowing or knowing about. Therefore babies who had a single breath of life will not be judged for eternity.

But I can get more specific than that. In Deuteronomy 1.39, the children who were too young to make a realistic decision (too young to know good from bad) are not judged, but are shown mercy; their level of accountability was directly related to their moral awareness. Therefore babies would not be judged for eternity.

Isaiah 7.15-16 teaches the same thing: God deals differently with people based on their knowledge. So we're getting a sense of the fairness of God, and that he takes many things into consideration as he makes his perfect decisions.