Tuesday 14 December 2010

Morning Scepticism: Moral Monster

One line of apologetic I occasionally encounter is one of us being morally imperfect, that we have failed to live up to God's standard as laid out in the ten commandments so He has every right to send us to hell. This, I think, is akin to a parent who finds out that their child took a cookie from the cookie jar without asking being punished by getting locked in the basement and brutally tortured for years. It's actually worse than that because hell is an infinite punishment. All we can do is look at extremes like that and ask, what would you think of a parent who did that to a child? Would we call a parent to did that "righteous" as this line of apologetic labels God? Because to me, such behaviour would make a parent a moral monster.

But I hear the objection already, there's a way to avoid such a fate: by believing in the resurrection Jesus as payment. But this doesn't make eternal torture any less morally dubious, it's like the parent locking up and torturing their child unless they pat their belly.

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