Crime + punishment

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I don't understand the argument that morality depends on God to be anything to do with an afterlife.  The question is: if there is no God, can there be a moral standard that is not merely a matter of biological predisposition or social convention?  If so, what is it's source?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Most of this is unrelated to my point really.

Asserting the existence of natural law is no reason to believe in God. Plenty of atheists believe in natural law, many contemporary Kantian ethicists for example. This debate is about what grounds something like natural law, not whether it exists or not.

Saying that God is a superior being is also besides the point. You still have the grounding problem of getting an ought from an is no less than people who explain morality from biology do. If God murders someone for their own divine pleasure is that really automatically good because God did it? How is this not arbitrary?

The two are also contradictory. If natural law exists then God is subject to it, so he's not unfathomably morally superior as he can be judged by that standard.


Speaking generally, exactly how one gets morality out of God is an extremely thorny theological problem that has been debated for thousands of years and has received multiple different answers. There's no advantage to theism such that belief in God is preferable because by itself it solves our problem of where morality comes from.

It is my charge that the natural law, like physical laws, is created by God. God is not subject to natural law for the same reason He is not subject to physical laws preventing miracles. Unlike republican lawmakers, a majestic lawmaker is not just the creator of the laws, but superior to the laws. You might as well allege that there is no advantage to theism such that belief in God because by itself it solves our problem of where miracles come from.

Natural laws, physical or moral, depend on the natural properties and relationships which he created.  We can imagine God intervening to change physical properties or the relationships between physical objects.  But a suspension of the moral law would then require some change in the beings or objects upon which is being acted.  What does this mean?  In order for it to suddenly be good to kill an innocent person, there would need to be some change in that person's essence, or somehow in the nature of goodness itself.  And if goodness changes, then God must change along with it if he is ultimate goodness.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I struggle to believe that Christians actually say to themselves "well, this person was murdered, but at least she's in heaven now" and therefore hand down less punitive verdicts against murderers. This sounds like a parody of Christians that an edgy internet atheist might think up.

Maybe not be common but I do believe in those cases where the families of those killed have forgiven their loved ones murderers and advocated against the death penalty, the promise of eternal life plays a significant role.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

You can't infinitely suffer. Putting aside the materialistic nature of physical or mental suffering somehow having to keep going after death, suffering devoid of any context of what not suffering 'feels' like ceases to be suffering by any measure. For the same reason a promise of eternal joy is hollow as it's impossible to feel eternal joy without the context of pain or loss. Those who try and seek it in life, destroy themselves.

Can the memory of pain and loss provide the context for eternal joy?   Christ's resurrected body retained the marks of his crucifixion.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

You can't infinitely suffer. Putting aside the materialistic nature of physical or mental suffering somehow having to keep going after death, suffering devoid of any context of what not suffering 'feels' like ceases to be suffering by any measure. For the same reason a promise of eternal joy is hollow as it's impossible to feel eternal joy without the context of pain or loss. Those who try and seek it in life, destroy themselves.

Can the memory of pain and loss provide the context for eternal joy?   Christ's resurrected body retained the marks of his crucifixion.

Why would it for us though?

Though related to your point it would make even less sense for god to punish with eternal pain when he experienced physical and psychological pain for a few days and it broke him.

Why would it not for us, when Christ's resurrection, as the Firstborn from the Dead, is what accomplishes our own?

Christ was broken and died, and then restored, as the promise is that we may be as well.  The tradition of felix culpa within Christianity emphasizes that what is broken and then healed is in some sense more whole and blessed than had nothing been broken.  It is what allows us to know grace.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

You can't infinitely suffer. Putting aside the materialistic nature of physical or mental suffering somehow having to keep going after death, suffering devoid of any context of what not suffering 'feels' like ceases to be suffering by any measure. For the same reason a promise of eternal joy is hollow as it's impossible to feel eternal joy without the context of pain or loss. Those who try and seek it in life, destroy themselves.

Can the memory of pain and loss provide the context for eternal joy?   Christ's resurrected body retained the marks of his crucifixion.

Why would it for us though?

Though related to your point it would make even less sense for god to punish with eternal pain when he experienced physical and psychological pain for a few days and it broke him.

Why would it not for us, when Christ's resurrection, as the Firstborn from the Dead, is what accomplishes our own?

Christ was broken and died, and then restored, as the promise is that we may be as well.  The tradition of felix culpa within Christianity emphasizes that what is broken and then healed is in some sense more whole and blessed than had nothing been broken.  It is what allows us to know grace.

That doesn't answer my question. You've just pointed to two examples of knowing joy from pain or in the case of felix culpa, gain from loss.

If you feel joy for infinity, into which the finite time of feeling pain  isn't divisible, it's not joy. It's a new neutral equilibrium.

I agree emotion has a relative aspect, but I don't believe it is merely relative.