![\"\"](\"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/scranney_Make_it_brighter_and_more_heavenly-1._219b52fc-2d2b-4249-9e78-3c46cb0915d5-800x800.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Hell to Heaven<\/em><\/p>\n We Latter-day Saints hold to a rather benign form of hell. I think this a feature, with traditional hell being the ultimate bug<\/a><\/span>. However, one implication of our benign afterlife of second chances is that arguably this-worldly religious decisions have less \u201cimport.\u201d If your decision to not be baptized leads to you burning in traditional hell for all eternity, that\u2019s different then if you spend some time in spiritual prison while you are instructed and spiritually sensitized in preparation for receiving eternal ordinances.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While the Latter-day Saint framework makes more sense to me in terms of mercy and reason, it does attenuate Pascal\u2019s Wager for us. (Pascal\u2019s Wager is the idea that everybody should be a religious believer because the cost of being wrong [hell] is eternally greater than the cost of being wrong in a universe without God). Pascal\u2019s Wager smells funny and smacks of spiritual blackmail, but logically it seems pretty airtight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As a child I remember brooding on the issue before I ran across it formally (in saying this I\u2019m not claiming I\u2019m some Pascal\u2013I\u2019d wager many if not most thought experiments or theoretical concepts have been thought up by many random children before some 19th century white guy was the first one to put it in a book in a particular part of the world and have the concept forever attached to his name. Besides, Pascal is Pascal for much more than this thought experiment). I finally concluded that, while the fundamental premise of potential eternity being more important than any non-eternal thing is indeed correct, there is a lot of variation in the different potentialities for eternity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The way I framed it was: some New Religious Movement leader says that I should hand over my bank account to him or I will burn in hell. Even if there\u2019s an infinitesimally small, one in a bajillion chance that he\u2019s right, any probability greater than 0 would, given the premises of Pascal’s Wager, suggests that I should give him all of my money.<\/span><\/p>\n However, that assumes that the NRM leader is the only potential of eternity; my breakthrough came when I realized that one could argue that by giving him all my money I might incur hell, or by wearing black shoes on Monday, or one of many other choices that have an infinitesimally small probability of hellfire attached to it. At that point, as long as we\u2019re connecting it to things of potential eternal worth, it all becomes a matter of what our religious priors are, of which religious option is the most likely one (I\u2019m ignoring the mathematical finding that <\/span>portions of infinity are <\/span><\/a>all equal, since that would mean that every action has the same liabilities and benefits eternally).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This is a variation of the \u201cargument from inconsistent revelations\u201d response to Pascal\u2019s Wager. One of the giants of the moral skeptical school of thought (basically, people who don\u2019t believe in objective good and evil) was ironically an extremely soft-spoken, Mr. Rogers type person who stated in response to Pascal\u2019s Wager that \u201c<\/span>the church within which alone salvation is to be found is not necessarily the Church of Rome, but perhaps that of the Anabaptists or the Mormons or the Muslim Sunnis or the worshippers of Kali or of Odin.\u201d (He\u2019s one of those atheist types who I would love to see crossing the threshold into the eternities and realizing that <\/span>\u201cthe Mormons\u201d were right.<\/span><\/a>)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, as noted, Pascal\u2019s wager is attenuated in our case because; while choosing correctly presumably has some eternal value, the extent to which our afterlife fate is eternal or modifiable is fuzzily defined in our theology (which, again, might be a feature instead of a bug), whereas in other cases the heaven\/hell dichotomy is more clearly defined.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, while believing in a more harsh God that consigns people to an eternal hell of physical torture based on religious decision-making in this life might hedge against being exposed to that risk, the chance of that God being a True, all-powerful, all-merciful God is greatly weakened by His association with such a system. While the Latter-day Saint God\u2019s afterlife is more second-chance oriented than other systems, it makes more sense to me and is much, much more likely to domain of a loving, reasonable, and True God, and I\u2019ll take my chances with Him over another God who tries to force my obedience by threatening me with eternal torture.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hell to Heaven We Latter-day Saints hold to a rather benign form of hell. I think this a feature, with traditional hell being the ultimate bug. However, one implication of our benign afterlife of second chances is that arguably this-worldly religious decisions have less \u201cimport.\u201d If your decision to not be baptized leads to you burning in traditional hell for all eternity, that\u2019s different then if you spend some time in spiritual prison while you are instructed and spiritually sensitized in preparation for receiving eternal ordinances.\u00a0 While the Latter-day Saint framework makes more sense to me in terms of mercy and reason, it does attenuate Pascal\u2019s Wager for us. (Pascal\u2019s Wager is the idea that everybody should be a religious believer because the cost of being wrong [hell] is eternally greater than the cost of being wrong in a universe without God). Pascal\u2019s Wager smells funny and smacks of spiritual blackmail, but logically it seems pretty airtight.\u00a0 As a child I remember brooding on the issue before I ran across it formally (in saying this I\u2019m not claiming I\u2019m some Pascal\u2013I\u2019d wager many if not most thought experiments or theoretical concepts have been thought up by many random children before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":45365,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/scranney_Make_it_brighter_and_more_heavenly-1._219b52fc-2d2b-4249-9e78-3c46cb0915d5.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45363"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50217,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45363\/revisions\/50217"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}