#hell rant

So, well, it's not like anyone needs my approval to have whatever religious beliefs they have.

But today, Easter Sunday, I would just like to state for the record that I intensely disagree with and morally disapprove of the idea of sin and the idea of hell.

(Which means I also disapprove of any concept of salvation which is salvation from the whole "the wages of sin is death" thing.)

First off, the concept of right and wrong should be one of harm caused to actual people or things in the the real world, not of defiance of arbitrary rules created by an authority figure. Children feel bad when their parents are unhappy with them because their parents have the power to punish them. Sin and hell are taking these dynamics and projecting them onto God the Father. It's not real. It's not real ethics. When you're a kid, playing loudly when your mother has a headache and needs quiet isn't bad because your mother is an authority figure and she might get mad at you, it is exactly as bad, no more no less, than causing anyone who does not have authority over you extra suffering while they are not feeling well.

Suffering is bad (really shocking take I know), attempting to alleviate suffering is good and causing more suffering on purpose or through insufficient caution are bad. And some other things: respecting autonomy (letting people live their lives as they see fit) is good and denying autonomy is bad. Truth is good and deception is bad. Tending to the interdependent web of existence on earth is good and disrupting it is bad. All of these are in tension with each other all the time, but none of them should be in tension with obeying or defying the will of a made up super-parent.

(Am I saying God is not real? Not really. I think good people can believe in God or not believe in God, it's orthogonal to morality. Am I saying that conception of God is not real? Definitely.)

People will talk as though obedience to authority is a reasonable substitute for coherent ethics. It's not. For one thing, notice I claimed autonomy as a core value? Find that in the Ten Commandments. (It's not there. Nor is any reference to sexual violence, even though popularly everybody thinks sexual violence is one of the worst things people can do to each other.)

For another, the motivation is all wrong, people who follow moral rules to avoid being punished are fundamentally being selfish, and going from a selfish avoid-pain-supplied-by-authority motivation to a "other people have feelings and interiority" motivation is not that easy (it's actually much more direct to go from "this is what I find good or bad for me" to "maybe other people find similar things good or bad for them?") and "well I have a conscience, if I do bad things I feel guilty" isn't actually morality, it's just internalizing what other people want you to do, it's having a cop in the head. It's the "my parent will punish me" dynamic all over again. (I am acutely aware of this because my conscience makes me feel bad for things that are not actually ethical issues all the time, mostly about not being productive enough, and other times I'll do things that rationally I think are harmful and not get feelings of guilt. It's internalized authority, it's not ethics.)

For a third, sometimes when people do things out of fear of authority they are morally bad things. The Holocaust was a thing a government did. Wars are things governments do. Colonization is a thing governments do. Slavery. Baby snatching. Residential schools. Comfort women. The Crusades and the Inquisition were driven by the Church (and it's not like Christians are uniquely capable of committing atrocities in the name of religion either. Just that in the last several centuries they've had a tremendous amount of power.)

For a fourth, coercive authority is inherently bad. We understand coercion is bad when there is no "legitimate authority", we know that a schoolyard bully is not right for beating up a loner kid and we know muggings aren't right and armed robberies aren't right and we know you can't just tie someone to a chair and tell them you're going to hurt them until they agree to do everything you want them to under normal circumstances and pretend that's morally OK. But suddenly when there's a "legitimate authority" it's ok to torture and imprison people against their will and generally force people to do things they don't want to do? No. "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong" extends to lots of things beyond the death penalty. Why do we hit kids to show that hitting kids is wrong? Why do we take people away from their families and everything they find enjoyable in life for causing some form of harm to others (at most justified) or because they stole or damaged someone's property or because (least justified) they got caught with a bunch of drugs on them? Why do we frown on gangs but fund police forces, which operate basically the same way as gangs? Why do we frown on killing people at home but give them medals and discounts at restaurants for killing people abroad?

You ever listen to someone with a child or a pet going off about "good girl" and "good boy"? You notice how it's almost never about actual morally right behavior, it's about what's convenient to the adult human? The cat eating your sandwich is "bad". (You being late to feed your cat is just your cat being funny for being so melodramatic over food though.) But a cat eating the food it can find is not being bad at being a cat, nor is it being unethical. It is doing what cats do to survive, and in as much as ethics even apply to cats that is actually being a good cat. If anything the human was being a bad human for leaving the sandwich where the cat could get to it. But the "nice" thing about being a pet owner is there's no one standing over your shoulder telling you you're doing it wrong, so you get to blame your cat for your bad behavior all you want. Or your dog. Or your child.

Kids should run around and be loud a lot of the time, and have their own wants and needs that are independent of their parents' wants and needs. Kids mostly should take care of their needs and learn and grow, including needs for play and for making friends and for getting attention and having new experiences. And learning for instance what happens when you fall from climbing all over something that was not designed to be climbed on.

And adults should...do things adults need, and as we're able help other humans get things they need when either it's likely to get reciprocated or when someone's in a situation where their needs vastly outstrip their ability to return favors. (And maybe not wreck the planet? That would be nice.)

Many Christians think that life on Earth is some sort of dress rehearsal or test before the main event of Heaven. But Earth is all we've got. And part of that is Earth functions on a cycle of life and death. Your body functions because cells have a life cycle and die and get replaced. And your ecosystem, such as it is, functions on organism having a life cycle and dying and getting replaced. And the biosphere, the entire living part of Planet Earth, functions on organisms having a life cycle and dying and getting replaced. We do die. The world will someday die. That's not the price of sin. It is the price of being alive.

And it is a cycle. I don't think we come back as us in any meaningful sense. Heck, I'm not entirely sure that the concept of an identity that spans a lifetime is not mostly illusion. But life comes back. The seasons cycle and the days cycle and the moon (the months) cycle and the cells die and new ones are born and organisms die and new ones are born, it cycles.

Now the green blade riseth/From the buried grain.