Is the Christian doctrine of heaven a bribe, and does the doctrine of hell commit the scare tactics fallacy?

1. Some people maintain that, in religions that teach a belief in heaven and hell, that heaven is a bribe and the doctrine of hell commits the scare tactics fallacy. Is this a reasonable statement, or not? 

Here is a discussion of the scare tactics fallacy. 

A Question from a Student

Here's a thought: Who is the more virtuous person?

1. The person who follows a religious creed to avoid eternal damnation, but does not strive to live virtuously, instead taking advantage of the "forgiveness of sins" clauses that are in major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism).
2. The atheist or agnostic who works to live a virtuous life merely for the sake of being virtuous, with no thought to any reward or any sort of afterlife.

If there was a god, and these two people were standing before you, which one would you let into the proverbial pearly gates? 

One theory is that since God standard is perfection, and no one reaches that standard, only those who, through faith, appropriate God's substitutionary sacrifice in Christ are saved, and everyone else is lost.

But there are other theories of heaven and hell. One is that heaven is actually a big bore to anyone except those with a good character. A religious faith that is just a fire insurance policy which allows you to stop worrying about going to hell while remaining indifferent to the development of one's character is a pretty worthless kind of faith. If a loving God runs the universe, then the only way one is ever going to be happy forever in this kind of a universe is to become a completely loving person oneself. You can do some of that on your own power, but that only goes so far, so at some point you are going to have to reach out to that loving God and ask them to turn you into the loving person you are trying, but not quite succeeding, in being now.  

Keller on the natural consequences view of heaven and hell

“The idea of hell is implausible to people because they see it as unfair that infinite punishment would be meted out for comparably minor, finite false steps (like not embracing Christianity.) Also, almost no one knows anyone (including themselves) that seem to be bad enough to merit hell. But the Biblical teaching on hell answers both of these objections. First, it tells us that people only get in the afterlife what they have most wanted-either to have God as Savior and Master or to be their own Saviors and Masters. Secondly, it tells us that hell is a natural consequence. Even in this world it is clear that self-centeredness rather than God-centeredness makes you miserable and blind. The more self-centered, self-absorbed, self-pitying, and self-justifying people are, the more breakdowns occur, relationally, psychologically, and even physically. They also go deeper into denial about the source of their problems.”

-Tim Keller

Part of Lewis's chapter on Hell from the Problem of Pain

Without hell, can evil triumph?

First, there is an objection, in many minds, to the idea of retributive punishment as such. This has been partly dealt with in a previous chapter. It was there maintained that all punishment became unjust if the ideas of ill-desert and retribution were removed from it; and a core of righteousness was discovered within the vindictive passion itself, in the demand that the evil man must not be left perfectly satisfied with his own evil, that it must be made to appear to him what it rightly appears to others--evil. I said that Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress. We were then discussing pain which might still lead to repentance. How if it does not--if no further conquest than the planting of the flag ever takes place? Let us try to be honest with ourselves. Picture to yourself a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity; who, having thus attained success, uses it for the gratification of lust and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honour among thieves by betraying his own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of bewildered disillusionment. Suppose further, that he does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant--a jolly, ruddy-checked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life, that God and man are fools whom he has got the better of, that his way of life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable. We must be careful at this point. The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin. Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a man: to prefer his conversion, at the peril of our own lives, perhaps of our own souls, to his punishment; to prefer it infinitely. But that is not the question. Supposing be will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him? Can you really desire that such a man, remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side? And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness--only spite--that prevents you from doing so? Or do you find that conflict between justice and Mercy, which has sometimes seemed to you such an outmoded piece of theology, now actually at work in your own mind, and feeling very much as if it came to you from above, not from below? You are moved, not by a desire for the wretched creature's pain as such, but by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow. In a sense, it is better for the creature itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake. Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented continuance in such ghastly illusion. Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself, but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good; for the alternative is that the soul should be ignorant of the evil, or ignorant that the evil is contrary to its nature, "either of which," says the philosopher, "is manifestly bad." (Summa Theol., 1, 11ae,Q. xxxix, Art. 1.) And I think, though we tremble, we agree.

Lucy Van Pelt locks the doors of hell from the inside.

Have to distinguish her from Lucy Pevensie of Narnia and Lucy Ricardo of, well, you know.

HT: Bob Prokop. 

C. S. Lewis on Hell: Successful Rebels to the End

I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully "All will be saved." But my reason retorts, "Without their will, or with it?" If I say "Without their will" I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary If I say "With their will," my reason replies "How if they will not give in?"

I'll tell you how. God knocks them over the head with irresistible grace, and changes their desires. Then they are going to want to commit that act of self-surrender, with perfect compatibilist freedom. But since God can do that for everybody, he will, and therefore universalism is surely true. No?  

