Will I see Hitler in heaven?

Brian, GDR: This is a question near and dear to my heart, the question of God's existence and/or nature in light of the slaughter of innocents. Forgive me for rambling through your exchange.I wrestled with this from an early age, and the lack of satisfying answers helped drive me first to young, aggressive atheism and then later, less emotionally and more thoughtfully, to a skeptical agnosticism.Essentially, all the Abrahamic faiths root their answer in mystery, for there is no human justification for Job's misery or the misery of any child born into crushing poverty.Reason cannot justify God's ways to man, and the believer who attempts it is on a fool's errand. Only mystery, only the impossibility of human comprehension, can give these faiths moral cohesion.My personal walk-away from my childhood faith hinged greatly on these questions. In a matter of months, I moved from wondering about the reasonableness of killing 40 children for taunting a prophet to understanding that the entire Bible required one's acceptance of the necessity of the slaughtered innocents; beyond the question of God's existence lay that of worship--shall I worship the fount of necessary evil? Is this the father I should adore?I found I could not accept that necessity within the framework of a loving, personal, all-knowing and all-powerful God, leaving three possibilities: I had arrived at a stubborn refusal, a rebellion that was practically Satanic; there was no God; the human understanding of God was in error.For many years I only entertained the former possibility, that there simply was no God, and I was forceful about it. Still, I am first a poet, and the lyrical beauty of life and love pulled me always back to thoughts of spirit and eternity: it's a human thing. My sometimes ecstatic love of wild nature remains a great counterbalance to evidence-free conclusions of "only" or "merely."I don't know. I deeply, sincerely, don't know.So, I find myself again looking at necessity and contingency and looking more closely at the third option--that the human understanding of God is in error. If I understand the theology of it correctly (my Southern Baptist roots didn't need much theology beyond an angry God, a bass guitar, and sex), Christian apologists usually come to rest at balancing the necesssity of evil with the necessity of free will, suggesting that God was bound by some sort of moral calculus that required that toddlers be raped and throttled. I still can't go there.Nonetheless, I have somewhat re-balanced my leaning-away agnosticism--right down the middle, trying to see without histories, mine or otherwise. The repugnance I feel at the above apologies is at the apologies, not the world; neither the tiger nor the lamb break my heart, because I see the march of their generations (and mine) like a parade: life is long enough, after all, and the answer to the slaughter is to stop it whenever one can. I find myself wondering whether God really has to line up an infinite series of falling dominos to be God, or whether the true essence of divinity could be purely creative, the contingency of life as true as the necessity, and all because it was the only way there could be any being at all, and if divinity could blot the horror of our human stain, it would.My apologies for thinking with my fingers.

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God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ”Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’
--Ann Coulter, Fox-TV: Hannity & Colmes, 20 Jun 01 Save lives! Click here!
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Yes, I understand the Fall thing. I just don't believe it.Babies are not guilty, Ian. You can theologize all you like, but I grew up with baby siblings, baby nieces and nephews, made babies and diapered grandbabies. I was a baby. Babies are not guilty.Little girls who stop politely for the wrong stranger are not guilty. Grandmothers who squint and step into traffic are not guilty. The handful of people killed each year by lightning are not guilty. The conjoined twins (and the Down's syndrome kids, sweet and heart-breaking as anything), are not guilty.Even me, Ian, flawed and struggling as I am, trying to see the truth by the best light that I can, I am not guilty.The vaporized children of Hiroshima set the wheels of their fates in motion no more than I set mine, nor did we choose our own natures or the nature of this world. We all grapple with the cards we were dealt and the flow of the game. Whatever else they and I may be, we are not guilty of some primeval stain that justifies our torment and slaughter. We are executives of our own will, and we stand to account for ourselves, not our fathers.I have more respect for the reply of mystery, for "It is God's will" than the old, creaking, deus ex machina of original sin, cranking out apologies for the lost and forsaken, wiping the blood from some strange god's hands.IMHO, of course.

