This is a question I often bring up to believers I am talking to, and I thought I’d put it forward here, as the first of a series of posts that all touch of the topic of hell.
You were born in [insert country here], which is a predominantly [insert religion here] country. You are [insert religion here], and presumably you believe that [insert religion here] is the “true” faith/religion, and that other religions are not correct in their beliefs.
If you were born in the US you’d likely be christian.
If you were born in India you’d likely be Hindu.
If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you’d likely be Muslim.
If you were born in China, you’d likely be Buddhist (or another eastern religion).
You get the point I assume…
If one religion is true (ANY religion, it doesn’t matter which one), isn’t it odd that so much of whether or not you believe that one to be true is based on the circumstance of where you are born?
Couldn’t “god” make it so that all people, regardless of the area of the world they are born in, have an equal chance to follow the “true” religion, so they can avoid hell?
If one religion is the “true” one, why is it so arbitrary who is exposed to it, when it’s seemingly such an important part of reality according to believers? In fact according to many christian and muslims, if I don’t believe in the “right” god, and worship them the “right” way, I’m going to hell. That seems highly unfair towards those who happened to be born in the “wrong” part of the world, and are brought up following a “wrong” religion.
[Also posted at: JREF]
There were a few really good points brought up on JREF when I originally posted this, so I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite points here.
I have similar thoughts. Also, what about station and opportunity? If one is to be “judged” on one’s life experiences, you’d think that a just God would give everyone pretty much the same shot.
But not so, of course.Who is more likely to live a virtuous life:
The ghetto kid with a crack-addicted mother and 10 “uncles” (all of whom are into some sort of criminal activities), who attends a few years of a sub-standard school and who’s role models are pimps and drug dealers….
Or the child of well-to-do parents in the suburbs, gently reared and educated….
You get the idea.
I honestly had a small headache trying to think about the unfairness and a royal mess-up ‘God’ has made. Being raised under a strongly held Catholic family, their excuse for something like what you’ve brought up was ‘well, at least they worship the same god’.
…no they don’t…apparantly.
The imaginary friend of the Christians, at least, has no problem with the concept of condemning innocents for the sins of their fathers, so I don’t really find it out of the question that he would also condemn innocents for being born in the wrong place. I guess that’s what they get for being born to those fathers whose sin is living in the wrong place.
And I’d like to end with somebody who disagreed with my take; Tsukasa Buddha:
I used to like this argument, but I don’t buy into it too much now. Mostly because each religion will likely be based on the teachings of a certain human revealer of truth, so the regional bases that developed due to the difficulty of long range communication in the past is rather forgivable. Also, many will say that others have realized their truth, but they called it something else, or only got some of it, etc.
To which I replied:
Many of the religions are incompatible with each other (the whole you’re going to hell if you worship other gods thing).
If religion A says “bob” is the son of god and he died on “the hood of a car”, and you must believe in him to be saved; and religion B says “bob” was not god, but a good wise man who faked his death, and to claim otherwise is blasphemy and you’ll go to hell for repeating it; and religion C claims that “bob” was not a god, but a cow is one of many gods, they can’t be part of the same truth, since they make mutually incompatible claims.
Jeff Randall
Sarah Hippolitus
Brian Gregory
Luis Reinoso
Matthieu Guibert
Great post! reminded of that quote I have seen many times and attributed to Annie Dillard :
Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to Hell?”
Priest: “Not if you did not know.”
Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?”
Yeah, I’ve heard variations of that as well, and it’s a great line to use with those who push the idea that ignorance means you can not be held accountable.
I use this argument all the time with my believer friends. But they tend to ignore the obvious illogic of a supernatural entity not taking care of this small oversight by saying either it “allows for freewill” or “then it is up to the believers to “save” the unfortunate folk born in the wrong country”. Both of these arguments are cop-outs of course, but then so is believing in imaginary beings as an explanation for something. So, consistently inconsistent, I have to grant them.
Dawkins give a talk about this topic at TAM3… he showed a picture of 3 kids sitting on a balcony in Jerusalem, watching (if I recall) a basketball game. The caption was something about how sport can unite people (which may be true) and pointed out that “here a “jewish kid” a “christian kid” and a “muslim kid” are sitting together getting along”. Dawkins point was that assigning religious identify to kids is bizarre and crewel. What it *should* have said was “the middle east is torn apart by religious identity, but here are *three kids* sitting together, who have not yet been indoctrinated into their faiths to a degree that prevents them from believing the others are infidels and/or going to hell.” But media assigns and reinforces the identity from an early age, and is an example of the arbitrary nature of initial religious identity that can happen even when born basally next door to each other.
The problem with the “allow for free will” argument is that there is no free will involved if you are never given an opportunity to learn the “true” religion.
A child born to an aboriginal tribe in Australia is not going to be taught about christianity, buddhism, islam, islam, etc. If one of those is correct and not believing in it sends someone to hell, then regardless of their “free will”, they will spend an eternity suffering due to no fault of their own.
A child born to a fundamentalist christian family in the rural southern US is not going to be exposed to religions other than their own. Thus if the zoroastrian, rastafarian, etc faith is correct then they are doomed to never ending suffering, not due to some fault of their own, but due to never having the opportunity to learn the “truth”.
In both cases it shows the utter lack of justice in the belief of hell, just in terms of how one can escape this punishment (there are many other objections as well I’ll go into on later posts).
As for the belief that because of this, the believers should strive to “save” those who has the misfortune of being born in the wrong place, that still does not solve the problem. Missionaries have not been able to get to every place on earth today to “preach the gospel”, much less historically when travel was less convenient.
I’ve seen a video of Dawkins giving this talk (or possibly the same talk at a different time) about the three kids. And you’re right, they are not kids of different religions getting along. They are three kids who have not yet been taught to hate those who are different than themselves.
When the vast majority “take on” the religion of their parents, and many of these religions claim that only those who accept the “true” faith will be saves from eternal damnation, one has to think about these ideas, and it can’t help but lead to questioning…
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Ebonmusings has a good essay on this topic. He calls it “The Argument from Locality”
I know I had heard people make similar arguments to my own here, but I never thought of it as having an “official” name.
I agree with all of his points 100% (in fact a few of them are the exact same points I made here), EXCEPT for one:
I can see some arguments against this from christians and atheists.
On the christian side they could argue that if the world truly is 6,000 or 10,000 years old that god did reveal himself to everybody living at least twice in human history (Adam & Eve and Noah). It is man’s evil and sin that has caused his word not to be spread fully to all corners of the world.
To me this clearly shows the incompetence of that version of god, and negates many aspects of god that most christians are unwilling to abandon.
On the atheist side I would argue that we can not claim what god would or would not do, but we can judge that based on god’s actions that god is unworthy of praise or worship.
This does not poke a huge hole in his premise, but I would change it to something more along the lines of:
* Any deity which desired to be believed in would reveal itself to everyone, not just to a specific person, culture, race or nation; and failure to do so would make such a deity impotent or unworthy of worship.
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