Picturing hell

What picture of hell makes the most sense to you? This is an interesting article by a Melbourne philosophy student.

A defense of Hell

A redated post, and maybe something Steve Hays can use against me in a discussion I'm having with him concerning retribution over at Triablogue. What a difference a t makes.

By Mark Talbot. One t.

Hell, Hays, and the criminal analogy

I think we have to go back to the context of your using Grayling's employment of the Polanski case in the defense of hell. There are some important differences between this kind of criminal case and the problem of sin. Grayling would not have been making his case if Polanski had served his full sentence and was about to be released. The point is that our judicial system allows people to be released from their punishment once proportionality is reached (with a lot of other considerations thrown in as well). The passage of time without punishment doesn't release one from guilt, that was Grayling's point. In our judicial system, the doing of time in prison "pays one's debt to society."


You are the one using the criminal reasoning to justify hell. But the analogy to the criminal justice system is precisely what propels the proporitionality objection. To get a defense of hell of the ground you have to argue either that the case is different with sin because it is against God, or argue that the damned sinner is unrepentant and therefore reoffends continuously. Those are precisely points at which the criminal justice analogy breaks down.
In my view the retribution analogyis too closely connected to the concepts of criminal justice to justify hell, and that is why I think of hell primarily as a natural consequence of the fact that one is rebelling against the source of goodness itself. If you're doing that, you can't be happy, and here case of Aslan and the dwarfs and the Great Divorce helps us see that. No fire and brimstone is necessary to make us miserable if we are trying forever to find happiness apart from the Source of happiness.

Retribution, Hell, and Roman Polanski: A Response to Hays

This has nothing to do with Calvinism, just so you know.

The concept of retribution is that the evildoer should be deprived of happiness to in proportion to the wrongfulness or harmfulness of the act. The proportionality objection to hell would not be that a certain amount of time passing is going to take the guilt away, but rather that no action is infinitely bad or infinitely harmful, and so the proporitionality requirement can be met in a finite length of time, and the eternity of hell isn't necessary.




It doesn't imply that guilt diminises with time, it just says that after a certain amount of happiness is deprived from the wrongdoer, the punishment can end, because the crime has been paid for. So the reasoning in the Polanski case doesn't apply here.



There are two standard responses to it. One if that in the case of sin, the offended party is God, and therefore sin, (unlike crime) can and always does deserve an infinite punishment. That seemed more plausible back when people were thought of as standing on different levels of the Great Chain of Being, and a crime against a nobleman was thought more heinous than a crime against a commoner, for that reason only.



The other response is to say that the damned are unrepentant sinners who continuously reoffend. I think that is surely the more plausible response, but this has little to do with the reasoning in the Polanski case.



What is more, there is a statute of limitations for many crimes, but no statute for the most heinous crimes. But hell, presumably, is for sinners of every type, and Protestants at least reject the idea that some sins are "venial" and do not threaten a person's salvation.



So I don't think that this is the right way to meet the proportionality objection to the doctrine of everlasting punishment.

Hell, Calvinism, and those wretched Dwarfs

You die a faithful believer, you are ushered into heaven, and as you begin to sing your song in the heavenly choir, you notice the people in the fires of hell, suffering eternal torment wailing and gnashing their teeth. Your initial reaction is to

A) Feel sorry for them, and ask, as Lucy did concerning the Dwarves in the Last Battle, what can be done for the poor wretches.

B) Sing louder, praising God that while God's glory is demonstrated in the just punishment of the wicked, you reflect on the wonderful graciousness of your own salvation, that you were spared, by grace, the punishment that you otherwise would have received.

I'm A all the way, which makes me a lousy Calvinist.

This is the passage from the Last Battle.

“Aslan,” said Lucy through her tears, “could you — will you — do something for these poor Dwarfs?
“Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.” He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, “Hear that? That’s the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don’t take any notice. They won’t take us in again!”
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised the golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.”
But soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at least they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding nose, they all said:
“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”
“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.

This is the only conception of hell that has ever made any sense to me. But perhaps there is another option Aslan isn't considering here. Maybe Aslan can perform and act of irresistible grace and convert the dwarfs into dwarfs who are for Aslan as well as for the dwarfs, and can release them from the prison of their own minds. Or predestined that they never get into that state of mind in the first place. If either of those is a plausible alternative, then Aslan's reply to Lucy collapses.

Jonathan Edwards on the Blessed enjoying the Torments of the Damned

When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different from it! When they shall see how miserable others of their fellowcreatures are, who were naturally in the same circumstances with themselves; when they shall see the smoke of their torment, and the raging of the flames of their burning, and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity ; how will they rejoice!

The link links to the entire essay on why the blessed should not at all be concerned about the fate of people in hell. There either has to be something wrong with him, or something wrong with me.

Does this sermon commit the fallacy of scare tactics?

Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God."

