Ten Hundred Word Purgatory

Mr Jesus talked a lot about what happens when we die. He warned people not to be bad, or they might not go to the nice place in the sky. He also said lots of things about people going to bad places where they get hurt after they die. Some God-liking people think this means all the other people always go to the bad place under the ground, but some think it’s a bit different.

Some of those people say that there’s a place where people go to get hurt, but when they have been hurt enough to make the bad things they did go away, they get to go to the nice place in the sky after that.

Utilitarian Yahweh wants to harvest your soul

Picture the scene: a number of young and otherwise healthy people are dying due to the failure of a single organ, a different one in each case, and no organs are available for transplants. An enterprising doctor suggests killing the next healthy person to walk through the door, and harvesting their organs. It’s an outrageous suggestion, but it would take one life to save many. Isn’t that a good deal?

This is the sort of thinking that’s usually being attacked when people criticise utilitarianism, and no one but the odd provocative philosopher or fifth-form debater ever seriously proposes it, but it’s hard to explain why it’s a bad thing. Wars are conducted on very similar ethical grounds, for example, with death accepted for the greater good. It’s not just consent – civilians don’t consent to be “collateral damage” either – but the obvious difference is that the death in this case  is obvious and necessary, not just something that may happen.

Email from Heaven

From: gabs@personnel.hv

Greetings, exalted friend. Kindly pardon me for inconvenience.

Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I have the believe you are a reputable and responsible and trustworthy person I can do business with from the little information so far I gathered about you during my search for a partner and by matter of trust I must not hesitate to confide in you for this simple and sincere business.

Book Review: Love Wins by Rob Bell

I recently got round to reading Love Wins by Rob Bell. It’s a book that re-evaluates a lot of traditional Christian ideas, and it caused a lot of discussion, debate and even denunciations when it came out last year, so I thought I should see what all the fuss was about.

Bell does a good job of knocking down traditional, conservative and even fundamentalist ideas, pointing out the flaws in their  interpretations by quoting the Bible and using the conservatives’ own methods of argument against them to show that it’s rather more complicated than conservative dogma suggests. That’s clearly the strongest element of the book, and a very valuable one.