This from Catholic Answers catholic.com/blog/tim-staples/what-is-heaven:
Did you mean this as an objection to Bradski’s post? It seems to me that this is precisely what Bradski was alluding to.
The desire for eternal life could be construed as a bottomless egotistical avarice. Consider:
You bet!
I’m just stating a fact. There will be no non-souls in heaven. Or hell. No animal souls, just human souls.
I won’t respond to this whole post by line item because you misunderstood what I meant by socially stimulated. Let’s take a biological example. The muscles of your arms and legs develop because of the genes in your DNA. However, let’s say that you became bedridden or whatever and thus never moved your arms or legs. Henceforth, your muscles would actually degenerate. The lack of social activity in sports, walking, etc. led to the devolution of the muscles. Human language acquisition works the same way. Social stimulation is not the same as social construction. This framework allows for autonomy, free will, and metaphysical dualism or a special type of metaphysical monism. Therefore, deterministic material atheism is not a foregone conclusion of atheism itself. There are a variety of forms of atheism.“stimulated” gives the same away. In other words we are still cogs in the machine of nature and not responsible for our thoughts or actions. If we are simply naked apes we have no choice in the way we respond .
If order is merely conceptual it would be no different from chaos! Do you really believe the progressive development of purposeful, rational beings can be explained entirely by a fortuitous series of purposeless, mindless events?
The atheist’s singularity is impersonal, irrational, mindless, valueless, purposeless, meaningless and incapable of love, development and fulfilment. How does that compare with the Jewish concept of God as a personal, rational, moral, purposeful and creative Being capable of love, development and fulfilment? It is a superior and a more adequate explanation in every respect which corresponds to the way we live - which is the best test of any theory: “By their fruits…”.
“stimulation” again gives the game away! The cogs in the machine are having a whale of a time with their impersonal opinions. “arbitrary” sums up life in a mindless universe perfectly. We can think what we like but we are all wrong. There is no criterion of anything…
And that is precisely where their scheme of things is inconsistent and incoherent. What is the rational foundation of their values? Human opinions? There is not one jot of evidence that matter is intrinsically moral or conscious of anything. If only matter exists nothing matters…
Your passage didn’t reveal life as meaningless. It just shows that Russell was cognisant of the fact that relatively speaking, what we do has little to no impact on the larger universe out there. This does not deprive life of its meaning no matter how small it might be compared to the universe.
This invokes classical Enlightenment philosophy, that is that human nature should not be obfuscated, granted that Russell implicitly takes the Rousseau position on human nature instead of Hobbes.
Isn’t there something ignoble about the need to be dead forever? What could motivate it other than cowardly fear of life eternal and the judgment of a just and merciful God?
Do you actually read my posts?
Reasons for not desiring eternal life mentioned thus far include concerns for quality of life, loss of ones individual identity (which some have equated with death), and having never heard a description of eternal life that sounds appealing. That’s non-exhaustive; there may be other reasons.What could motivate it other than cowardly fear of life eternal and the judgment of a just and merciful God?
I think the idea of being dead forever is usually applied to the other person.
I think that is true. His impression of Christianity is not what I believe to say the least. But I could understand how he arrived at that point given that he grew up in the Victorian era.
Actually, I do read your posts. I never said you said Russel was at wholesale odds with the Christian tradition. I merely pointed out that his argument was fundamentally very similar to Boethius’ in Consolation of Philosophy and emphasized it because I wanted to bridge the gap between faith and lack thereof. In short, I wanted to show that seeking happiness in life is itself a meaning to life. Russel clearly upheld this position.
Certainly not exhaustive. Near the top of the list for some people I would put the fear of being judged because one has a good reason for such fear.
Plainly we disagree on whether Russell in that passage quoted was admitting to the dismal aspects of his atheism as an obstacle to our hope of eternal happiness.
I’m inclined to put this in the quality of [after]life category. I’m assuming that when you refer to judgement that you are also thinking about a punishment that never ends and not a finite punishment after which the person is welcomed into something better.
I’ll have to leave his state of mind at the time of his death to the realm of speculation. There have been people that seem to have thought that the actions they orchestrated against another person/people were morally permissible and have even thought themselves as acting as agents of God. How Hitler saw himself is unknown to me.
Sounds like the Borg to me.
Speculation is certainly allowed. It’s highly doubtful that he saw himself as a Christian.
There is always some ambivalence and uncertainty, but most people who do harm to others do so for some good that they worship: sex, wealth, power, family, nation, ideal, etc.
