• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Dante

An evil God?

18 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Buddhism, Death, God, Karma, Morality, Roman Catholicism, Supernatural

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Augustine, Dante, Friedrich Nietzsche, hell, justice, rebirth, Śāntideva, theodicy

I’ve lately been finding myself increasingly horrified by the concept of hell, and its implications for a certain kind of Christian belief in God. I’m familiar with several theological ways in which Christians handle this concept; there’s the pre-New Testament view in which the unsaved simply disappear after death, or the view in which hell is simply an allegory for what we do to ourselves psychologically in life. (I think Dante, who did a great deal to create our conception of hell, is often interpreted this latter way.) I don’t have serious problems with hell interpreted in either of these ways, or with a God who created it.

My problem is with the literal concept of hell, the one you see preached in evangelical sermons. I’ve been tempted to think of it as just a superstition for those who haven’t thought their Christianity through very well. But it isn’t that. Even Augustine, a profound thinker I have a deep respect for, seems to say fairly clearly that the damned suffer physical and psychological torment for eternity. This, to me, raises huge problems.

I can’t figure any way around the view that a God who damns people to hell for all eternity is evil. Such a God would deliberately inflict far more suffering than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot put together (and added to every other vicious tyrant you might care to name). Moreover, such a punishment seems completely gratuitous, far more than anything the sufferers could reasonably be said to deserve. Augustine argues the point merely by reference to Cicero and the Roman customs of the time: “we have punishments more severe than the crime all the time!” Such a point convinces me only of the barbarism of Rome, not of God’s justice. Nietzsche notes with some satisfaction that Aquinas and Tertullian go even further than this: among the pleasures granted to the elect in heaven comes the ability to see the ways the damned are punished. What kind of God would encourage such a thing?

Buddhist hells, by contrast, give us two ways out of the dilemma. First, they’re not permanent; everybody gets a second chance, as one should expect from a merciful god. Second, and more fundamentally, nobody put them there. Like all the other suffering in the world, they’re just an unpleasant fact of nature, one we need to find a way to deal with. If the Buddhas could eliminate the hells, they would; they’re omniscient and omnibenevolent, but not omnipotent. Śāntideva, in redirecting his good karma, hopes that the hells will become glades of lotuses – he just doesn’t succeed in effecting this transformation, at least not for the majority of the hells.

Am I missing something here? With respect to the God of the medieval theologians, if he existed, it’s not just that I would find it hard to believe him omnibenevolent. Rather, I would find it hard to believe him benevolent at all.

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Nathan on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Nathan on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber Martha Nussbaum Mencius modernity Pali suttas pedagogy Plato qualitative individualism race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) T.R. (Thill) Raghunath technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (12)
  • Applied Phil (269)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (40)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (13)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (25)
    • Play (11)
    • Politics (152)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (36)
  • Asian Thought (392)
    • Buddhism (282)
      • Early and Theravāda (118)
      • Mahāyāna (116)
      • Modernized Buddhism (82)
    • East Asia (82)
      • Confucianism (52)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (128)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (15)
      • Jainism (23)
      • Modern Hinduism (35)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (35)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (26)
  • Indigenous American Thought (3)
  • Method (233)
    • M.T.S.R. (131)
    • Metaphilosophy (156)
  • Practical Philosophy (347)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (41)
    • Emotion (150)
      • Anger (31)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (7)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (46)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (31)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (48)
    • Flourishing (81)
    • Foundations of Ethics (105)
    • Karma (42)
    • Morality (61)
    • Virtue (146)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (12)
      • Gentleness (5)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (14)
      • Patient Endurance (28)
      • Self-Discipline (8)
      • Serenity (27)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (114)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (31)
    • Monasticism (41)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (19)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (325)
    • Consciousness (14)
    • Epistemology (105)
      • Certainty and Doubt (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (27)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (62)
    • Hermeneutics (54)
    • Human Nature (29)
    • Logic (27)
      • Dialectic (15)
    • Metaphysics (90)
    • Philosophy of Language (18)
    • Self (63)
    • Supernatural (48)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (415)
    • Analytic Tradition (90)
    • Christianity (137)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (21)
      • Roman Catholicism (46)
    • French Tradition (47)
    • German Tradition (84)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (110)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (18)
    • Islam (37)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (86)
      • Biology (22)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (144)
      • Economics (30)
      • Psychology (59)

Recent Posts

  • Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Of mental health and medical models
  • Of perpetually vulnerable subjects
  • The scattershot application of “neoliberalism”
  • How neo is neoliberalism?

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.