The Good Father

@philokalia said
As discussed earlier, our sins are enough for us to go to hell. For, they actively transgress the moral order.

Why are they "enough" to warrant eternal torture?

@divegeester said
Why are you arguing over semantics such as “tortured” or numerical nuances about how many billions are being burned alive…instead of addressing the challenges of the concept itself; I.e. it being morally abhorrent and intellectually incomprehensible?

Is it wrong that a person who has chosen to flagrantly laugh in the face of consequences should face those consequences..? No, we can all accept the idea that receiving one's comeuppance can be a very good thing, yes?

What is wrong with people who are worthy of hell being sent to hell?

Are you really arguing that nobody could merit hell ?

@philokalia said
What is the difference between a man who murders someone... and a man who wishes to murder another, but only abstains from it for fear of getting caught? Both are, qualitatively, committing an act of murder in their heart.

What is the difference between a man who murders someone... and a man who wishes to murder another, but only abstains from it for fear of getting caught?

One has engaged in an immoral act, and the other has not.

Qualitatively speaking, one has committed a murder and the other has not committed a murder. Big difference.

@philokalia said
Our sins that go unrepented for darken the mind, and incline us towards more sin.

And even if someone spent 50 years of their life - a finite amount of time - engaging in some immoral acts, why is the morally justified reaction to it an infinite punishment?

@philokalia said
Why should only those who are powerful enough to manifest such an evil sin be held accountable, but those who would have engaged, but failed to do so, not be held accountable?

Are you talking about "thoughtcrimes" here or are you talking about crimes of attempted murder or conspiracy to murder?

@philokalia said
Is it wrong that a person who has chosen to flagrantly laugh in the face of consequences should face those consequences..? No, we can all accept the idea that receiving one's comeuppance can be a very good thing, yes?

When it comes to various religions, let's take yours for example, who is "flagrantly laughing in the face of consequences"?

@philokalia said
What is wrong with people who are worthy of hell being sent to hell?

This

"people who are worthy of hell"

and this

"people being sent to hell"

together make:

"What is wrong with people who are worthy of hell being sent to hell?"

Did circular logic of this kind work on you when you were being converted to the Orthodox Catholic Church?

@fmf said
Why are they "enough" to warrant eternal torture?

Right, this would lead us back to this classic thread:

https://www.redhotpawn.com/forum/spirituality/st-dionysius-and-evil.181203#post_4043623

Check it out:

Nothing, then, is evil insofar as it is a being. Conversely, anything is evil insofar as it fails to be. Dionysius’ doctrine of evil as non-being must be understood in light of the principle that any being is in virtue of its proper determinations or perfections, which are its way of being good and therefore its mode of being. Anything is evil, i.e. not good, then, insofar as it lacks the proper goodness which is its constitutive determination, and to that extent fails to be itself and so to be. ...
Thus Dionysius says, for example, that “the demons are not evil by nature” and are called “evil” “not insofar as they are, for they are from the Good and received a good reality, but insofar as they are not, by being weak (as the Oracles say) in preserving their principle. For in what, tell me, do we say they are evil, except in the cessation of the possession and activity of divine good things?” He then says, still more clearly, that “they are not evil by nature, but by the deficiency of angelic goods”

Evil comes from not necessarily action, but even just from being in a way that is deficient of the good, and deficient from the yearning for God:. McCormack provides this analysis:

At bottom, then, evil as deficiency of being is a failure to revert to, to love, to desire God, who as the Good is the sole cause and end of all desire.
Evil, then, is fundamentally passivity, the failure in a being of the reversion, the agency, the interiority which is its taking part in its being made to be. This interiority, as we saw in chapter 3, is the freedom which is analogously present at every level of reality.

Passivity towards God itself is an evil:

Here Dionysius repeatedly links the fall, as a fall toward non- being, with the passions in their multiplicity. For to the extent that a man is subject to passions he is failing to be a self at all, a center of unity that exists in and by performing its own activity. Largely passive, driven about not by himself but by the passions, by what happens to him from without, he is vicious in his lack of unity, of interiority, of selfhood, failing to take part in his own being and to that extent failing to be. Nothing can be wholly passive, for that would mean having no unity, no identity, no activity, no selfhood, and so not being at all. But to the extent that anything is passive, it fails to be one, to be itself, and so to be, and to that extent it is evil.

https://disfiguredpraise.blogspot.com/2019/05/there-is-no-reason-nor-could-ever-there.html

And this is why your position is a good one to have - you are very passionate about these topics, and your lack of passivity may very much help you in the long run.

So, back to the qustion:

All failure to desire God, and failure to live in accordance with the Divine Will, shows a certain passivity, which constitutes evil. Of course, we are all constantly lacking, and that is why we depend on grace to get to a point where we can achieve benevolence through being properly ordered in ourselves.

@fmf said
What is the difference between a man who murders someone... and a man who wishes to murder another, but only abstains from it for fear of getting caught?

One has engaged in an immoral act, and the other has not.

Qualitatively speaking, one has committed a murder and the other has not committed a murder. Big difference.

So thoughts do not have any moral quality?

@philokalia said
Are you really arguing that nobody could merit hell ?

I can't think of anyone, no.

You mean people being tortured in burning flames for eternity? And this all happening in secret?

No. I can't think of a crime that would warrant such a reaction.

@philokalia said
So thoughts do not have any moral quality?

Morality, to my way of thinking, governs action and human interaction. I don't subscribe to concepts of thoughtcrimes and even things like tougher punishments for hate crimes etc. Maybe if I believed in supernatural causality and a revealed God or Gods that forbade certain thoughts, maybe I would subscribe to them.

@philokalia said
Passivity towards God itself is an evil.

So you say. You mean the God you worship of course. "Passivity"? Is that synonymous with a lack of theistic belief, not sharing your religious beliefs, not finding something morally coherent, and not finding claims you make about supernatural things to be coherent? Is that what "passivity" means? And it's "evil" is it? Gosh.

@fmf said
Morality, to my way of thinking, governs action and human interaction. I don't subscribe to concepts of thoughtcrimes and even things like tougher punishments for hate crimes etc. Maybe if I believed in supernatural causality and a revealed God or Gods that forbade certain thoughts, maybe I would subscribe to them.

You are conflating whether thought has a moral quality with thoughtcrime, which generally is used in a political context.

So, if someone regularly has fantasies about abusing children in a perverted manner... aren't those immoral thoughts?

@fmf said
So you say. You mean the God you worship of course. "Passivity"? Is that synonymous with a lack of theistic belief, not sharing your religious beliefs, not finding something morally coherent, and not finding claims you make about supernatural things to be coherent? Is that what "passivity" means? And it's "evil" is it? Gosh.

Passivity indicates...

that, confronted with the evils in the world, we can only say that for no reason, and therefore outrageously, the world as we find it does not perfectly love God, the Good, the sole end of all love. And since the Good is the principle of intelligibility and hence of being, to the extent that anything fails to partake of that principle it is deficient in being,

which constitutes evil through the passive rejection of God as it is a deficiency in being.

@philokalia said
So, if someone regularly has fantasies about abusing children in a perverted manner... aren't those immoral thoughts?

If they act upon those thoughts and abuse children, then you have moral acts upon your hands. As I said, for me, morality governs action and human interaction. I don't subscribe to concepts of thoughtcrimes and even things like tougher punishments for hate crimes. Someone who "regularly has fantasies about abusing children in a perverted manner" would undoubtedly be creep, but I don't think "thoughts" can be "immoral". Morality governs behaviour and how we interact with each other.