tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post192194386337186457..comments2024-03-15T19:54:18.063+00:00Comments on Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart: Does Anyone Believe in Hell?Larry Arnharthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14619785331100785170noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-89178254855743776462011-04-14T11:58:03.042+01:002011-04-14T11:58:03.042+01:00"Traditionally, Christians believed that Heav..."Traditionally, Christians believed that Heaven and Hell were real places."<br /><br />Well, no. A more accurate statement would be "Traditionally, Western Christians believed that Heaven and Hell were real places." Eastern Christians have always known that Hell is being united with the Energies of God and perceiving those energies as fire rather than as light. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_Hell#cite_note-Godhimself-24.Tim of Anglehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10910643987517809686noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-71333601814267420742011-03-22T03:32:55.376+00:002011-03-22T03:32:55.376+00:00Professor Arnhart,
Rob Bell can be considered &qu...Professor Arnhart,<br /><br />Rob Bell can be considered "evangelical" in name only. The vast majority of evangelical or fundamentalist Christians today continue to accept the teaching of a literal hell. A minority would hold some variant view of hell not being eternal, or that the souls of unbelievers will be destroyed at the final judgment.<br /><br />Fanciful speculations positing an evolutionary origin for religious belief fail to take seriously documented supernatural manifestations, particularly among evangelical Christians, such as miraculous healings. Non-Christian religions have unexplained supernatural phenomena as well. <br /><br />It really does take more faith to believe the beauty, complexity and order of the known universe happened by blind chance than that there is some Great Mind Who created and oversees it all.<br /><br />You mentioned Noah's ark in a separate post, as well as continental drift. Most old-earth ID proponents view Noah's flood as universal (i.e., eliminating all land-dwelling creatures in a certain area) but not global.<br /><br />Men like Dawkins have the guts to say out loud what evolutionists really think: God is a fantasy and religion does more harm than good, unless it can be used to keep the simple-minded in their place.<br /><br />We're all fundamentally religious in the sense of having some framework for evaluating life, both seen and unseen, and the verities of the hereafter. Secularists have gained the upper hand by pretending their religion is neutral, while it has very serious and far-reaching consequences for society. <br /><br />quaerite veritatemAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-84057115352828469102011-03-15T05:18:06.524+00:002011-03-15T05:18:06.524+00:00I think you may have slipped there at the end. You...I think you may have slipped there at the end. You somehow took the NY Times article as an indication that "most human beings today have lost their belief in Hell." But why would you think <i>that</i>, unless you somehow think that middle and upper-class Westerners are the only human beings alive today? Even if most American Christians don't believe in Hell (and I don't think the NY Times article shows even that), it hardly follows that most human beings don't.<br /><br />Of course, it also hardly matters, because very few people are motivated to avoid serious wrongdoing by the belief that they will go to Hell if they don't. More often, one's belief in things like divine retribution is a consequence and effect of one's moral views; anyone who had no other reason to refrain from, say, rape or murder would either reject Christianity altogether or somehow rationalize their action. <br /><br />It would be interesting to look more carefully at the data and find out how many Christians who reject the traditional doctrine of eternal punishment actually accept universal salvation. My own anecdotal evidence suggests that very few Christians today believe that a person absolutely needs to be an explicitly confessing Christian in order to avoid Hell (even the Roman Catholic Church does not teach <i>that</i>), but that most still think that it's possible to go to Hell if you are an especially wicked person.<br /><br />Finally, you're not quite right to say that Hell was traditionally understood as a "real place." Eternal punishment has certainly been understood as a real state of the soul after death, but not literally as a <i>place</i> -- unless, of course, one somehow imagines that disembodied immaterial souls exist in space and occupy place, which is nonsense.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-63355161347851247432011-03-10T15:54:29.529+00:002011-03-10T15:54:29.529+00:00Dear Mr. Arnhart,
I´ve been following your blog f...Dear Mr. Arnhart,<br /><br />I´ve been following your blog for some time now. I think it covers really interesting subjects, and actually it covers exactly the subjects that are attracting my attention right now. <br />(Darwin and the moral sense, Darwin and Aristotle)<br /><br />Within a month I have to start writing my bachelor thesis (history at the University of Utrecht). I've chosen to write about Darwin & Huxley in the tradition of the moral sense-philosophers (especially Hume and Smith). Do you have any recommendations (literature, blogposts) for me on this subject? Thank you very much for your help.<br /><br />Yours faithfully,<br /><br />RemyUnknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10501812796786571542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16355954.post-29801697824431936772011-03-07T18:49:20.970+00:002011-03-07T18:49:20.970+00:00This post seems to be a response to the comment I ...This post seems to be a response to the comment I made on your previous post. "How far each man values the appreciation of others, depends on the strength of his innate or acquired feeling of sympathy; and on his own capacity for reasoning out the remote consequences of his acts"<br />I don't think Darwin, living in such a strict religious environment, understood how little sympathy people could have for another another absent the religious society, or how reasoning could be used exclusively to ones egotistic purposes. And he have the benefit of evolutionary game theory to see how the cheats would invade and overwhelm altruists. You just have to look in our popular culture, behaving altruistically is scorned as being a sucker. Materialism and egotism are celebrated by left and right alike. "By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses." This statement seems like an romantic, absurd fairy-tale to me.Empedocleshttp://apoxonbothyourhouses.blogspot.comnoreply@blogger.com