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God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ”Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’
--Ann Coulter, Fox-TV: Hannity & Colmes, 20 Jun 01 Save lives! Click here!
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC!
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Thanks for the thoughtful reply, GDR. Likewise, and glad of it: we often don't know what we truly think and believe until we try to present and explain it, and a thoughtful reply is a fine gift.And, yes, I have spent many years contemplating these questions. This is a somewhat more generally philosophical line of thought rather than religious, based on the idea of a necessary dualism. The Buddhists use this line of thought to demonstrate the limitless nature of suffering.However, in the context of your example, keep in mind that I am not objecting to human mortality. Our transience does suffuse the birth of new life with more poignant celebration, but mortality alone seems adequate to that task: it is not death that I object to but the free hand given to evil.I do not believe that free will must, from a creator's perspective, mean the unfettered freedom to spiral down into increasingly egregious acts of depravity against others. After all, there are evils aside from predating other human beings, and a god could sort us out on some basis other than spilled human blood.Even supposing free will, we cannot reach up and brush the moon from the sky: if sexual lust in the heart alone identifies the sinner, so must the lust for blood. The sanctity of life could be built into the universe as fundamentally as gravity, distance, and other limits on our power.Given this, why would a benevolent God not do so? That central question brings me, again and again, to the questions of necessity I raised earlier. I see no necessary connection between free will and victimizing evil.Nor am I persuaded by the necessary dualism argument. The experience of sorrow does highlight by contrast that of joy, but it is not clear to me that this is a necessary connection: infants and toddlers, for example, delight in the love of their parents, and the play of light and color, long before they experience heartbreak or hatred. Many children are fortunate enough to find considerable pleasures in the world before they must experience significant pain. I respect your faith and honesty, GDR, and the answer I hear in this sentence is the reply of mystery, and I respect that, too, though it does not satisfy me.My central point previously was that the existence of this mystery--the apparent conflict between the nature of the world and the claimed nature of its Christian God--leads me to consider two primary options: either there is no God, or the human traditions of God's nature are far wide of the mark.Job eventually stood up on his dung heap and questioned his fate, and God's reply boiled down to mystery. As a child, I cheered when Job stood up; I was keenly disappointed when he was shouted down. My question is a bit different: Why create a world where evil and suffering flourish? If we must be tested, why does the test require the option to slaughter our neighbors?

Certainly that is the answer I have long embraced. But I try to question all my beliefs often, and it seems to me that many atheists are painted into the corner of that conclusion by the absurdities of doctrines and apologetics.There is another option, the option of a Divine whose nature we do not know, a Creator who has been ill-served by the elaborated tribal superstitions that pass for truth. Most of our present world religions insist on an all-knowing, all-powerful, personally invoved and benevolent Creator. None of these characteristics make sense to me in light of the nature of this world. The possibilities of a Creator who could only create and not mandate, a less than all-powerful Creator who was bound by necessities we have no inkling about, or whose agenda is so vast (and we so trivial) that there is no personal interest or involvement--perhaps it will require many more millennia of evolution before we become interesting... These possibilities also merit consideration, but organized religion has by and large precluded them.My own conceptions of intellectual honesty and open-mindedness preclude ruling out these possibilities altogether. Thus I hold onto my agnosticism despite the best efforts of believers to justify atheism.

Thanks for the reply, GDR. I appreciate the tenets of faith you have outlined, but for the unbeliever (agnostic or atheist), they are inescapably circular--you answer questions about reconciling what we see of the world with belief in a particular sort of deity with your faith in that deity. Again, I understand that your faith answers those questions adequately for you, but to an unbeliever this merely begs the question. My central point here was that the freedom to will evil has been coupled with a largely unrestrained power to do evil to each other--which seems unnecessary for the theological purposes ascribed to free will. If the expression of our sovereign will is so important, then why should one person's will to evil preclude other peoples' opportunity to express their own sovereign will?As the topic title suggests, Hitler might have repented and been saved at the last moment, while many of the millions he killed were deprived of that chance at redemption. Outside of belief, it is difficult to reconcile that calculus.If we accept the premise of a Creator, then the human capacity to do evil--as opposed to the human capacity to freely choose evil--was prescribed by that Creator. The Christian view of free will seems to be that we must be able to choose Evil or our ability to choose Good would be meaningless. That does have a certain amount of theo-logic but it does not address the power to enact that evil.How many infants' blood does a man need on his hands before he has demonstrated his choice? If sin is sin, if the will to evil, like lust in the heart, is already a sin, then why must so many people continue to suffer for what he has already demonstrated? What further purpose is accomplished? A murderer can freely enact his will to evil over and over, but one murder--or even his desire to murder--would seem adequate, theologically speaking.Our power has limits that our will does not. Those limits could have been drawn anywhere, but they were drawn to specifications that both permit great suffering and preclude the free choices of others.Thus, to accept the theological argument for the necessity of free will, it seems to me, merely moves the point of contention from the question of why God permits freely willed evil to the question of why God allows the enactment of freely willed evil and provided it such ample scope. When you note that there may be constraints beyond our ken, I again hear the reply of "Mystery."I understand that your faith gives you answers that satisfy a believer, but an unbeliever stands outside that circle.

