/lit/ - Literature

>>21622259
There are a host of serious logical problems with this attempted justification of eternal damnation.

The first and most obvious issue is that it isn't in the Bible anywhere. There is no indication from either the Hebrew scriptures or the New Testament that God's infinite nature entails that all offenses against him are also infinite. It generally seems to imply the opposite; for example, how exactly could Isaiah say that Israel had received "double" for all her sins when the debt incurred by any singular sin is infinite? If the proper response from God to any sin is to immediately inflict endless torture on the offender, why does Jesus tell us in the Gospels that the way to be like God is to forgive your enemies and be kind to the good and bad alike? If this theory of retribution were true, wouldn't he have said, "And if a man slaps you on the cheek, immediately slap him back with the exact same amount of force?"

Moreover, we must consider the concept of "mens rea". Mens rea defines the level of intention, lucidity, and available knowledge that a person has, and which will influence the level of culpability that they are judged to have had in their offense. A sin of "infinite malice" must necessarily entail perfect knowledge of the offense and perfect knowledge of its infinite-ness. But of course, therein lies the rub: we are finite. And not only finite; we are created, contingent. A major point of St. Thomas's metaphysics, along with many other veritable theologians, is that God is ultimately unknowable in his very essence. "We cannot know what God is," Aquinas famously states, "only what he is not." This isn't limited to humans, either - even Lucifer does not actually know WHAT God is. This clearly implies that it is completely impossible for any created being to have the perfect knowledge necessary to be fully and infinitely culpable for an offense of this nature. The only being with full knowledge of God is God; but God, by his very nature, can't sin! Therefore on closer analysis it turns out to be metaphysically impossible to commit an infinite sin at all.

Another problem: God is not our peer in an ontological sense. When we judge human offenders, regardless of their status, we judge them as beings of the same finitude and existential type as us, as human beings. But God is transcendent. God is not one agent among many, who stands side by side with any of his own creations. He has ALL the power - impervious to harm or obstruction in any way by the creations whose existences are wholly dependent on him. There is nothing that any of us can do that would affect God in any way. A microbe can do more to us than we can do to God. If our sins have any effect, it must surely be on ourselves and not God.

I could keep going but unfortunately I'm running out of characters. Suffice it to say, this justification of infinite torture has an infinite amount of holes in it.