If your point is that in the case of afterlife punishment one can take the risk that it's just a sham, my answer was that there are enough natural consequences to bad behavior in this life that they suffice.
You suggest that some bad actors apparently go unpunished, and one could also infer that if, say, sodomy was so wrong then there would be more negative natural consequences (besides some relatively easily avoided diseases). Yes, all kinds of people make all kinds of innovations, sometimes improving on common morality to everyone's agreement, and sometimes trying new things that the majority disapproves; and we might argue that the disapproved innovations don't get the "smite" treatment lately.
This is not a proof that the universe won't stop immorality or that it's unjust. Because Blue, logically, either there is no universal justice (meaning there's nothing "unjust" about the person you disapprove getting off scot-free in your humble opinion); or there is universal justice (meaning that whatever that justice is really will happen and our own thinking that justice has been deferred or sleeping is the real error). You don't get it both ways by saying injustice exists (meaning people get away with junk) and justice doesn't exist (meaning we have no duty to do right ourselves).
It's not me imposing my will any more than it's you imposing your will on real bad actors (like pedophiles). It's us working together to learn how the universe really does work. If the universe has lots of loopholes where what is called bad really does go unpunished, let's learn the universe's true loopholes so we can best pursue our enlightened self-interest! Could there be some good in sodomy after all?
Did I say people can repent in hell? No. But it doesn't matter because, whether the dividing line is death or some later confirmation, if there is a point of no return then there is a risk of loss. (If there is never a point of no return then everything is fixable and we're Origenist universalists.)
(You may be thinking of purgatory, which is much more complicated, but for which Catholics still admit there is a point of no return and purgatory doesn't cross it.) Your critique of the universalist model is actually in line with the majority of church testimony, not opposed to it as you suggest.
I've had to have a handle on the vast evils that have happened over world history because your basic theodicy arguments (existence of evil, unobserved tree) come up again and again here. I daresay you might be underestimating how evil it is. Now keep in mind: it's your judgment that these things are not being fixed and also will never be. You judge from the limited perspective of what you can see, as do I. But the universe, as you note, goes on to permit these things to accumulate for centuries without apparent justice to our eyes.
This still presents us the same dilemma that you haven't chosen a side of. "if nothing in the known universe that we can observe can stop evil", then your human judgment that good exists has no basis in reality because you would have defined the nature of reality as having no consequential distinction between good and evil. On the other side, every time you say it should be a certain way, justice should fall upon the wicked, you define the nature of reality as having some real and consequential distinction, and you indicate that life does have meaning and that meaning is to find that justice wherever it may be found, and to amplify it until all these unsolved murders are resolved.
Until you decide whether your perception of good does or does not reflect something external to you, your conflict will remain. Either it's merely human and therefore no better than anyone else telling you what to do, tooth and claw, or it's real and thus we can participate in the healing for the evils we have observed. I invite you to join me in the latter quest, it's exciting and inspiring and I will either achieve universal justice or heroically die trying.
Well, again I thank you for bearing with me while you disagree with and resent my thoughts. The core of your point seems to be:
You don't like imagining a world. were evil can persist. without justice.
and you seem to be the only idiot on planet earth. who think bad things don't go unpunished. which is weird to me.
In actuality, I do imagine such a world often enough. First thing I suggest, take the long view and remove "immediacy" from your perspective. If a bad thing gets fully punished much later, people still accept that justice has been done; but, if no late punishment can truly satisfy justice, then nobody should be required to say justice has been done. So to determine if all bad things are punished eventually or not, we need to agree that this means punished sufficiently fully and sufficiently close to the event to be just and meaningful. I think you're reasonable enough to recognize that it's not as simple as God hitting the Smite button on his computer immediately after any sin is committed.
So to imagine a world in which such evils occur that they can never be remedied to any innocent petitioner: if there is no universal justice and evil persists unpunished forever, then as you say each person is his/her own morality, each of us decide what is good or bad irrelevant of any external standard. You punish what you define to be crime, which is fine, except that others don't define it to be crime and keep doing it or empowering it. Everything is a fight then, isn't it? Now what happens is that since we decide what is evil, independently, everything we say about it is "all in our heads". Some other person, or even I myself later, could easily contradict what moral standard I propose today. That means your morality ("harder on crime") is not objectively better than anyone else's, and the meaningfulness of your system of justice is lost. You only find meaning in the fact that a few people agree with you and you've gotten "crime" punished according to your standards, and the poor "criminals" who think you're the wrong one only were defeated because of superior force, and when we don't hold on to superior force others overpower us with their preferred morality. You and I have both considered this at some length, haven't we?
That means that if evils go unpunished forever then there becomes no meaning, good or bad, in that fact, and no meaning to our own morality in complaining that they are evil. If you cannot appeal to anyone outside yourself, your appeal does nothing. So I'm looking forward to your thoughts on resolving your dilemma between wanting to uphold morality as you see fit (which I affirm) and denying that morality has any source outside yourself. If you don't see a contradiction there, well, that's part of meaninglessness.