See this for a treatment of the scare tactics fallacy.

Reply to Bill Snedden on teaching hell

VR: "And if someone believes in hell, it then gets problematic to argue that they ought not to teach the doctrine at all (keep it secret?). At most one is left with the constraints about age-appropriate teaching, which I was trying to cover in my post."
Bill S.: I don't find it problematic at all to argue that people who believe in morally repugnant notions ought not to teach them. If a concept is morally evil, then it shouldn't be taught as good, period. Whether a person believes that concept to be good is wholly beside the point.
Parents who are KKK members and believe that miscegenation is morally evil should not teach such rubbish to their children. That they disagree is beside the point.
Your point about different views of the doctrine of hell is well taken, I think. However, if we were to agree that a doctrine of eternal torment was morally repugnant, would we not also agree that it should not be taught to anyone (as true), much less children?
VR: I think some of the discussion has gotten a little off track here, and I think I ought to get it on track.
First, we might distinguish between ways in which we might assess different versions of the doctrine of hell.
1) Doctrines of hell which are morally coherent and at least plausible from within a Christian perspective.
2) Doctrines of hell that, in the final analysis, are morally incoherent, but which can be held in good conscience by at least some Christians.
3) Doctrines of hell which are morally incoherent, and where the moral incoherence should be evident to anyone who reflects on it.
I realize that there are arguments for the claim that no doctrine of everlasting punishment falls into category 1, and that this case is made not only by atheists but by universalist Christians like Tom Talbott. Another position might be that while the DEP may not be incoherent, many popular versions of the doctrine are morally incoherent. If the missionary's truck broke down on the way to the village before the dying man preached the gospel to him, and he ends up in an eternal torture chamber rather than in eternal bliss because of it, then I've got to be concerned about the concept of eternal punishment in use here.
Another example of a doctrine that I find morally incoherent is Calvinism. In spite of the biblical and moral arguments which I have heard over the years, this view just seems to be just completely incoherent morally. It's a view that leaves me just shaking my head at how anyone can actually believe that God can do that and be good. And yet, I know that there are Christians of good will and good conscience who believe it.
I'm not saying this to launch a debate on that topic. I'm saying I would oppose the claim that people who believe this should refrain from teaching it to their children. That's what they honestly think is true. If they don't teach it to their children, they would be liars. It now becomes a matter, and a matter only, of how they teach that doctrine.
Suppose, however, the doctrine could not be held by a reasonable person. That is what Bill is suggesting when he talks about the KKK and people who oppose miscegenation. The problem here seems to be that the doctrine shouldn't be believed by any reasonable person. But if, my some intellectual failure, it is believed by someone, I think I would still have to say that you can't argue that it is wrong to teach the honest truth to one's children. The error, the intellectual dishonesty if that is what is involved, occurred when the belief was formed. I don't see how you could give someone a reason not to teach some particular version of the doctrine of everlasting punishment to children (even a version of it that you or I might both find detestable) without at the same time giving the holder of the belief a reason to abandon the doctrine itself.
If I fire a gun at someone I think to be and armed robber, and I shoot an innocent 15-year-old boy instead and kill him; if we assume that I am within my rights morally to shoot an armed robber under these circumstances, then depending on how I formed my belief that the moving object over there really was an armed robber, I could be morally in the clear for firing the shot, even though an innocent 15-year-old died as a result.
You have to act on the beliefs you have, not the beliefs that someone else might wish that you had.

On teaching the doctrine of hell to children

More from my response to Parsons' thread on the Secular Outpost.


Any world view, except the sunniest forms of theistic universalism, I take it, commits you to unpleasant realities that you probably are not going to be too eager to teach to your children, and if you do teach them to your children, you would have to do so in a gingerly way, exercising a certain amount of caution in making sure that the teaching was done in an age-appropriate way. A Christian who taught the doctrine of hell to a five-year-old, or a Christian who used made a special effort to present the doctrine of hell in an especially terrifying way, with the intent of scaring the child into proper behavior, would be teaching the doctrine abusively. But an atheist who constantly emphasized to their children that their Christian schoolmates who hope for an eternal life in heaven are deluded, and that when you die you rot, rot, rot, would be teaching the atheist view of death in a way that seems to me abusive as well. If you had someone who, through no epistemic fault of their own but due to some unfortunate intellectual circumstances, came to hold that the Jews controlled the banking industry and that black people were inferior (Darwin seems to have held that latter belief), then one would have to teach those beliefs to one's children in some sort of appropriate way. You can't teach your children what you think isn't true, you have to teach them what you think is true. That's what makes this nonsense about "teaching falsehoods to children" nonsense. I have trouble believing that an educated person today could hold those kinds of beliefs without some sort of culpability, just as I am sure Dawkins doesn't think that anybody could believe in the doctrine of everlasting punishment without some culpability.