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God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ”Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’
--Ann Coulter, Fox-TV: Hannity & Colmes, 20 Jun 01 Save lives! Click here!
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC!
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Hi, Ian.Thanks for your input--but if doctrine were reason, agnostics would fly. For all your explication, you remain within the circular arguments of belief, and take refuge in Mystery: indeed, who is to say that murdered infants don't crawl right into heaven?Scenario #1:
God: Okay, kid. This is your last chance--do you admit that you are a putrid, maggot-gagging piece of sinful crap?
Infant: gurgle...
God: Well, don't say you never had a chance.
Infant: *poops*Scenario #2:
God: Okay, Peter, let's get those dead babies in here first.
St. Peter: There are so many of them, Lord!
God: Yeah! Bet they can't believe their luck, huh?!Being one of the millions killed in the Holocaust and the war against Nazi Germany might have been a privilege, salvation-wise, though the (allegedly unsaved) Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals might be startled to hear it.This is the best of all possible worlds, and only the moral pus running into our mortal eyes prevents us from seeing that.And when the proclaimed nature of God appears to conflict with the observed nature of the world, who are we gonna believe--your doctrine, or our lying eyes?That's the ticket. Edited by Omnivorous, : smilie fix

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God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ”Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’
--Ann Coulter, Fox-TV: Hannity & Colmes, 20 Jun 01 Save lives! Click here!
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC!
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I suppose that from a Christian perspective, the agnostic rejection of doctrine looks much like the atheistic one. But I do not claim that I cannot know--I admit that I do not know.My understanding of "know" is this context is not purely intellectual. I do have intellectual scruples about proofs of a negative, and that is part of my agnosticism. I also remain in awe of the majesty and mystery of this universe, and that is part of my agnosticism, too.I have no objection when the religious claim to know God on the basis of personal experience, whether it be gradual and dawning, or sudden and revelatory. Should I have such experiences, I shall quite likely claim that knowledge as well. It is my capacity to wonder, to adore, to marvel, to sense a strain of grace in this bloody world--quite as much as my intellectual scruples--that keep me on that fence you so disdain.The human sense of balance is a remarkable thing. If you study the human systems of sensation and perception, you learn that balance is a dynamic process: we do not find a balancing point and remain there, still and poised, without effort; our nerves and muscles make constant corrections--correct a bit this way, oops, back the other way a little, oops, now over here--even when we are standing still.The more I converse with a doctrinaire Christian, the more I begin to sound like an atheist; the more I converse with a militant atheist, the more I seem to harbor religious tendencies. I'll repeat what I've said before, Ian: death holds no terrors for me. The notion of Death as the Great Democrat is an attractive one, but every death has its context, and the context makes all the difference--to an agnostic.One might say that Hunger is a great democrat, since we all become hungry, regardless of our categories of religion, race, or creed; but some categories of the hungry eat on a regular basis, and others starve.Some lives are rich and long, some are grindingly stunting and long, some are horrid and short. A believer in a particular doctrine may well posit that the infants and toddlers had their chance at heaven, though concentrated in a shorter time, or suggest that they receive a special exemption, and, in the context of their belief, find that perfectly reasonable. I don't share that belief, and I find the notion facile in a repugnant way: not the believer, the belief.Outside the parameters of doctrine, I can wonder if such difficulties are resolved by human ignorance of the divine, and thus also maintain a moral agnosticism as well as an intellectual one. *shrugs*The topic is Hitler in Heaven, else I might have mused on the Potato Famine. Indeed. Which god is that? Zeus loved, grew wrathful, and fancied that he handed out justice. Many religions have sacrificed children to their gods because they loved Them so, and craved their love in return. That remains to be seen.