If your point is that in the case of afterlife punishment one can take the risk that it's just a sham, my answer was that there are enough natural consequences to bad behavior in this life that they suffice.
You suggest that some bad actors apparently go unpunished, and one could also infer that if, say, sodomy was so wrong then there would be more negative natural consequences (besides some relatively easily avoided diseases). Yes, all kinds of people make all kinds of innovations, sometimes improving on common morality to everyone's agreement, and sometimes trying new things that the majority disapproves; and we might argue that the disapproved innovations don't get the "smite" treatment lately.
This is not a proof that the universe won't stop immorality or that it's unjust. Because Blue, logically, either there is no universal justice (meaning there's nothing "unjust" about the person you disapprove getting off scot-free in your humble opinion); or there is universal justice (meaning that whatever that justice is really will happen and our own thinking that justice has been deferred or sleeping is the real error). You don't get it both ways by saying injustice exists (meaning people get away with junk) and justice doesn't exist (meaning we have no duty to do right ourselves).
It's not me imposing my will any more than it's you imposing your will on real bad actors (like pedophiles). It's us working together to learn how the universe really does work. If the universe has lots of loopholes where what is called bad really does go unpunished, let's learn the universe's true loopholes so we can best pursue our enlightened self-interest! Could there be some good in sodomy after all?
Did I say people can repent in hell? No. But it doesn't matter because, whether the dividing line is death or some later confirmation, if there is a point of no return then there is a risk of loss. (If there is never a point of no return then everything is fixable and we're Origenist universalists.)
(You may be thinking of purgatory, which is much more complicated, but for which Catholics still admit there is a point of no return and purgatory doesn't cross it.) Your critique of the universalist model is actually in line with the majority of church testimony, not opposed to it as you suggest.
I've had to have a handle on the vast evils that have happened over world history because your basic theodicy arguments (existence of evil, unobserved tree) come up again and again here. I daresay you might be underestimating how evil it is. Now keep in mind: it's your judgment that these things are not being fixed and also will never be. You judge from the limited perspective of what you can see, as do I. But the universe, as you note, goes on to permit these things to accumulate for centuries without apparent justice to our eyes.
This still presents us the same dilemma that you haven't chosen a side of. "if nothing in the known universe that we can observe can stop evil", then your human judgment that good exists has no basis in reality because you would have defined the nature of reality as having no consequential distinction between good and evil. On the other side, every time you say it should be a certain way, justice should fall upon the wicked, you define the nature of reality as having some real and consequential distinction, and you indicate that life does have meaning and that meaning is to find that justice wherever it may be found, and to amplify it until all these unsolved murders are resolved.
Until you decide whether your perception of good does or does not reflect something external to you, your conflict will remain. Either it's merely human and therefore no better than anyone else telling you what to do, tooth and claw, or it's real and thus we can participate in the healing for the evils we have observed. I invite you to join me in the latter quest, it's exciting and inspiring and I will either achieve universal justice or heroically die trying.
Well, again I thank you for bearing with me while you disagree with and resent my thoughts. The core of your point seems to be:
In actuality, I do imagine such a world often enough. First thing I suggest, take the long view and remove "immediacy" from your perspective. If a bad thing gets fully punished much later, people still accept that justice has been done; but, if no late punishment can truly satisfy justice, then nobody should be required to say justice has been done. So to determine if all bad things are punished eventually or not, we need to agree that this means punished sufficiently fully and sufficiently close to the event to be just and meaningful. I think you're reasonable enough to recognize that it's not as simple as God hitting the Smite button on his computer immediately after any sin is committed.
So to imagine a world in which such evils occur that they can never be remedied to any innocent petitioner: if there is no universal justice and evil persists unpunished forever, then as you say each person is his/her own morality, each of us decide what is good or bad irrelevant of any external standard. You punish what you define to be crime, which is fine, except that others don't define it to be crime and keep doing it or empowering it. Everything is a fight then, isn't it? Now what happens is that since we decide what is evil, independently, everything we say about it is "all in our heads". Some other person, or even I myself later, could easily contradict what moral standard I propose today. That means your morality ("harder on crime") is not objectively better than anyone else's, and the meaningfulness of your system of justice is lost. You only find meaning in the fact that a few people agree with you and you've gotten "crime" punished according to your standards, and the poor "criminals" who think you're the wrong one only were defeated because of superior force, and when we don't hold on to superior force others overpower us with their preferred morality. You and I have both considered this at some length, haven't we?
That means that if evils go unpunished forever then there becomes no meaning, good or bad, in that fact, and no meaning to our own morality in complaining that they are evil. If you cannot appeal to anyone outside yourself, your appeal does nothing. So I'm looking forward to your thoughts on resolving your dilemma between wanting to uphold morality as you see fit (which I affirm) and denying that morality has any source outside yourself. If you don't see a contradiction there, well, that's part of meaninglessness.